Black Women with Justice Involvement Navigating Harm As They Pursue Healing: An Examination of Structural Violence within Treatment Systems

Background: Black women with justice involvement (BWJI) navigate myriad forms of harms as they reintegrate back into society. These overlapping forms of harms include interpersonal violence, the traumas associated with complex illness experiences as well as stigmatization, which can lead to perceived social rejection, disbarment, and shame. In addition, BWJI also experience structural harms as they pursue recovery and seek support from state systems which reinforce marginalization and devaluation through practices, policies, and their cultural ethos. Emerging research efforts have begun to explore the ways in which justice involved communities experience myriad forms of structural violence along their life cycle. This current work seeks to advance this emerging and critical attention towards system-level harm.

Methods: This presentation is based on a community-engaged research study conducted to understand how BWJI experience and navigate multiple systems of harm as they re-engage in their families and communities. The study recruited 28 Black women who were recently released from incarceration and currently engaging in a mandated substance use treatment program. This study was also developed and carried out in conjunction with a community advisory board (CAB) assembled specifically for this project. A constructivist grounded theory approach was used to conduct semi-structured qualitative interviews and analyze the meaning making process of justice involved women navigating both recovery from illness as well as re-entry back into their families and communities.

Results: Findings from qualitative interviews indicate that BWJI experience systemic violence within drug treatment facilities which communicate harmful messages about respectability and “proper womanhood” through practices that reify devalued gendered and racialized statuses. Moreover, the data also reveals that as BWJI pursue wounded healing roles they also face structural harms which reinforce narrow constructions of reentry and relegate them to roles as care workers in pursuit of redemption and healing.

Conclusion: Implications of this study call for a critical ethics of care and justice within systems that reconstructs care work in ways to promote healthier reintegration for BWJI who seek recovery from multiple forms of systemic harms. Moreover, a critical ethics of care and justice interrogates power and control relations in social work to advance anti-oppressive policies and practices.