Redefining Safety and Harm For A New Generation

The Abolish Patriarchal Violence (APV) Study is a national multi-method research project of Black people’s experiences with both violence and safety in their homes, at work, and in their communities. This project began as a 100-year visioning exercise with the goal that in five generations from now, if you were to ask a Black child what sexual violence is, they wouldn’t understand the concept because it would have been eradicated. Led by a team of Black Feminist organizers at M4BL and researchers at GenForward, we are committed to understanding how Black people keep themselves and each other safe from patriarchal violence.

In June 2025, three of our team members within the APV project facilitated a focus group with select attendees at the Black Feminist Future conference in New Orleans, Louisiana. The informal, preliminary focus group featured five participants who self-selected into the study based on their attendance at the largest Black Feminist conference in the country. We selected this conference so that we could hear directly from movement organizers, nonprofit coordinators, and community practitioners with first-hand experience addressing and building solutions to eradicate patriarchal violence in their own networks.

Our study centers on abolition, gendered harm and violence, and the ways that Black community members define, seek out, and maintain safety on their own terms. Going into the focus group, we had some core questions: What does it mean to name patriarchal violence? Who are the perpetrators of this violence? How do we all contribute to a culture of gendered violence that targets the most vulnerable among us? What does safety mean for Black people? These are just a few of the animating questions that underlie our current research partnership with the Movement 4 Black Lives. Our initial focus group showed that safety, violence, harm, and consent mean very different things for Black people who are situated at differing orientations to power. What we found in our discussion both surprised and concerned us. 

Several important themes emerged in our conversation. Here I will explore three: patriarchal violence within families, the lack of knowledge and socialization around consent for young women, femmes, and gender expansive people, and lack of resources for men who experience or perpetrate sexual violence and gendered harm. 

First, the prevalence of patriarchal violence within families seemed to be common for most women, femmes, and gender expansive people in attendance. When describing her fears of male community members, one participant shared, “That fear though, that fear for me came from growing up in a household where my father was extremely violent. And I think that’s where that fear [comes from] to this day.” Participants shared that male family members were often permitted to be more aggressive, touchy, and forward with women, femmes, and gender expansive people in their communities. Meanwhile, they were often expected to be small, quiet, and reserved. One participant shared, “I’m talking about, and forgive me if this triggers anybody, family members. It was always on me to dress a certain way. To walk a certain way, to cover up. It wasn’t ever on them. And even when it was, they were still invited back into the house…somehow they could still come back to the cook outs. I just had to stay away from them. It wasn’t their responsibility to behave better. And even when I was abused, violently abused, the detectives that were over my case, you know how you could just see that they don’t give a fuck.” This participant’s comments illustrate the ways that gendered harm and sexual violence are frequently systematized within families themselves. This is likely a contributing factor to Black women’s increased risks of sexual assault when compared to other women excluding Indigenous women. In fact, 1 in 5 Black women are estimated to experience sexual assault over their lifetimes. In our focus group, every woman expressed some experience with this harm and violence.

Second, a critical theme which emerged during our conversation was that the women and gender expansive people we spoke with felt that they were never properly educated on what consent means and how to engage in healthy sexual practices. One attendee said, “no one told me that until I was [in] my mid-to-late twenties that I could say ‘no’, or I could ask questions.” This participant explained that it wasn’t her parents or family who taught her about consent. Rather, it was other women and femmes who equipped her with language and tactics to understand her own interest in sexual activity. She said, “that was the first time I started hearing people being like, ‘oh, you can have these conversations very explicitly early on.’ It doesn’t have to be a taboo conversation to have, which is why when we talk about sex that I can’t ask you… that’s how I learned about it. Then it started just being like a regular practice for me because I got told by other femmes¹ and other women that like, you can do this.” Another participant echoed these experiences sharing, “I come from a very different generation. So, I was just told, I guess as a teenager, like 17, 18, don’t go to a man’s house unless that’s what you want to do, don’t invite him over. If that’s not what you want to do. Don’t, you know, be ‘stranger danger’. Don’t get into a car. I never knew that you could say ‘no’, you know, I never knew that you could say ‘no’. When I did say ‘no’, I was always scared, always scared.” This is a critical revelation from many young women and gender expansive people who have not been socialized to believe that they can say ‘no’ or change their minds about sexual activity.² Not only that, patriarchal culture frequently privileges men and masculine-of-center people in romance and sex. By empowering women, femmes, and gender expansive people to understand their rights to their own bodies, communities may assist in preventing unwanted sexual and gendered harm and violence.

Third, what was unique about our initial focus group was that it included women, femmes, and gender expansive people who work in movement spaces and nonprofits dedicated to ending carceral violence and anti-Black structural racism. As such, these women and gender expansive people often find themselves advocating for men and boys who have also caused gendered and patriarchal harm. One participant shared that her best friend had lost an infant child to the abuses of her child’s father. But, she didn’t want others to know about the harm she had faced in her own home. In response, the participants stated, “Sometimes the folks, the person who is being abused will be mad at you for it. That’s right. You for it. And I’ll take it. I’ll take it. That’s right. Yeah. Be mad. Be mad friend. I’d rather you be mad and alive.” Several participants shared that they often feel obligated to step in and advocate on behalf of other women, femmes, and gender expansive people who are facing abuse and harm at the hands of men within their communities. A participant shared, “What the fuck do you do? How do you move in the world as a feminist? Move in the world as an abolitionist and all those things when you got your own family members being abusive, being harmful, being rude and disrespectful and abusing women and abusing their children? It makes me feel like a hypocrite. I don’t know what to do often, but pray.” The desperation and exasperation focus group attendees expressed represents a gap within Black communities that must be filled by community-based resources, social workers, and other educational tools about gendered and patriarchal violence. It is our hope that this study will help frame out new possibilities for what those resources might look like in the future.

Overall, these findings suggest that our work on the Abolish Patriarchal Violence (APV) project is both necessary and imperative. This research takes seriously the ways that we talk about, engage in, and normalize sexual behaviors that, too often, put vulnerable community members at risk. In the coming months, our quantitative and qualitative work will continue to illuminate the contours of patriarchal violence and gendered harm within Black communities. It is our hope that, through this work, we cannot only elevate those who are most vulnerable but build solutions for a radically different world where they are safe and protected.

¹ “Femme” refers to people of all genders who express their gender in traditionally feminine ways.

² See here: Article Source