Transformative justice and restorative justice: Gender-based violence and alternative visions of justice in the United States

In the United States, the contemporary feminist movement against gender-based violence started in the early 1970s, just as ideologies and policies supporting mass criminalization launched what became a five-fold rise in U.S. rates of incarceration. Since the new millennium, people of color have taken the lead in re-envisioning fundamental notions of justice given the dramatic backdrop of mass incarceration and the recent upsurge in prison abolitionist possibilities. Central to this reformulation has been a social justice critique that recognizes the intersection of gender-based violence and other forms of interpersonal violence with the violence of the state, most concentrated within U.S. carceral institutions. While the U.S. roots of violence as well as resistance to this violence extend back to the earliest days of colonial occupation, the contemporary manifestation of the anti-violence struggle has taken on the labels of restorative justice and, more recently, transformative justice. This conceptual paper relies upon historical analysis of the contemporary anti-violence movement, secondary legal literature, and insider social movement knowledge to trace recent trends in the movement to redefine notions of justice in its application to gender-based violence, the contrasting trajectories of restorative justice and transformative justice, and the liberatory vision and practices of transformative justice.