The Privilege and Power of Choice

In mid-January of 2017, I was leaving a community-based support group for families of homicide victims in a Southwest Side community of Chicago. I was carrying my three-month-old daughter Belén and accompanied by two mothers in the group who needed a ride home. As I placed Belén in her car seat, multiple gunshots rang out less than ten yards from our car. I instinctively laid my body over my daughter’s car seat; one mother crawled under our minivan, while the other huddled on the floor of the car. We heard shouting, the squeal of car tires, and remained frozen for several minutes. Another group member came running to our car to make sure everyone was okay—thankfully nobody had been harmed in the incident. The shooting was directed at a group of young people who were leaving the same facility where we had just finished our group. Both of the mothers in my car were visibly shaken; they had lost sons to violence and were retriggered. One of them needed an ambulance just a few hours later due to a panic attack and difficulty breathing.

I drove 15 minutes further southwest to my quiet, suburban home and shared what happened with my husband. Four months earlier, I had been leaving a separate support group for families of homicide victims when I drove in between a shootout occurring on Chicago Avenue at 8:00 p.m. on a Wednesday night. These two incidents, and the escalating community violence observed during the prior year, made me question my motives and commitment, but also my threshold to the work I do in violence prevention and community safety. My husband understood my internal dilemma; he is also a social worker in violence prevention and works in similar neighborhoods. In fact, we started community-based support groups for families of homicide victims starting in 2009, and we co-facilitate a group on Friday evenings. Each of our six (soon to be seven) children spent the first year of their life accompanying me to the group, as well.

On this evening in January of 2017, my husband asked me, “Do you want to keep doing this?”

My first thought was that I have a choice, whereas the families I work with do not. I have the privilege of choice to leave the communities where I work and drive to a safe, stable home. I have the privilege to choose where I work and whether or not I continue to facilitate the group. Not only do I have the privilege of choice, but I am also not carrying my own trauma history into the community work I’m involved in. I have never been involved in the streets, in the criminal justice system, or suffered traumatic loss of a family member due to violence. The majority of my coworkers over the past decade carry this burden with them; every encounter with community violence that they experience as part of their professional role can become a reminder of a past experience. The past can resurface and become an ever-present reminder of previous suffering that is mirrored in the community members they interact with. This one incident, in addition to several dozen others, is not even worthy of comparison to the daily exposure to violence that residents of Chicago’s South and West sides regularly experience.

The privilege of choice is one of the reasons why I have maintained a commitment to advocating on behalf of justice-involved persons, as well as an engagement with system stakeholders.

The privilege of choice is one of the reasons why I have maintained a commitment to advocating on behalf of justice-involved persons, as well as an engagement with system stakeholders. I have worked with the Chicago Police Department, Illinois Department of Corrections, Adult Probation Department of Cook County, and the Illinois Attorney General’s Office. My work has been centered around decarceration efforts informed by the experiences of system survivors as well as survivors of violent crimes. But does my work matter at all? Is there a sense of self-importance embedded in my commitment to reform, and my ability to be a good ally and advocate on behalf of people and communities most impacted by violence?

Most likely, yes. In the field of community violence prevention, we may observe more setbacks than successes, we may attend more funerals than graduations. For every bullet we think we stop, there are five more flying in another direction. This could mean that our advocacy goals are limited in their creative vision, or that we are working to reform a system that was never meant to accomplish the rehabilitation and safety goals that social workers value. There are occasions, however, where I have felt that my position as a social worker has been actualized to promote the safety and justice reforms that are meaningful to the families and communities I have worked with. While acknowledging the most likely over-inflated sense of self-importance in my career, I remain committed to continual learning and growth with an accountability network based in the communities I work in.

Over the past few years, I have been able to invite families who have lost children to violence into various advocacy spaces to share their experiences and make recommendations on local and state policies impacting crime survivors. Through collaboration with the Alliance for Safety and Justice (a national advocacy organization) and the Illinois Attorney General’s Office, their recommendations were incorporated into policy revisions that were passed in a Criminal Justice Omnibus Bill by the Illinois Legislature in January of 2021. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker signed these revisions into law on February 22, 2021 with several key revisions to Crime Victims Compensation that would directly impact families who are affected by community violence. Over the last 15 years of working with families affected by violence, I met parents who were forced to cremate their children due to the inability to pay for a funeral or burial plot. I knew families who opted for homelessness, or who urgently left their homes and lived in their cars, out of fear of violent retaliation for having cooperated with a police investigation. I knew community members living with permanently disfigured faces or limbs due to community violence who had to forego medical treatment because they did not have adequate coverage and could not be reimbursed for out-of-pocket expenses. I had encountered children of homicide victims who were unable to access counseling because their deceased parent was on probation or parole at the time of the incident.

While it may seem to be a minor accomplishment, supporting the advocacy of surviving families and witnessing the fruit of their labors illustrates a second reason why I remain committed to justice reform work. Social workers are uniquely positioned to create access and elevate the voices and experiences of system survivors, and to advance more just policies that address the root causes of violence. Not to “be the voice of the voiceless”, but rather to hand them the mic. I refuse to speak on behalf of people who have their own stories to tell, and who may begin to heal through telling those stories. I remain committed to providing access and audience to these stories in spaces where they need to be heard.

In the field of community violence prevention, we may observe more setbacks than successes, we may attend more funerals than graduations. For every bullet we think we stop, there are five more flying in another direction. This could mean that our advocacy goals are limited in their creative vision, or that we are working to reform a system that was never meant to accomplish the rehabilitation and safety goals that social workers value.

There is tremendous privilege and power in choice. The power lays in how choices are constructed and who is empowered to make a choice. If incarcerated men and women told social workers they should disrupt their collaboration with correctional systems; if men, women, and children passing through criminal courts told advocates to please leave the courtroom and take their advocacy efforts elsewhere; if detainees held in police custody requested that social workers please leave the station; we should listen. However, when social workers define responses without the perspectives of those who are most impacted, we may be perpetuating the same harm we are criticizing; imposing our perception of what we think is best upon others.

Two weeks after the incident in 2017, I had again been picking up families in our minivan to bring them to the support group. When we checked in, I asked them about their reactions to the shooting that had occurred, their broader safety concerns as they navigated the community, and if the support group helped at all in managing these stressors. Each family shared the same basic response: this group is a lifeline for me that brought me out of isolation after losing my child. It then occurred to me that, while the support group may not “resolve” their issues related to loss or stop shootings in their neighborhood, it facilitated an essential connection among people with a shared experience that sustained them at the darkest time in their lives.

So, to answer the question my husband had raised earlier: “Do you want to keep doing this?”

Yes.