 I am the daughter of immigrants to the United States. My father is a refugee from North Korea, my mother from South Korea, both fleeing the devastation of the Korean War. And for my mother, the internal war of the family torn apart by the violence inflicted by her father, my grandfather. I come from a country in which one out of four people died from a civil and global war that set brother against brother and sister against sister. A division that continues until 1950 when two American military personnel were given the task of drawing a line, arbitrarily set up 38 parallel, in order to demarcate the territory that would be occupied by the United States. And it is a line that my family still cannot cross to this day. So when I think about why it is that I do this work and I'm so passionate about it, it is to perhaps no wonder that I find myself seeking a solution to both intimate violence and to state violence. And a solution that has a possibility of resolving this violence through repair, reconciliation, and unity rather than the tragedy of endless conflict and division. I was another story to share, and that's a little bit more hopeful. And that is 50 years after the division of Korea in 1950, in the year 2000, there was a small group of women of color in the United States, most of us, who had worked for many years in the anti-violence movement. And we held a conference in Santa Cruz, California called the Color of Violence. We actually held it as an excuse for us to have a meeting so we could get together and see if we wanted to form an organization. We thought maybe 200 people would come. Over 2,000, almost all women of color, actually, when they heard about it, wanted to come to this conference and we were able to let in close to that number. Insight women of color against violence, as we would name ourselves, just days after that conference, created a new social movement space from which women of color in a white dominated US feminist movement were able to find any of our critiques and disappointments from the hallways and bathrooms where we usually gathered at conferences and within our shelters to center what would become four conferences, countless gatherings, dozens of campaigns, local chapters, both articles of movement spaces that not only challenged the prevailing feminist response, as Leigh had talked about, but also brought to our own responses to the intersection of gender and state violence. The emergence of the Insight Women of Color Against Violence now called the Insight Women and Trans People of Color Against Violence came in another important historical juncture. Two years before that conference, in 1998, the organization of critical resistance. Has anybody heard of critical resistance here? OK, so that's something to look up. Also, I had a conference in Oakland, California that brought together about 3,500 current and former prisoners, their families, labor leaders, religious leaders, feminists, and others together to address conditions of mass incarceration in the United States and to strategize ways not only to reform, but to end the prison industrial complex. So while our movements overlapped, we also recognized attention, a kind of an empty void that demarcated the zone between a movement that was defined by the prison abolition on the one hand and our movement of women against gender violence on the other. That zone was identified and mapped in a historic statement that was made between these two organizations called the Critical Resistance Insight Statement on Gender Violence and State Violence. And I just want to read our first few lines of that statement that actually continues on for several pages and is something that you can find on the web. It says this like this, we call social justice movements to develop strategies and analysis that address both state and interpersonal violence, particularly violence against women. That section ends with this statement that to live violence free lives, we must develop holistic strategies for addressing violence that speak to the intersection of all forms of oppression. So I think many of the themes that have been raised over and over again today are things that we consider very important. This is a statement that came out in 2001. Now we find ourselves 15 years later. What we found is that people that were advocating for prison reform or prison abolition did not always address violence that the state had committed against women nor had they necessarily addressed the importance of also looking at violence against women domestic and sexual violence. That those were often omitted in their activist work. At the same time, these two movements said, well, the work that had been done by women challenging violence against women often did not look at criminalization as an issue but sometimes contributed to it. So this was a huge area of worry and one that really guided our work for the next 15 years to this day. I formed the base for the development of an intersectional political analysis. It became a political education tool. So you see, this is hard to read, but this is one of the posters that we created that had the statement on it. But perhaps more importantly, we developed not only principles but also practices, months and stories of anti-violent strategies that we created as alternatives to criminalization. We call it that, we call it various things, community-based responses to violence, community accountability strategies. And in more recent years, people have started to embrace the terms restorative justice to a certain extent but even more so the terms transformative justice. For some of you, this may be unfamiliar terms, some of you may have heard about it but wonder about its meanings. I want to spend a little bit of time talking about that. I also want to show you that this is a movement that actually has quite a few players. So in, you just see this as a backdrop but I just want to let you know that there are many organizations in the United States but also internationally, internationally that have been part of this move together to address both state violence and interpersonal and gender violence. Transformative justice as a concept is one that still remains fairly bound within a social justice community which tends to circulate more through word of mouth and scenes, small gatherings that you may have not had the benefit of attending. And while there may be contending definitions, I'd say there are some key aspects of what we would consider transformative justice. They're not unlike many things that people have raised already and I myself believe that we shouldn't have the false binary between restorative versus transformative justice so that we may consider why it is that some people have chosen to say them to use the term transformative justice as opposed to the restorative justice. One of these factors may be that it relies on solutions by and for those most affected by violence, again, not unlike things that have been said today. I'm not only gender violence in this case but also forms of structural and state violence that transformative justice tends to understand and hold critically important the recognition that violence is not just an individual act but it is a collective act and it is also that rests in conditions of structural violence and therefore must be addressed in our transformative responses to violence. Third, we need to develop responses outside of an autonomous to the criminal justice system and I would say this often includes child welfare systems. Therefore our strategies need to address the individual incidents of harm but within the context of structural conditions of power and privilege. Two, our strategies must not uphold the continued expertise of a slight group of individuals and organizations but rather must work to build the skills and capacity among everyday people and with communities most affected by violence. In short, we look towards the prioritization of de-professionalization. And third, this means that we must, that we need to create strategies that are always relevant to and accessible to and in the context of the US these terms are relevant. Communities of color, including immigrant and LGBTQ communities. And we need to move towards these communities not just the location of participation but also leadership. Um, I have to see a little bit of slack. Okay, um, in making a decision here it's a little bit of a wall. Why should I just stop? No, why should I continue a little bit more? I'm gonna continue a little bit more. Oh no, I think she's gonna ring a bell. Okay, um, so I want to continue, I'm just gonna give a little bit further. In 2004 a strategy organization called Creative Interventions that created a pilot program for community-based responses to domestic violence and sexual violence that did not rely on the criminal justice system nor conventional direct services. We have a website that has our extremely accessible 600 page toolkit. And I will be looking forward to collaborating with you all to make that much more accessible in short. So I would say that there are currently cracks in what we call the cursoral feminist edifice and without a doubt at least in the United States this has not only happened in the name of women and communities of color but has absolutely been the leadership of women of color that has made this current turn towards restorative and transformative justice a legitimate possibility. Thank you.