Liberatory Harm Reduction is a philosophy and set of empowerment-based practices that teaches us how to accompany each other as we transform the root causes of harm in our lives.
So I think what’s important to know about Liberatory Harm Reduction is that it’s generations old, not inventing anything, I’m not describing something new. I’m sort of naming, hey, we’ve been doing this forever as a liberatory practice because we have always needed to save our own lives and we believe that we can save our own lives through these key strategies.
I think the key differences between Liberatory Harm Reduction and public health harm reduction is that public health harm reduction, especially as it exists inside social services, which by the way, I want social services to practice harm reduction, so it isn’t that I want them to stop.
So I got shepherded into NIPAC, and then as NIPAC was closing in the early 2000s and right after 9/11, and I had just … My heart was just broken between 9/11 and NIPAC closing, so I moved to Chicago just as the Young Women’s Empowerment Project, who had been organizing together for several years, I was not a founder or a co-founder, YWEP had been in existence for years, maybe three or four years when I got there, but I did get there right as they were forming a nonprofit.
You can take whatever you want. People can be in the bathroom for 30 minutes and someone will check on you to make sure you haven’t OD’ed, or you don’t need help, or you’re not sick. But that bathroom is a sanctuary. The office will be painted a million different colors. It will feel like a living room. There’ll be couches and dogs and food that people have cooked.
If you experience interpersonal violence and you try to seek help, you are then necessarily going to experience state violence. I think of the Danielle Sered quote, “No one experiences violence for the first time by committing it.” And so if we flip what I just said around and think about if I was experiencing interpersonal violence, I was also simultaneously experiencing state violence because some of the root causes of violence are about the state.
And I think what liberatory harm reduction is saying is, “Hey, we’re whole people right now, deserving love, fully formed, exactly as we are,” and we can organize and we can take care of each other. And we also need resources, help, and support. So not to say it’s all perfect, it’s actually all kind of a mess. But it is what we’re doing and it is what we’ve been doing, and we’ve had some really beautiful, important wins and moments built from that.
I think of the Janes here in Chicago as one of the in many ways forerunners of harm reduction, in that providing underground abortion services in the ’60s and ’70s was something that was so, so life-giving, so essential, so necessary, that it really makes sense for us to learn from the Janes. It makes sense for us to learn from STAR. It makes sense for us to learn from everyone who came before us and put that into as much practice as we can.
Syringe exchange is still illegal in some places in this country. Right? So it isn’t always about the law or the rule, but it is about your relationship to the risk and your relationship to the people who you’re supporting and who you’re in community with, and who are your people, and whose back you’re going to have.
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