Black Feminist Visions for Justice: Moving Beyond a Broken System
Black feminist approaches to transformative justice centre practices of healing and accountability to ensure harm is focused on those whom mainstream systems consistently fail to protect. In our new position paper, we argue, that for tech-facilitated and AI-generated intimate image abuse, we should take the same approach.
‘We keep us safe’ animates what is at the heart of transformative justice: community care and accountability.
Historically, communities who have been excluded from accessing care from the state, but are still subject to state violence, have learned of the necessity of providing alternative modes of care: mutual aid, mutual care, and accountability practices, which improve how they resist and exist in society. For example, harm reduction strategies developed and deployed by Black LGBTQ and Latina communities as AIDS ravaged their communities, are the same harm reduction strategies employed by refugee, migrants and racialised populations in towns, hamlets and cities across the UK. This is one striking example of the aphorism 'we keep us safe', which reflects the hard-earned and practical wisdom emerging from those who are oppressed.
‘We keep us safe’ animates what is at the heart of transformative justice: community care and accountability.
How is it that when we design systems—like a reparative approaches to harm—with Black women involved, in mind and cared for, we create approaches and remedies that can meaningfully provide care for all? To understand why Black feminist approaches prove so effective, it’s helpful to reflect on the position Black women have long held in the West.
The systemic oppression of Black women is not an accident
The Mammy - a trope that reduces Black women to doting and patient caretakers is one that underpins medical racism and neglect, due to the as the persistent belief that Black women are more resilient to physical pain, require less care and are less human than non-Black people. Black feminism asks us to look under the hood, and ask: who is served by the structural and cultural enforcements of having a passive, neglected labour force?
As Françoise Vergès tells us - Black and brown women clean the world. In the same vein, Joy James uses the phrase 'captive maternal' to illuminate how the forced labour of Black women is utilised by the patriarchal state to regenerate and sustain itself. Without the structural and systemic oppression of Black women — which presents as persistent structural inequality — the state could not be what it is, even if what it is isn’t good enough for most of us. Captive maternal also explains how and why technology-facilitated gender-based violence is disproportionately experienced by Black women, yet Black women are rarely centered in conversations or solutions to combat it. Lastly ‘captive maternal’ it goes some way in explaining the durability of the political reluctance to make it stop—not just for Black women, but for all.
This dynamic extends directly into digital policy space and legislative fights, where the burden of mitigating proposals around online safety and AI governance - to ensure that there are human rights frameworks around racial and gender discrimination are present - falls on already overstretched civil society organisations led by and serving marginalised communities. The reality is that by and for charities, like Glitch, are the ones trying to lessen the captive maternal.
Black feminism looks beyond itself
Black women may experience violence disproportionately, but we do not experience it exclusively. When we focus on the ways Black women’s bodies and images are policed, objectified and now modified and violated with generative AI, we find the fault lines along which intimate abuse travels for all women. The social and technological infrastructures designed to profit from the dehumanisation of Black women—are those which accelerate the distribution of intimate image abuse at scale.
Intimate image abuse represents a holistic case study to show how current systems fail. The 20.9% surge in cases outpaces any meaningful response, while victim-survivors navigate a maze of inconsistent platform policies, slow regulatory processes and criminal justice systems that routinely exclude and re-traumatise them. We say: the same wisdom and need that creates life-saving harm reduction models offers a blueprint for redress for intimate image abuse. Rather than believing that justice or prevention will come from carceral systems, these approaches focus on the victim-survivors' needs.
A not-so-radical radical idea: healing is a reasonable ambition after harm
A fundamental Black feminist principle at the core of Glitch, our work and our position paper, Beyond the Content Takedown, is that Black women and Black gender-expansive people deserve justice in this world. A resourced redress access scheme after experiencing individual harm is not be a radical demand; nor is it unreasonable. Our new position paper shows how transformative justice models deliver what the current system refuses to.
Our position paper Beyond the Takedown is an invitation to conceive of approaches to tech-facilitated violence that truly centre victim-survivors and not platform accountability. In the simplest terms, if the human rights violations of intimate image abuse are not addressed with appropriate redress for Black women, the infrastructure for the protection of human rights for all women does not exist.