Discussions on Downstate: Care is the Antidote to Violence

On Saturday, November 19, a panel discussion was held at Playwrights Horizons. Below are edited and transcribed highlights from the full discussion. To read more about the other events in this series and for program curator Sivan Battat's curatorial framing essay, please click here.

"Care is the Antidote to Violence”* with panelists Amita Swadhin, RJ Maccani and Jenani Srijeyanthan

When harm happens, how do we hold it within community? What does a survivor-centered justice process look like, and how might it support healing? What modules exist outside of carceral and punitive systems to address harm and support survivors? This conversation with activists, academics, and abolitionists discusses forgiveness and transformative justice after sexual harm at the personal and collective levels.

*From Saidiya Hartman, via Mariame Kaba

SIVAN BATTAT: Hello everyone. My name is Sivan Battat. And it's really an honor to be sitting alongside these three people and to introduce them so we can have a conversation today about the context and history of Child Sexual Assault, particularly in the United States – Turtle Island. We'll also speak a little bit about prevention and what it looks like to actually build systems that can prevent harm. We'll also talk about responses to harm and intervention. 

Let's start talking about context a little bit. So, while child sexual assault is, are instances of occurrence, there's also historical context and cultural containers that have created and continue to perpetuate Child Sexual Assault in this country. So, beginning with Amita, I'd love to start with you. Can you tell us a little bit about the historical context of CSA and where it sees its roots in American society? 

AMITA: Yeah, thanks for that question. I think my answer would be different depending on which country's context we're talking about. Rape culture is a global phenomenon. The endemic violence of children getting raped and of patriarchy surrounding that violence is literally all over this globe. It's not unique to any particular region of the globe, but the way that it happens and the social context is gonna be different. 

So let's root this work here. We're on a land that was colonized roughly 500 years ago. And in that colonization act, something we don't acknowledge enough is that children were raped by design. Indigenous children were raped and murdered and hunted. The boarding schools are just one layer of documentation of that. But of course, that violence was happening from the very beginning. Even the girl that we know in pop culture as Pocahontas was a little girl. She was 12 at the time that she was kidnapped and raped by a white settler.

And so you can't divorce this violence from the history of this country being colonized, that we're on stolen land. And then of course, in the kidnapping of African people and bringing them here, and the introduction of the system of racial capitalism – which is also, in the U.S., where you can trace the introduction of a gender binary. People being considered property made people be sorted into categories to be force-bred. And what is forced breeding but enacting sexual violence in a system? And that included the systemic raping of children. 

Not to mention the people that were the first presidents of this country were also documented rapists. If you talk about George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, these are men who kept women and children enslaved, and sometimes grown men, to be raped at their pleasure. So, we just can't talk about ending sexual violence in this place that's now called the United States without acknowledging that history.

And I think that's really important in the context of this show. When we talk about the institutions that grow out of colonization, genocide, and enslavement – the prison system, policing – in this moment, after the uprisings of 2020, hopefully we now have more and more growing collective awareness that police were used as an early institution to catch enslaved people who were running away. When we think about family policing, which is also sometimes called mandated reporting, it's part of that same system. And we could trace every major institution in this country to that very history. So I think that's the history I want to read this conversation in….

SIVAN: Let's shift the conversation and talk about prevention, which is of course in conversation with the cultural container and the context that this is sourced in, because how do you prevent something without looking at its root?How can we create circumstances in our containers so that harm doesn't have to happen in the first place? 

JEN: if you look at what Child Sexual Abuse prevention is like, it all relies on the fact that a child has been abused. So it's not really even prevention if it requires harm to already have happened to a child. And I think that also definitely includes public school education, because all we're really teaching kids is what red flags are of, like, the “shadow villain” that exists in your community. And then we tell them to call the police or we tell them to go to somebody who more likely than not is a mandated reporter. None of these things are keeping children safe because it requires the fact that somebody has been hurt already. 

When you look at root causes of child sexual abuse, more often than not, it's similar root causes to a number of other issues that are happening in our society. Like, people are not able to get good food on their table. People are not able to make a livable wage. People are not able to have housing. But also, there's this other layer to it, that when you feel powerless, there's one way that we are taught through history, through time and time again, to gain power, and that is to just seek it, dominate it, and grab it. And if we're not addressing root causes, then we're not really even taking a preventative approach. 

At the end of the day, I really do feel that a preventative approach to CSA involves meeting a community where it's at and addressing the things that need to be addressed so that people are able to be okay, so that people don't have a reason to dominate, to take, to grab, to assume power over, in order to be okay. I think that's hard in this country because it's not family protection that's winning elections, it’s really expanding family policing. And I think what's really special about what we do locally in the devi co-op, we're just trying to get money and give it to people who need it. We're trying to get resources and get it to the people who need it, because those are the things that help people escape toxic relationships. These are the things that help people have relationships that are healthy relationships to begin with. 

You know, if we're gonna do prevention education in schools, medically accurate sex ed, first and foremost. We wanna teach kids in school how to have healthy relationships with one another. I did a lot of teen dating violence work in my life. Even my peers, like I'm 26, I go to my peers, I'm like, “What do you do to get out of a toxic friendship?” No one knows how to answer that. So how do we expect people who are young to get out of toxic intimate relationships when all of that stuff is muddied? At the end of the day, these root causes are not special. These are root causes for a number of different ways that people are hurt in this country and in this world. We just have to actually prioritize that, and that's not the thing that's winning elections. 

SIVAN: Yeah. Thank you. I'd like to just add in this piece around Downstate, which presents this model of folks who have been incarcerated, who are living in a halfway house, who are living on the sex registry, which people often turn to as like, “Look, we have a sex registry as a tool that in some cases is claimed to prevent Child Sexual Assault.” The registry as a carceral tool to prevent it. And what Jen is saying here is like, that's not prevention if the harm has already occurred. If we are incarcerating people after the harm, if we're reporting on harm that has already occurred, that's not taking a preventative model, it's taking a reactive model.

JEN: We have this idea that the sex offender is perpetually criminal, like perpetually going after young people. When you look at CSA statistics, even sexual assault statistics, the majority of people who are victimized, I think for sexual assault, like 9% is a complete stranger.

Over 90% of people who are sexually assaulted, whether as a child or an adult, it's probably someone you know, it's a community member. And I don't know about you guys, but, it's very hard for me to put a loved one in prison, you know, especially knowing that there's sexual assault in prison.

SIVAN: I would love to turn to Amita and RJ on this question of prevention as well. If you have anything you want to add to what Jen shared. 

AMITA: I'll just say the play specifically brings up for me the work of one of my comrades and colleagues. We were actually both grantees of the Just Beginnings Collaborative together, and her name is Sonya Shah. She founded and co-directs a national organization called The Ahimsa Collective. They're also based in California and they do restorative circles with primarily cisgender men who are incarcerated and then coming out of incarceration into reentry homes similar to the one in Downstate. And all of the men who are in that program elect to be in it. So during the time that they are incarcerated, they can choose to be part of this circle program. And I believe the whole curriculum is up to a three year program. They meet once a month in circle and it's an eight hour session each time they meet. And the very first 18 months are just internal curriculum around feminism and healing and accountability.

And then during the next 18 months, they start inviting outside speakers in who have either survived the murder of a loved one, or have survived being raped or sexually assaulted as a child. So I'm sharing this because I had the chance to sit in circle with those men twice. Once in 2018 and once in 2019. It became really clear to me as one of the story tellers in one of those restorative circles as we passed the talking piece around, after I shared my story, almost all of them were broken down in tears talking about their own survivorship, because almost all of them had been raped as kids.

And they all said: “I never got treatment, I never got support, I never had a safe place I could go to heal." And we also know that most people who are raped or sexually assaulted as children do not go on to rape or sexually assault more children. But again, of the people who are incarcerated for this crime, who we've had a chance to study, most of them are themselves survivors who never got therapy, never got support, were never believed.They never got transformative ways of learning, “How do you act in a healthy way? What is healthy intimacy? What is a good boundary?” 

The same way that we learn about other epidemics, we should be teaching about child sexual abuse as a public health issue. If I had been in ninth grade and looking at the federal data from the Centers for Disease Control, that one in four girls and one in six boys as a baseline are sexually assaulted as children… That doesn't even include like gender non-conformity as a risk factor for Child Sexual Abuse. So if you're a gender non-conforming kid – as I was very visibly was, I was like a quote unquote “tomboy” – if you're undocumented, if you're Black, if you're Indigenous, if you're Disabled, if you're Deaf, these are all risk factors that make you more vulnerable, any marker of difference in our society. And so the rates go up from one in four and one in six.Can you imagine how many people we’re talking about? 

And most of us, while we're kids going through that violence, think we're the only ones,  because our media sensationalizes it. So my whole childhood I thought I was alone. The tragedy of it all is that when I started talking to friends I had grown up with, they all started disclosing.

So can you imagine how our own lives might have been different if we had just had a health class that had said this is an endemic form of violence. At the very least we could have supported each other. We should have had better support from the adults around us, but at least we would've known how to speak to each other as children and to fit inside that terrible experience of violence, not solo.

That's the work I'm trying to do with Mirror Memoirs. I don't think we can put a binary in place between healing and prevention work because most of the people committing the violence are survivors as well. And that's the uncomfortable truth of it. When we say “believe survivors” and “support survivors,” do we really mean all survivors? And I do, I don't think anyone should experience the violence that I lived through, including the men in that prison. And that was the uncomfortable truth in that circle. I was crying while talking to them and saying, “I didn't expect this. I have more in common with you as men who were raped as little boys than I do with people who were never raped as kids.”

Right? And we should be supporting people to heal so that they, whatever is wounded, whatever needs healing, particularly around shame and self-loathing, that that wound gets restored. That you're a human being and things happened to you when you were a kid. That shouldn't have happened. And how can we, as a society, compassionately and boundaried, give you tools so that you can reclaim your humanity and certainly dehumanizing, you know, sex offender registries and policies that go with them.

That's, that's not helping anyone feel their self-loathing. 

SIVAN: I'm just thinking now about this moment in the play where Dee and Andy are having a conversation and Dee in that moment, if you've seen the play discloses, Spoiler Alert:Dee discloses that Dee himself is a survivor of child sexual abuse.And I think about what it would've looked like for that conversation to be in a different container and what it would've looked like to have a different model of what that encounter was, in fact for those two people in that moment. Itjust brought that to mind for me… And I'll just bring in the language for a moment here of Abolition, which is, Abolition is a tool of ending something, right? Carceral systems, policing. It's also a tool of building something. nd it's a tool of building infrastructures for support that meet the root causes of what's causing what we call crime, right? Or what we call these things that people end up in prison for.And so Abolition I think is language that's helpful in that  framework of saying prevention also looks like building something else. hat doesn't exist right now.hat creates infrastructures that support people who need that support in order to then in turn prevent harm.

Let's talk about intervention and responses to harm…So can you tell us a little bit about, you know, when harm happens in your, through your work, where can we go from here?...And we spoke also about the word forgiveness and where does the idea of forgiveness play into this, if at all?

RJ: ,,,what I can say from my, you know, years of working at Common Justice from the years kind of before that, of doing community based responses to sexual violence and then my own experience as a survivor.

is that you know, those of us who experience these things, whether we call ourselves victims or survivors, or we just say, that's something that happened to me. The things that we tend to want and the things that all the survivors other than myself have gotten to interact with, tend to want are, are options. We want some options. We want to have some agency. We want to feel our power be involved in some way. And a piece of that is that, you know, for most of us when we experience something like this, it's a feeling of powerlessness or a feeling of not having some choice, right? So survivors, we want options. We want agency. We want access to some real opportunities to heal, right? We want answers. Why did this happen to me? Like, why did this happen? We want answers. And we wanna see some real change, some real accountability from the person that did it. You know, those tend to be the things, like over and over and over. That's not always true. Like some survivors I've interacted with are like, “I just wanna get a crew of people together and go and beat that person up.” You know? And in terms of the work that we do, we’d be like, oh, that's not really what we do, but I want you to have options.

You know? And the same would go for somebody who's like, “actually I just wanna call the police right now.” Again, it's like, that's not what we do, but I want you to have options. You know? So, but all the things I just described, the criminal legal system doesn't really tend to any of those things. And I really wanna center us there.

It's just like we're not getting those things. And so when I talk about the ways that we as society can respond to child sexual abuse, I'm not coming from a moralistic place. I'm not coming from an idealistic place. Like we're talking: let's be pragmatic. Let's be pragmatic about addressing it.

Some of what Amita and Jenani shared, you know we can say that this isn't so much about stopping individual monsters, right? But it's more about addressing a socially entrenched form of violence. But that being said, like what do we do? Like what do we do when it happens? When someone does something that feels so monstrous to many of us, like sexually abusing a child, like what do we actually do?

And all of this political analysis isn't really that helpful in that moment. You know, it's like, “great. Okay, so now I know it's rooted in colonization and slavery. It might be great, but still like, what the fuck do I do? I think if we want to be our most effective, but we need to be able to move through our first initial responses, you know, which are often horror or terror or disgusted or rage.

Like, you know, this is what we will feel. But if we want to get to a place where we're actually gonna effectively address child sexual abuse, we've gotta move through that. And what do we know? We know that some of us as humans, experience the urge to have some sort of sexual experiences with minors, children, babies.

This is something that we know, it's documented. It's not an easy thing to sit with. I've worked with people who suffer from this sort of desire and ideation, and those same people are also deeply committed to never acting on it. So if we're serious about reducing child sexual abuse, we could provide accessible and anonymous counseling for people who experience this.

Germany does this. And if we stay stuck in our fear, if we stay stuck in our disgust, our horror, then we'll just continue business as usual. But this is not being protective of children.We also know that when older children and teenagers are sexually abusive to those that are significantly younger than them, that it's usually not because they're suffering from the sort of ideation I was just talking about.

What we know is that they're typically acting out what they themselves have already experienced. So a restorative justice response for young people who commit child sexual abuse is typically going to be much more effective and appropriate than a carceral or a punitive one. And I can say that the two people that abused me were not well.And in neither case would I've dreamed of getting the police involved, not because I was an abolitionist, right? But because even then I had the sense that it wouldn't be helpful in any way. And so what do we know about the guys? Like the ones depicted in DOWNSTATE, right? We know that they come out of prison often completely isolated, and with extremely limited options for housing, employment, and connection. And we know that isolation and unaddressed shame are core drivers of recidivism. So we want to find ways to build connection and community around these guys. Not because we're such wonderful enlightened people, but because we know, again, that this is what's protective of children.

And in many different parts of the States, Canada and other countries, there are programs that do this. They're typically called Circles of Support and Accountability. And they typically involve people in a returning citizens community who are able to move through their initial response to volunteer to be consistently engaged in that person's life.

So those are like a couple examples of just the kinds of things of, what do we do? What are people already doing? But again, and I think to tie back to your question about forgiveness and this is true at Common Justice as well, like forgiveness is a possible sort of like ancillary effect of something that might happen.

But in none of the work I've been involved in, have we seen forgiveness as like a central component of a pragmatic, grounded response to addressing these forms of violence? It might happen, it might be incredibly healing for the person who was harmed. It might be really meaningful and powerful for the person who harmed.

But I think a lot of times, because we are shaped in a predominantly Christian society, (and no knock on Christianity,) but just that sometimes these notions of forgiveness get so foregrounded, right? And it's not really about that at all. Right? But it is something that could happen and wouldn't it be nice.

SIVAN: Can you break down the word “accountability” a little more for us? What is accountability? What does it mean to be accountable for harm that one has committed? What might accountability offer to someone who's seeking it?And what might it look like? 

RJ: I can kick it off.So accountability. Again, a lot of times people would associate accountability with saying, “sorry, I'm sorry.” You know? And again, sorry, might be a part of it. Sure. But it's really about acknowledging what happened…then it's really meaningful to say, and I recognize the impact that that had on you. I acknowledge not just that it happened, but I see how it impacted you. And then I'm going to, if I'm the person who caused harm, I'm gonna commit to doing the work I need to do so that, you know, I'm never gonna do that to anybody else again.

And I would really like to know what can I do now? Short of getting in a time machine and going back and not doing it. What can I do now to make things as right as possible? And then like, finding out what that is and doing it. That's how we think about accountability of Common Justice and one of the most powerful things I get to witness is, I get to witness survivors and the people who cause them harm, come together and have those kinds of conversations. And then I get to accompany people as they go through that process of their own kind of growth and transformation and fulfilling on those agreements, fulfilling on those commitments.

And it just looks so entirely, it's not even related to our current criminal legal system. Like the process is so completely different. The way we are doing it, it’s like as if these two things are kind of laid side by side. It's a very bizarre kind of experience.

SIVAN: …in those moments of if the answer is there's absolutely nothing, what then? Like nothing is good enough. Nothing will ever be enough….is there anywhere to go from there? 

AMITA: I’ve been through that. Like, I haven't spoken to my father since I was 16. And that was by my choice. I'm not a believer in forgiveness being necessary for a survivor to feel healing, you know? I don't think healing is a finish line. Right? Particularly inside of ongoing rape culture. Like, I'm queer, I'm a non-white person. I am gender queer. My partner is a trans Black man.Rape culture can't be divested from any of the identities I just talked about for the foundational reasons I said in the beginning. So, I can heal pieces of my childhood experience, but there's still violence coming at me from the state.  It's coming at the people I love.

….I think for me forgiveness is about relationship. And I think it's absolutely okay when we support survivors’ autonomy to say “you get to break relationships.” And I talk a lot in my work about blood supremacy being part of the patriarchy that allows rape culture to flourish globally…
It's part of my healing to cut off that side of my lineage and to say, you don't get access to me. You haven't earned that relationship with me. Why? Just because we share blood? Like, no, you have to earn that relationship. And maybe if he and his brothers who protected him had been of the mindset of what you're saying or what you said, like how can we help repair what's possible to repair?

Because you can't, just like you can’t un-murder someone, you can't un-rape someone, right? But you know I I think it's okay for any survivor of any kind of violence to say “I no longer want a relationship with that person who did violence to me.” There's nothing they could do that would re-earn that right to a relationship. You know? That's how I feel about my father…You know, there's just nothing.

Now, however, do I think that there are things that survivors usually want? Many of the things that you listed, RJ I mean, in the Mirror Memoirs, audio archive, I asked every survivor, we have 73 stories on record of queer and trans people of color who are survivors.

And I asked all of them,  and this is a question I like to ask all of us, because frankly, whether or not you're a survivor, 100% of us were raised in rape culture, right? literally all of us. And so if we were all in the imaginings of what do we all need? What do you all need to undo rape culture in your heart and in your head, right?

Like our collective healing. If we all went through a portal right now into a dimension in which capitalism doesn't exist, and your only responsibility from the moment you get up till you go to sleep is to heal yourself of rape culture, whether that's from a place of directly experiencing it, or just living in this violent society, and you have a toolbox that has every material. and spiritual resource to support your healing: what's in the box? And so we have 73 different answers in our audio archive, and zero of them are police and prisons. And not because I said to people, you must be an abolitionist to be part of this project. Many people didn't even know that word, but people said “I need stable housing.I want art supplies. I want really good food and lots of friends to enjoy it with. I want a support animal, right? Like a pet or a horse or a dog or whatever to love me. I wanna be able to swim, I want to be able to dance. I want, you know, for our wheelchair users, I want accessible grounds where I can be with my community and not have to worry about the fact that I'm a wheelchair user keeping me separate all the time.

Right? These were some of the answers that people said. There's many, many beautiful things. So I think another way people could be accountable is you know, how do I use whatever money I might have access to to pay for your stable housing, your food, your education, your art supplies, your therapy.

My God, I've spent like, I don't know, I've had to have two reproductive surgeries because of trauma related tumors, like at least $100,000 on all of my healing. And there's studies about this from, from the government. It's like what, roughly at least $140,000 per child sexual abuse survivor for your lifetime of healing your body and your mind to the possibilities that you can.

Most people can't afford that. Right? Most people, if we don't have health insurance, if you don't have your basic needs met. So I think those are some things people can do and it may never earn back a relationship. And accountability is not something we do to other people. Mariame Kaba who lives here in New York,nd if you don't know her work, you really should. So many projects that Mariame’s involved in, she and Andrea Ritchie just wrote a book called No More Police, in which they talk about both being survivors of sexual violence themselves. But Mariame talks a lot in her work about how accountability is not something you can do to another person.

We can't hold people accountable cause that's actually not accountability, that's punishment. And if we're all going to undo rape culture from our heads and our hearts, then we have to undo punishment culture in our heads and our hearts, cause that's actually part of rape culture. Accountability, like RJ was talking about, is something someone can choose to do themselves.

…

JEN: …what I really love about abolition is that…It's really being like, if we don't have a government to save us, how do we save one another? You know? And I think on the individual level, if we're really holding ourselves accountable, that shouldn't also happen because someone has told us we have hurt them…I just, I don't know. I think for me, I hope that out of this question people take away, like, it's not making an excuse to say why you did something. You know? Part of that is accountability, part of that is acknowledging the hurt that has come to you, and if we're gonna break down this abuser survivor dichotomy, we have to make space for people who have caused harm in this type of way, to also have those conversations for themselves. And it's not a distraction, it's not an excuse. It's, it's their life…you know? 

SIVAN: …knowing, you know, many of you identify as artists and storytellers as well, I'd love to talk for, you know, particularly Amita and RJ have worked specifically in theater and performance work around some of these topics. I'd love to turn this question to you of how you see performance work and storytelling, playing into the larger project of preventing and or responding to harm…

AMITA: …So a year ago, Mirror Memoirs filmed a play because Covid, we didn't wanna fill the theater. And we specifically spent 20 hours in writing workshops with four of our members, including our board co-chair, who are black trans women. One is an Afro-Latina intersex fem. And all of them were raped as children to be clear, everyone in Mirror Memoirs, right?

And so the reason we brought them into writing workshops, it was based on a model I learned with Sarah through Ping Chong and Company. But we, we really made it our own with the, ways that we incorporated some of the ritual traditions from the diaspora of people who were enslaved and from Africa, like pouring water in between people's testimonies, like lighting incense….And I think the reason I chose to focus so much of our resources in the middle of a pandemic on this particular play is because, you know, we're in a time where I think for people outside of specifically Black Trans community, hopefully it's legible in a way that perhaps wasn't before that there's been an ongoing genocide very specifically against black trans people in this country….And so in order to make this legible during the Post Me Too era, I think we were seeing the statistics very clearly mirrored in our membership base that what does it mean that gender nonconformity is a risk factor for being raped as a child? Well, it should mean that trans people as adults are disproportionately survivors, you know? And including, like when you layer in race and indigeneity, we should see movements led by black trans women, for example, because they are disproportionately child sexual abuse survivors and survivors of adulthood violence. And that's not the face of the current movements nationally right now.

So we wanted to course correct for that through storytelling because data is out there. It's out there. It's like federal data from the Justice Department on how there's like genocidal levels of sexual violence against trans people, and it's not actually infusing itself into collective movements. I think storytelling, like we're wired as human beings to sit around a fire from prehistoric days and witness each other. We have mirror neurons in our brain that are literally fired when a listener and a storyteller pair together and one witnesses the other. That's part of our literal wiring neurobiologically as humans. It like creates empathy basically when those mirror neurons get fired.

So, you know, we're using very basic human technology through the act of ensemble storytelling to try to get empathetic responses on a broad level. When you hear four black trans women talk about, “the police raped me when I was a child.” “ The police trafficked me when I was a child.” “It was the guard at the juvenile prison that I was put into when I ran away from home at the age of 12 and was doing sex work on the streets to survive.”

These are not my stories, these are the stories of the women in Transmutation. But I think when you hear those stories, about like who is a perpetrator often includes people who are paid by the state to do the dirty work of the carceral system, right? Group home employees, psychiatric state institution employees, of course prisons, police, prison guards, and police, right?

Then, it's no longer a debate, at least for me on abolition, right? When the police are literally the ones raping vulnerable people. Raping the people that are victims of our societal genocide, then why would we ask for more police if we really wanna end the rape of all children? And that's a collective question for our society.

Do we really mean it when we say no child should be raped? Because if we did mean that, then we would all be abolitionists, I think. And I think that's why I practice storytelling, you know, just to clear away the academic debates and the jargon and just get right to the heart of witnessing people's truth.
…

RJ: …my experiences of being sexually abused were the only things that I kept from my mother. I just had that kind of close relationship with her. She was a very open person, very accepting person, you know, and that was the only stuff I never told her about until I got into my mid twenties and kind of had this awakening….there's so much power in survivors telling our stories together. And the first opportunity I had to do that was as part of a men's digital storytelling project. So, a bunch of men from New York City and the Bay Area who were child sexual abuse survivors, we kind of each made our own little three minute digital story, using whatever the technology is that used to do that… that opportunity to actually sort of construct the narrative of something that was kind of inside me so jumbled was really powerful, and then to not be alone when it is such an isolating experience.

…

AMITA: I just wanna say that in a time of pandemic, it's been a time of a lot of talk about grief, and I think that the work of preventing child sexual abuse is a collective responsibility to grieve the reality that kids are being raped at an endemic rate.

And that's not just for survivors to hold, and that like some of the orientation that we've all been raised through propaganda, like Law and Order and whatnot, to believe that like this prison system is gonna somehow save us, like it's been illegal to rape kids, right? We have the largest prison population in the world here, and kids today, right now are still being raped at endemic rates.

And part of the word of undoing that desire for like fiery punishment in our hearts and heads is to just get in touch with our grief around that reality, right? It's devastating. And it's something we all hopefully have a little more practice around that feeling of grief, like after this, through this ongoing pandemic.

That's part of the work is in order to build a new world, we have to get in touch with our feelings about how fucked up this one is. And that we can build something better. But it's not just for survivors to do, it's collective work. 

About the Curator & Facilitator

Sivan Battat (she/they) is a theater director and community organizer, and the Associate Artistic Director of Noor Theatre. Sivan seeks to bridge justice work and cultural work, bringing the power of performance to our movements, and the vision of movement work to our theaters. www.sivanbattat.com

About the Panelists

RJ Maccani brings fifteen years of experience in transformative justice responses to violence and trauma-informed leadership development to his current work as the Director of Training for Common Justice - the first alternative-to-incarceration and victim-service program in the United States that focuses on violent felonies in the adult courts. He is also a parent and a lead teacher for generative somatics. As a co-founder of the Challenging Male Supremacy Project and leadership team member for generationFIVE, RJ's transformative justice work has focused on addressing violence against women, queer and trans people, and children. 

RJ is an LMSW from the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College. His vocational experience reflects three complementary passions: transformative justice, somatic coaching, and the creative arts. RJ’s writing on these can be found in Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement (AK Press), The Politics of Trauma: Somatics, Healing, and Social Justice (North Atlantic Books), and A Moment on the Clock of the World: A Foundry Theatre Production (Haymarket Books). 

Amita Swadhin (they/them)
For over 20 years, Amita Swadhin has been an organizer, educator, storyteller, and strategist working to end interpersonal and institutional violence against young people. Their work blooms from their experiences as a non-binary, queer daughter of immigrants from India and survivor of years of childhood rape and abuse by their father. They are the Founding Co-Director of Mirror Memoirs, a national, abolitionist storytelling and organizing project intervening in rape culture by uplifting the narratives, healing and leadership of transgender, intersex, non-binary and/or queer Black, Indigenous and of color survivors of child sexual abuse. Mirror Memoirs is headquartered in Los Angeles and includes 650 members across the United States. 

Amita is also a published writer whose essays have appeared in several anthologies. You can follow their work on Instagram: @amitaswadhin and @mirror.memoirs. 

Jenani “jen” Srijeyanthan (they/she/them) is an [eelam tamil / queer / disabled] anti-violence advocate residing on Mvskoke land (Atlanta, GA), originally by ways of Lenape territory (South Brunswick, NJ). Their efforts to end gender-based violence, grounded in abolition feminism and transformative justice, are housed within two entities: Just Beginnings Collaborative and the devi co-op. Their organizing interests include: survivor defense, transformative justice, education, inside/outside survivor community building, and dreaming of a world where love reigns supreme. jenani centers young survivors and survivors who are currently/formerly incarcerated and/or system-involved, namely from queer and trans communities, in their work.

Downstate was co-commissioned and its world premiere was presented by Steppenwolf Theatre Company (Anna Shapiro, Artistic Director; David Schmitz, Executive Director) and The National Theatre, London (Rufus Norris, Artistic Director; Lisa Burger, Executive Director).

This production has received generous support from the Roy Cockrum Foundation and the Blanche and Irving Laurie Foundation.

Downstate was co-commissioned and its world premiere was presented by Steppenwolf Theatre Company (Anna Shapiro, Artistic Director; David Schmitz, Executive Director) and The National Theatre, London (Rufus Norris, Artistic Director; Lisa Burger, Executive Director).