“I think also interpersonally that I might be able to numb out to another person’s pain that I might be causing is part of how hurt and harm can work.”
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yessss i love talking about harm reduction!! harm reduction is a lot of things. firstly, it’s a political movement led by people who use drugs and sex workers as a way to fight for our liberation. Harm reduction as it’s practiced in the US today was really shaped by a bunch of different communities and activists during the 80s and the AIDS crisis, especially Black, poor, queer communities that were at the forefront of all of this work. A harm reductionist I really respect, Shira Hassan, talks about liberatory harm reduction as opposed to professionalized/co-opted/public health oriented harm reduction:
“Harm reduction is a philosophy and set of empowerment-based practices that teach us how to accompany each other as we transform the root causes of harm in our lives.
We put our values into action using real-life strategies to reduce the negative health, legal, and social consequences that result from criminalized and stigmatized life experiences such as drug use, sex, the sex trade / sex work, surviving intimate partner violence, self-injury, eating disorders, and any other survival strategies deemed morally or socially unacceptable.
Liberatory Harm Reductionists support each other and our communities without judgment, stigma, or coercion, and we do not force others to change. We envision a world without racism, capitalism, patriarchy, misogyny, ableism, transphobia, policing, surveillance, and other systems of violence. Liberatory Harm Reduction is true self-determination and total body autonomy.” (Excerpt from Healing Justice Lineages by Cara Page and Erica Woodland, from Saving Our Own Lives By Shira Hassan).
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it’s also a set of practical strategies to reduce harms associated with all sorts of actions–from drug use, to self harm and eating disorders, to sex work, and more. instead of mainstream rhetoric about drugs, that looks at drug use as a moral issue, or frames risks associated with drug use as an unchangeable fact of the drugs themselves, harm reduction locates those risks as caused by criminalization, and recognizes that risks associated with drug use are preventable.
some practical strategies of harm reduction that people are usually most familiar with is needle exchange as a way to reduce the risk of transmission of HIV or Hep C, where people can get new syringes/needles and dispose of old ones; overdose prevention, through distributing and training people on how to use Narcan, and safe consumption sites; providing safer smoking and safer snorting supplies; drug checking, through fentanyl or xylazine test strips or through technology like FTIR in order to get people accurate information about their drugs; providing condoms and bad date sheets as resources for sex workers; providing wound care supplies and safer cutting information to people who self harm, and more!
a lot of harm reduction is also based on the idea that all of us have agency in our lives, that we can make decisions about what we think is best for our lives, and that any positive change we make is valuable (and also that we don’t need to solely define our lives based on “positive change!”). harm reduction doesn’t view abstinence as the best or only option, but instead makes room for the wide variety of roles that drug use or other actions might play in our lives. i view harm reduction as a deeply relational practice, where we respect each others autonomy while still being in community with each other. it requires us to put in a lot of work to think about how to nonjudgementally show up in each others lives, and requires all of us to view ourselves as people who can make choices and are empowered to do so.
harm reduction is opposed to carceral and coercive treatment, and harm reduction is also an abolitionist movement that advocates for complete decriminalization of drug use and sex work.
there is probably a million other things that i could say about harm reduction and other followers feel free to add on your definitions of harm reduction, but that’s pretty much how I view it and why harm reduction is so important to me!
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On to the next book: Saving Our Own Lives by Shira Hassan, been looking forward to this one for a while
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Liberatory Harm Reduction is one of the most important interventions of the 20th century, and yet a compilation of its critical stories and voices was, until now, seemingly nowhere to be found. Saving Our Own Lives, an anthology of essays from long-time organizer Shira Hassan, fills this gap by telling the stories of how sex workers, Black, Indigenous, and people of color, queer folks, trans, gender non-conforming, and two-spirit people are – and have been - building systems of change and support outside the societal frameworks of oppression and exploitation. This is a collective story of trans women of color, who were sex workers and radical political organizers, who created shared housing to ensure that young people had safe places to sleep. It is the story of clean syringes, “liberated” from empathetic doctors’ offices by activists who were punk women of color who distributed them among injection drug users in squats in the East Village, and the early AIDS activists who made sure that everyone knew how to use them. It is the story of Black Panthers and the Young Lords taking over Lincoln Park Hospital in the Bronx to demand and ultimately create community-accessible drug treatment programs; and of bad date sheets passed between sex workers in Portland, who created a data collection tool that changed how prison abolitionists track systemic violence.
At a political moment when Liberatory Harm Reduction and mutual aid are more important than ever, this book serves as an inspiration and a catalyst for radical transformation of our world.
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the things that you do to encourage growth in a plant are not the same as the things you do to encourage flowering…
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Queer Dreams and Nonprofit Blues: Lessons from Anti-violence Movements
videos by Dean Spade and Hope DectorIn October 2013, BCRW and The Engaging Tradition Project co-convened a conference called Queer Dreams and Non-Profit blues to examine the critiques emerging from queer and feminist activists and scholars about the impact of funding on social movement agendas and formations. During the conference, Hope Dector from BCRW and Dean Spade from The Engaging Tradition Project conducted interviews with many of the speakers about their analysis and strategies related to the conference themes. These interviews were edited into 30 short videos that aim to bring these critical perspectives into an accessible format for use in activist spaces and classrooms. These videos highlight the type of knowledge production that is possible when the boundaries between activism and the academy are actively traversed.
The first three videos to be released explore lessons from anti-violence movements and feature interviews with Angélica Cházaro, Shira Hassan, Soniya Munshi, Andrea Ritchie, Andrea Smith, and Dean Spade.
More Laws = More Violence: Criminalization as a Failed Strategy for Anti-Violence Movements
After Nonprofitization: Reevaluating Anti-Violence Strategies
What are Alternatives to Nonprofitization and Criminalization for Anti-Violence Movements?