Harm Reduction
“If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
- Lilla Watson and other members of an Aboriginal activist group in Queensland, 1970s
Every year we at the Women’s Center choose an overarching theme that we use to guide the content of our programs for the upcoming year. We strive to choose a topic that is engaging and relevant and better equips us all to respond to the current social and political moment. We treat this as an opportunity and commitment to challenging ourselves and growing deeper into our feminist and anti-oppression values. In this particular moment where there has been an ongoing escalation of legislative threats and attacks on bodily autonomy, some critical guidance on how to help each other survive can be found in the archives of harm reduction.
Harm Reduction is a concept that means very different things to different people and institutions. Many folks may know it as a social work or public health strategy, specifically in the context of safer drug use. Thoughtful interventions such as syringe exchanges, supervised or accompanied drug consumption sites, and drug testing kits have saved countless lives from overdoses or other harmful complications. Colloquially, the phrase “____ as harm reduction” has been used to identify actions that some might deem necessary or important to win short term gains in a long term fight for more radical transformation, or simply things we do in the present to prevent further harm in the future. While some of these interpretations can be powerful, the history and essence of harm reduction have also been co-opted and erased. What originated as a peer-led survival strategy system and language of love in communities of streetbased BIPOC queer and trans people who were involved in the sex trade and/or using drugs has warped over time into an official public health and safety strategy, discussed at professional conferences and often involving other institutions that cause further harm, like law enforcement.
But what is harm reduction truly, and what can we learn from it, whether or not we see ourselves in this work? Longtime harm reduction practitioner and organizer Shira Hassan has coined the term Liberatory Harm Reduction (distinct from co-opted harm reduction) that serves as some of our inspiration for this year. She defines it below:
“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. 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 Reduction is true self-determination and total body autonomy.”
With inherent overlaps with the practices and philosophies of mutual aid and disability justice, our themes from the past two years, harm reduction calls into question the compulsory paternalism present in the common impulse to decide what is best for others. What does it really mean to support one another? How do judgment and shame show up in our approaches to offering or accepting solidarity and care? What does consensual allyship look like? This year we will explore answers to these questions together as well as the tensions they may bring up. We’ve chosen the theme Lessons from Harm Reduction in hopes to discover what the origins and legacy of this body of work can teach us about how to decenter shame and stigma and re-center empowerment and dignity in our stories.
Written by melisa stephen
Join Us!
This fall we will be reading Hassan’s upcoming book Saving our Own Lives: A Liberatory Practice of Harm Reduction, a generous anthology of essays and interviews grounding us in the history and the values of liberatory harm reduction. Fill out the interest form here.
Stay tuned to find out more about our upcoming theme programming including a winter workshop and the Women’s History Month Symposium!
RESOURCES:
Young Women's Empowerment Project
Native Youth Sexual Health Network
Four Fire Model of Harm Reduction
Voting is Not Harm Reduction – An Indigenous Perspective
Theme Artwork
This year's theme artwork was created by Mariah-Rose Marie. The poster she made in collaboration with our staff celebrates the values of liberatory harm reduction and the people it's about. The artist's image description is below:
A colorful illustration of five people holding one another. From bottom left clockwise: a fat Arabic woman in a wheelchair smiles up at a light skinned black person with short blonde hair and a t-shirt that says “trans rights”, who rests their hand on her shoulder. To their right is a tall dark skinned black trans woman in bright blue who gazes at the viewer. Smiling at her on her right is an indigenous american woman with a long braid, who holds the hand of a smiling Asian trans man wearing a shirt that says “sex work is work”. Where their hands touch each other, semi-transparent halos of pink light with little stars glow. Behind the black trans woman is a pink sun throwing rays across a baby blue background.
In the rays are the phrases “NO ONE IS DISPOSABLE”, “SELF-DETERMINATION”, “RELATIONSHIP IS EVERYTHING”, “CHANGE ISN’T LINEAR”, “BODY AUTONOMY”, and “DISABILITY JUSTICE”. Above them is “Northwestern University Women’s Center 2022-2023” and below them “LESSONS FROM HARM REDUCTION”. The illustration is subtly signed by the artist “mariah-rose marie”.
Artist
Mariah-Rose Marie is a story artist, writer, illustrator & graphic novelist based in the land of the Three Council Fires, aka Chicago. Mariah-Rose’s work often centers human relations with the land, wildlife, politics, and the intersections of identity through storytelling, humor and intimacy. Some clients include The New Yorker, Warner Bros. Animation, Science for the People Magazine, Spectre Journal, and The Nib.