Black Feminist Visions for Justice: Moving Beyond a Broken System
Black feminist approaches to transformative justice develop on practices of healing and accountability to ensure harm redress is centred 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.
Historically, communities who have been excluded from accessing care from the state, but are still subject to state violence, have learned to provide robust models for mutual aid, mutual care, healing and accountability, which fundamentally improve how they resist and exist in society. For example, the harm reduction strategies developed and deployed by Black LGBTQ and Latinx communities to save lives as AIDS ravaged their communities, are the same harm reduction strategies employed by vulnerable populations in towns, hamlets and cities across the UK. This is one striking example of the aphorism 'we keep us safe', which honours the hard-earned and cumulative wisdom that emerges from those people who are forced to the margins. ‘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 harm-reduction strategy—with Black women involved, in mind and cared for, we create approaches and remedies that can meaningfully care for all? To understand why Black feminist approaches prove so effective, it’s helpful to understand the position Black women occupy in the so-called West.
The systemic oppression of Black women is not an accident
The mammy, the trope that reduces Black women to doting and patient caretakers is the same trope underpinning medical racism and neglect, as well as the persistent belief that Black women are more resilient to physical pain and require less care. Black feminism requires us to look under the hood, and ask: who is served by the structural and cultural enforcements of passive labour force? As Françoise Vergès reminds us - Black and brown women clean the world, and academic and philosopher Joy James provides the phrase 'captive maternal' to illuminate how the coerced 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. This idea of captivity is useful to explain how and why technology-facilitated gender-based violence is faced disproportionately by Black women yet rarely centered in conversations or solutions to combat it. And, 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 modified 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 perfect case study of 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 retraumatise them. We say: the same community wisdom that created life-saving harm reduction models offers a blueprint for addressing redress for intimate image abuse. Rather than waiting for prevention in the form of carceral ‘justice’, these approaches focus on the victim-survivors' needs.
A not-so-radical radical idea: healing is a reasonable ambition after harm
The 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 and care. Resourced healing after individual harm should 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 start to conceive of approaches to tech-facilitated gender-based 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.