On a recent evening in downtown Oakland, seven women sat on couches arranged in a circle around a table with flickering candles, passing around a small, pink ball.

Each passing of the ball signified the holder’s turn to speak, while the rest of the group listened. The women shared how they were feeling, recent challenges they’d faced and about people they were grateful for. Then it was facilitator Kusum Crimmel’s turn to speak.

“Last week, we started talking about our children,” she said, introducing the main topic for the evening. “How have your children been impacted by the past relationships that we’ve been in? Have we talked with them about it, or is it still too hard?”

The women in the circle were survivors of domestic violence. They’d gathered, as they do each Wednesday, to talk about their experiences, learn from each other, and acquire new tools for healing and navigating relationships. Some had escaped abuse years ago. Others were still embroiled in it. All of them were dealing with the repercussions of domestic violence for themselves and for their children.

“It’s one of those things that impacts every day of my life,” said Shani Shay, 36, of West Oakland, who spent more than a decade in an abusive partnership that began in her teens. “You’re free from the physical violence, but you carry it because your body is like a vessel.” 

Called the Sisters Rise Circle, the gathering is one of about a dozen circles run by Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth, or RJOY, a nonprofit based in Oakland that uses restorative practices to address conflict and promote healing in communities impacted by systemic racism, violence and intergenerational trauma. While some of RJOY‘s circles have operated for years, the Sisters Rise Circle is a relatively new group. Organizers launched the circle last fall as part of a response to what they saw as a large, unmet need among the communities and families they serve to tackle domestic and intimate partner violence.

Founded in 2005, RJOY has a long history of working with youth in Oakland public schools and with young people involved in the juvenile justice system and their families. In addition to healing circles, the organization offers individual mental health support, youth programs, retreats and restorative justice processes in response to community tragedies such as shootings.  It also recently launched a 24-hour warmline called Safe Outside the System that community members can call for help with domestic violence, mental health crises and other challenges for which they don’t want to involve the police. Warmlines, which are a variation of hotlines, offer free practical and emotional support but are not intended for emergency situations.  

Clinical Director Jerdine Clarke oversees RJOY’S wellness and clinical mental health programs. She said people come to the Sisters Rise Circle because they are referred by a therapist or staff member, through the warmline, or hear about it in the community. Often, participants are parents who have a child involved in one of the youth programs or families who are receiving crisis intervention. Some people referred to the program may not even realize that what they are experiencing is domestic violence.

“If they’ve grown up in households that are kind of chaotic and have that level of aggression … they don’t necessarily have an idea that what’s going on in their relationships is problematic,” Clarke said. “It’s not necessarily working for you, but at the same time, you don’t have a different reference point.”

Eileen, who has been going to the Sisters Rise Circle since it started and asked to withhold her last name for safety reasons, said it took years of individual therapy for her to understand that the abuse she experienced during her 20-year marriage was not her fault. She grew up in a conservative, Chinese household where people didn’t talk about domestic violence, she said. Her husband blamed her for the abuse and told her she was crazy to complain about it. 

“Having a group helped me to understand I’m not crazy, a lot of my feelings are normal,” Eileen said. “It gave me a place, a safe space to express myself. Every time I come here, I feel better afterwards.” 

The circle uses restorative and indigenous practices that facilitate equal participation, reflection and a sense of community. When the group first launched, participants drafted a set of agreements to abide by during each session that include practicing curiosity, not judging, and keeping the information shared confidential. The ball, or talking piece, ensures that each person gets a chance to speak. The facilitators help guide the conversation but don’t dominate it. 

Being in the group can help women better understand what they’ve been through, regain a sense of self that they may have lost due to the abuse, and reduce feelings of isolation that are common in domestic violence situations, organizers said. 

Crimmel and her co-facilitator Norma Ward said they hope some of the participants will eventually want to engage in a restorative process with their own family members or others impacted by the violence. The circle might include their children, the person who caused harm, grandparents or neighbors. As with restorative justice processes used to address school discipline problems and other types of conflicts, the goal would be to build understanding of how the violence affected everyone involved and collectively agree on how to hold the perpetrator accountable and repair the harm. 

However, getting to a place where it is safe or even feasible to bring a person responsible for domestic violence into a restorative justice process is difficult, the facilitators said. In many cases, that person is not ready to accept responsibility for their actions and may still be a threat to the survivor. Survivors who have left an abusive relationship often understandably don’t want to reinitiate contact with the person who hurt them, they said. 

“The ideal scenario would be someone acknowledging what they’ve done, taking ownership, looking at that person and saying, ‘I’m sorry,’” Ward said, who has worked extensively with both survivors and perpetrators of gender-based violence. But for many people responsible for such abuse, “it takes them years to get to the point of where they acknowledge what they do. They’ve done it to so many people,” she said. 

For now, Krimmel said she hopes the Sisters Rise Circle can contribute to breaking generational cycles of abuse by helping participants better understand what’s healthy and what’s not in a relationship. She’s also encouraging participants to consider doing a restorative circle with their children, so they can talk about the impact of the abuse on the entire family and collectively find new ways to heal from it. 

As the circle drew to a close that March evening, some of the women expressed interest in that idea. For over an hour, they’d talked about trauma their children had experienced because of the domestic violence, how difficult it was for some of them to talk with their kids about it, feelings of shame about what their children went through, or frustration with kids who seemed to be acting out. Some also expressed hope that their kids would get the support they needed through therapy and talked about good times they’d had with their children.  

By the end of the session, a sense of calm and connection pervaded the room. Whatever they had been through, or were still going through, they were not alone.