The Justice We Demand

Sharing stories by Indigenous survivors of sexual violence to reconceptualize justice beyond punishment and remediationThe Justice We Demand asks a profound and urgent question: What does justice truly mean for rape survivors? To address sexual violence, two dominant frameworks of justice persist: carceral justice, which centers punishing perpetrators through the criminal legal system, and restorative justice, which emphasizes repairing interpersonal relationships to resolve tensions between perpetrator and victim. Indigenous survivors and their communities, however, do not view justice as a neat binary between carceralism or restoration. Instead, they navigate complex legal and social systems across federal, state, local, and tribal jurisdictions, and they imagine justice in the form of ceremony, apology, banishment, and more, remedies that often fall outside the formal, colonialist legal system. Centering the importance of storytelling in addressing trauma, Sarah Deer and Melinda Chen listen to the stories of fifty-one Indigenous women and Two-Spirit survivors of sexual violence to understand their versions of justice. Through their felt experiences, Indigenous survivors challenge conventional criminal justice paradigms that persist in Tribal Nations and settler colonial states, cultivating sovereign approaches to punishment and healing. With actionable insight and resounding truth, The Justice We Demand urges us to reconsider what justice means and envisions a constellation of remedies led by each survivor's needs, rooted in their own terms, bodies, and land. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.