Survivor-Centered Transformative Justice: An Approach to Designing Sociotechnical Systems Alongside Domestic Violence Stakeholders in US Muslim Communities

Abstract

Domestic violence (DV) is a social, political, and legal problem that requires contextual examination. In the United States, earlier advocacy work focused on law reform to empower survivors in influencing the public and state to take DV seriously and provide resources to support and protect survivors. However, harm is still perpetuated systemically and socially for survivors, especially those from racial and religious minorities. In this dissertation, I focus on domestic violence within the US-based Muslim population due to the unique issues Muslim survivors face when dealing with governmental services and service providers (e.g., gendered Islamophobia, racial discrimination, punitive actions) and within the Muslim community itself (e.g., community trauma, faith leaders lacking appropriate training). This work incorporates three phases of research that utilize qualitative and design methods to examine the forms and dynamics of domestic violence, help-seeking and healing challenges, and survivor advocacy, abuser accountability, and community transformation interventions. I argue that to pursue justice for survivors in design research, a multifaceted approach rooted in principles from Islamic feminism, traumainformed care, and restorative and transformative justice tenets is needed. Consequently, I propose Survivor-Centered Transformative Justice (SCTJ), a framework to discern individual and systemic harm, to understand how to design alongside victim-survivors, and to focus on victim-survivors' autonomy. I illustrate how SCTJ allows researchers and designers to account for individual inequalities, recognize communities' preferred approaches to pursuing justice, tackle the underlying conditions enabling harm, and provide interventions that alter, repair, and reduce harm within different scales of relationships. Additionally, I present the concept of healing structures, which aim to safeguard against harmful community practices, discriminatory laws, and practices while facilitating collective and survivor-centered interventions to promote healing. Lastly, I demonstrate the potential for design research to progress by taking a closer look into the belief systems, cultural values, and surrounding conditions that contribute to users' obtainable choices and decision-making processes, and by centering the needs of people at the margins. With this empirical, theoretical, and design work, I present insights that inform the HCI community at the intersection of social justiceoriented design, Islamic feminism, and gender-based violence.