Healing Justice
By Jackie Shaw. Illustration by Bella Harter.
Feminist activists across the world work hard for women’s rights and safety. But why are so many of us exhausted and distressed, and why do our movements often descend into infighting or fall apart?
Inequality is harmful. People who are discriminated against experience physical, emotional and social effects, which worsen their long-term health and well-being. These are collective traumas. Suffering is experienced in similar ways across communities and social groups living with historical oppression or the injustice of capitalism. One-to-one therapy cannot treat these collective wounds. It is inaccessible for many due to cost, but crucially, individual treatment makes healing a personal responsibility without tackling the social and political sources.
Healing Justice is a relatively new political organising strategy which aims to actively address these harmful effects through communal or group healing processes. Whilst collective healing depends on context, collaborations with feminist activists and healers from 10 African countries provide insight into what it might involve in practice.
The urgent need within feminist movements
Feminists often become activists following their own traumas, such as rape or abuse, as well as prejudice due to racism, their class, gender, sexuality, or disability. They also risk injury when defending their rights, especially in countries facing increasing repression. For example, in Senegal, where there is growing anti-LGBTQI+ speech from religious leaders, men threatened to burn down Yande’s house because she is a proud lesbian. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, where sexual violence is a weapon of war, Beatrice told us that feminist activists were forced to stop running healing sessions due to rape threats. Dembe explained how intergenerational trauma was generated after women were kidnapped during Uganda’s conflicts. Children born in captivity are often rejected by their communities, perpetuating bitterness and anger.
Activism can unintentionally intensify collective traumas. Many feminists report continual emotional distress, being re-traumatised while supporting others, and extreme burnout:
“I was left burnt out completely, not having the capacity to listen to another story of an abused woman….” (Feminist activist, South Africa)
We also found that collective trauma was spread and intensified in movements due to overwork cultures, where personal strength and self-exploitation for the cause were overvalued. In addition, harmful relationships within and between feminist organisations were highlighted in all the African countries.
“The movement is full of a lot of broken people, and sometimes this leads to a lot of toxicity in that space.” (Queer activist, South Africa)
These factors make feminist organising unsustainable. This is why collective healing is being prioritised as an essential component of activism in many places.
Healing Justice is a movement-led approach to building inclusive and sustainable solidarity. It emerged as a political organising strategy in the Southern USA and became more widely known through use by Black Lives Matter. However, it is rooted in black feminist, queer and indigenous radical traditions. For example, in the 1970s, black, lesbian and socialist women in Boston wrote the ‘Combahee’ statement, calling for feminist movements to prioritise collective care to enable struggles to continue. Importantly, Healing Justice is a non-carceral, abolitionist approach. Feminist movements globaly are suggesting that collective healing processes are a form of political action, and should be part of movement-building from within.
Collective healing processes
African feminists are using five types of practice for collective healing:
1) Re-energising and group bonding practices:
It’s important to say that collective healing can often happen through traditional collective action. Feminist activists reported being sustained through solidarity and elated and empowered through protesting together. Clearly, enjoyable organising practices are central to movement-building. But creating space to relax, rejuvenate and have fun together is also political because it resists the capitalist, ableist focus on productivity over collective well-being. In Senegal, activists have taken turns hosting parties to celebrate and let off steam, and in Kenya, undemanding activities like walking or hanging out together built positive connections.
2) Verbal exchange:
In all settings, feminists wanted space to safely express and process emotions together (e.g. anger and grief). Sharing individual experiences within a group is a foundational collective healing practice. Examples include non-judgmental story circles or cathartic storytelling. However, there is a strong argument for combining body-centred practices with communicative ones, because trauma symptoms are stored in the body and can't be healed by talk alone.
3) Body-centred practices:
Trauma can involve disconnecting from bodily memories. Expressive practices such as painting, modelling, or drama all enable people to access blocked experiences. African collective healing often uses creative approaches for emotional processing. Rhythmic activities such as communal dancing, drumming, and chanting are another example, because they bring people back into their bodies and connect them with each other to heal social fragmentation.
“Dance has an impact neurologically […] Our grandparents may not have been to school, but that is something that they know.” (Healer, South Africa)
4) Indigenous healing and spiritual-ritual practices:
Indigenous healing practices are also being used by African feminists as they try to connect body, mind and spirit. Reviving them is a political response to the colonial destruction of traditional approaches to building collective resilience and resistance. Feminist activists told us about spiritual and symbolic practices, such as the Senegalese communal ndeup rituals in which whole communities participate for collective healing. Rituals are also applied to generate meaning and bond activists during collective actions.
5) Awareness-raising and power-shifting practices:
The political orientation to healing means that awareness-raising practices should follow group story-work or creative activities.
“It is not that we would only be doing head work…... But, it is also as dangerous to only do heart work…. crying together without then elevating it into the processing and analysis.” (Feminist activist, South Africa)
Critical discussion in relation to history and politics is thus a key aspect of collective healing processes.
“I saw so… much of myself in many people’s stories. I realised this thing is systemic, this thing is pervasive, this thing is everywhere.” (Feminist activist, South Africa)
Building awareness of the structural roots of shared suffering can build solidarity and prompt action. Incorporating visual and performance approaches like posters, banners, participatory video, or community drama can also increase power. However, we found that power-shifting facilitation of group dynamics, and enabling difficult conversations across differences are also crucial to fostering genuinely inclusive movements.
Clearly, collective healing for feminist activism is not the same as healing in the commercial ‘wellness’ industry, with its expensive products and private therapy. Collective healing is anticipated to involve a diverse range of holistic healing and political organising practices. However, we concluded that weaving together these five elements would be most effective in transforming and strengthening feminist movement-building.
Now is the time for healing justice through collective healing.
The world faces many crises, including climate breakdown, escalating inequalities, armed conflicts, displacement, and social-media-fuelled division. Effective responses are urgently required to counter the exhaustion, despondency, social disconnection, and fear about the future that many feel.
Healing Justice can nurture resilient social movements. Collective healing activities are being organised at feminist events, like AWID Rising Together, a recent international conference for women’s rights, and allied gender, LGBTQI+ and disability justice movements.
I believe that collective healing needs to be approached as a process, not a one-off occurrence. This requires fundamental changes in movement financing beyond short-term project support.
Jackie Shaw is a Professor at the Institute of Development Studies. She collaborates with marginalised groups to build inclusion and community-led change processes using participatory, visual and feminist approaches.
Examples, quotes and ideas in this article are drawn from collaborations between the Institute of Development Studies, Urgent Action Fund-Africa and the Feminist Republik, a pan-African support platform. All names are pseudonyms.
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