ReAct, Respect in Action, is a youth education violence prevention group. All of the workshops, groups and discussions we facilitate with young people, we do to listen to and validate the experiences of violence youth have had and we do so with the hope of preventing future violence. But over the past couple of years the ReAct team has started asking the question: what happens after violence? While continuing with the goal of prevention, we have also made more space in our program and workshops to discuss what young people can do when they survive violence. We’ve created new materials and workshops that focus on care, supporting friends, and healing justice – a kind of justice that isn’t about punishment, but about responsibility, community involvement and transformation. We’ve asked other young people what these ideas mean to them and have been told that the work of healing ourselves and our communities is powerful and much-needed.
Recently, the ReAct team was blown away by The Interrupters, a documentary about youth workers in Chicago doing on-the-ground violence-intervention work. If there ever was a picture of “frontline youth work” in the dictionary, this team would be it. The interrupters step in - I mean right into it – breaking up fights, making speeches at funerals about ending the violence (“cease the fire”), stopping people from going after revenge, supporting mothers and families when they lose someone to violence, and physically staying with people so they stay safe (“the violence interrupters have one goal in mind: save a life”).
