Reimagining Policy for QTBIPOC Survivors: “We Keep Us Safe”
November 25 signifies International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women and marks the start of the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence (GBV) campaign. This is an important time to raise public awareness, reflect, and take action against GBV and its structural, societal, and systemic pervasiveness through individual and collective spheres.
Nealob Kakar is a Queer Afghan community-based researcher, storyteller, artist, and maker of all things. She is currently a third-year Social Practice and Transformational Change PhD candidate at the University of Guelph. Her research explores the ways Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, Person of Colour (QTBIPOC) Survivors practice care, mutual aid, and a praxis of indispensability for one another in ways that colonial bodies of policy have not been able to. Her research aims to contribute to a body of knowledge that reconceptualizes the discipline of policy through critical community-based perspectives that rethink difference and radically re-imagine transformative futures of collective care.
This past September, I attended my eighth Take Back the Night (TBTN), which is a global rally and march against GBV that began in the late 1970s. This year I was asked to speak and perform a spoken word poem about my experience as a QTBIPOC Survivor. As I took the stage, I peered out at the volunteers in purple T-shirts working the booths; the hand-painted signs in the grasp of Survivors young and old; the smiles and tears of community organizers on the outskirts; and the grit and grace of the Master of Ceremonies. Standing there, looking outward and thinking inward, I reflected on the stories of the Survivors that spoke before me and the common reoccurring thread that wove its way through all of our stories, stitching us together in place. We may not have used the same language or stumbled upon the same words, but—despite being thrown into the throes of the state’s bureaucratic processes, universalistic policies, retraumatizing practices, and revictimizing principles—there was one thing that kept us tethered: community.
This led me to think back to my first TBTN in Hamilton, circa 2017, that propelled my thirst for social change. For the first time, I was amongst other Survivors who looked like me. We were physically (re)claiming the streets with our bodies, chanting with our voices. That night was the first time I heard the words “we keep us safe.” At the time I didn’t fully understand the weight of each syllable, each letter, and each word, but I knew they would linger for years to come. From then on, I became heavily involved in Survivor-centred community organizing, delivering peer support training, facilitating support groups, administrating crisis line intervention, and advocating through public education. My life was built around supporting Survivors, and with time I realized that what this really meant was cultivating community. I quickly learned that existing policies and formal state-sanctioned support interventions do not in fact support Survivors. And all too often these supports add to the violence we experience. It became an unwritten rule that formal intervention puts the most marginalized Survivors at an increased risk of harm, particularly those Survivors at the intersection of racial, sexual, and gender-based discrimination.
QTBIPOC Survivors are forced to navigate a web of structural, systemic, and social inequities stemming from long-standing policies. These inequities range from colonization, slavery, and unethical medical experimentation to the criminalization of sex work and the profiling and abuse of trans women of colour. Despite the disproportionate rates of and vulnerability to violence, they are further excluded from and invisibilized in policymaking processes. QTBIPOC Survivor communities have historically practiced alternative anti-carceral interventions to justice, which stem from the failure of white carceral second-wave feminist approaches in the anti-violence movement of the 1960s-70s. Structurally, marginalized Survivors have been forced to explore the use of creative grassroots strategies to prefigure community-led movements that refuse colonial logics and are inclusive of their experiences.
QTBIPOC Survivors are confined to systems that weren’t built with them in mind and that have historically led to their subjugation. If we truly care about ending GBV in all its forms, we cannot look away from the historical and ongoing violence perpetrated by the state. To end GBV, we have to take seriously the roles of patriarchy, capitalism, coloniality, racism, homophobia, and transphobia in its perpetuation. We need an intersectional, community-led approach and a deconstruction of these harmful systems. We must deeply listen to, creatively engage with, and learn from those at the direct face of violence. Additionally, we must prioritize community care over a colonial carceral response and build momentum toward liberation because, time and time again, peers provide support when systems fail to respond. Communities of Survivors have done and continue to do the work to support one another, to hold one another, and to keep each other safe as a survival strategy to interrupt the added layers of institutional harm. Neoliberalism and Western thought have conditioned us to believe that we should navigate in isolation, that we are not indebted to one another, and that we don’t owe each other anything. In reality, the secret is that we actually do need each other to survive because, at the end of the day, “we keep us safe.”
- Written by Nealob Kakar