The Victim Offender Education Group, a restorative justice-centered program at a prison in Chino, is working to rehabilitate people who have caused harm.
The curriculum is grounded in principles of restorative justice, commonly defined as an alternative to punitive justice that promotes healing for the person who was harmed, the person who carried out the harm, and both of their communities.
As a child of undocumented immigrants from Guatemala, Jacquie Marroquin worried that speaking to anyone in authority about her father’s abuse would put her family in danger of being separated, or get her parents deported.
Now she is trying to help other families like hers. Recently, she became the first California-based responder working for a free, confidential helpline for people considering harming a loved one.
With the help of a faith-based restorative justice program in Los Angeles I was able to choose forgiveness and find healing for myself and my son.
I made a decision that I was not going to raise my son with hatred. I was going to show him grace in an empowering way. It became my goal to bring about restoration.
Trixie is a young woman in her mid-20s who recently left an abusive relationship with a boyfriend. She came to my workplace, Walnut Avenue Family & Women’s Center, in Santa Cruz, seeking help from our restorative justice program.
What she was looking for wasn’t an accountability process for her abusive ex-boyfriend, but a means of addressing the trust broken by her friends who didn’t believe that the abuse was real.
Our governor could take two steps right now that would bring together the committed players in domestic violence prevention, help identify and fill in gaps in support, and put the state even further along the road to meaningful leadership in preventing intimate partner violence.
In California, 58 percent of adult residents have been impacted by domestic violence directly or through a close friend or relative.
Domestic violence survivors often need mental health care. Like veterans of wars, these survivors have often been subjected to prolonged periods of extreme stress and fear for their safety.
Mental health care can be hard to access, but solutions exist.
When Christina Kaviani’s son, 6, doesn’t want to hug a grandparent or friend, Kaviani goes against some parenting methods and doesn’t make him.
To her, it’s a matter of consent.
As an educator on healthy relationships, consent is at the heart of what she teaches.
When inclement weather results in a state of emergency, survivors live in constant fear and uncertainty.
It is critical that legislators understand the myriad impacts of domestic violence and natural disasters driven by climate change, so that they can fund and implement more impactful ways to prevent both.
Maury Danielle studied the flyer about a missing woman that a friend had shared on Facebook. Something about it was wrong, she thought.
The woman’s husband had created the flyer and was calling for help finding his wife. But he gave no context about why his wife had disappeared.
Danielle remembered the times she, too, had gone “missing” from her now-ex-husband. She’d been trying to escape.
I survived verbal and physical abuse throughout my childhood and much of my early adulthood.
Now, as part of my journey to heal those wounds, I am working to prevent domestic violence and child abuse because I don’t want anyone to have to go through what I did.