CHLP20 Glossary

Accountability 

The ways in which individuals, organizations, and communities hold themselves to their goals and actions, and acknowledge the values and groups to which they are responsible. Accountability requires transparency, and clear processes. True accountability demands not only committing to shaping it but becoming a stakeholder in shared outcomes. From a relational perspective, accountability is not always about getting it right, it’s also about how we respond when we get it wrong. 
[Adapted from Racial Equity Tools Glossary]

Advocacy Through a Lens of Justice

A practice that centers visibility, resources, and decision-making power for individuals, groups, and institutions rooted in communities that have long been extracted from, while never receiving adequate resources. 
[Adapted from Freedom Maps: Activating Legacies of Culture, Art, and Organizing in the U.S. South]

Black Feminisms

A strategic framework and political ideology that explains how oppressive ideologies like white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, ableism, etc are both interconnected and systemic. It provides a blueprint for both individual and collective liberation. Black feminisms encourage Black women to define their own experiences, reclaim their narratives, and assert agency over their bodies, lives, and stories. They also emphasize the importance of centering the needs and experiences of all Black women as a means of growing collective action and solidarity among marginalized groups. Black feminism allows us a strategic framework for fostering networks of support and resistance against these intersecting systems of oppression. 
[Adapted from Black Feminist Future]

Bodily Autonomy

The fundamental right to determine what happens to every aspect of one’s body—including blood, tissue, reproductive material, or other biological matter. This includes the right to decide whether and how one’s body or bodily materials are used in any medical, public health, therapeutic, analytic or other procedure.

Carceral

Anything entangled with or serving to legitimize, systems of punishment and imprisonment. The carceral system includes the policies and institutions the state uses to define crime and impose punishment. Tools of carcerality include imprisonment, isolation, surveillance, and punitive responses when people make mistakes or resist the status quo. Even institutions intended to sustain life—such as schools, hospitals, and workplaces can and often do become carceral when they rely on punishment to control people. 
[Adapted from Abolitionist Futures Glossary]

Criminalization & Stigmatization 

Criminalization is the process by which behaviors or practices are defined as criminal by laws, policies and procedures, making them punishable offenses and reflecting societal judgments about what is “wrong” or “bad.” Criminalization is shaped by bias, prejudice, and oppressive stereotypes. It not only affects the people directly criminalized, but the neighborhoods and communities they come from. This is especially true when health conditions are criminalized, the people living with them also face stigma.

Stigmatization is the labeling of individuals or groups due to their conditions, circumstances, behaviors or characteristics that often lead to discrimination and exclusion. HIV stigma, for example, stems from harmful beliefs about people with HIV and the social prejudice that follows. Criminalization and stigmatization reinforce each other—when a health condition is stigmatized, it often becomes criminalized. And when a person or entire group of people are criminalized, this leads to further stigmatization.

Data Privacy

The right and assurance that individuals can control how their personal information is collected, analyzed, reported, used, and shared.

Directly Impacted People & People with Lived Experience

Those whose lives, livelihoods, bodies, health, homes, or access to essential resources and services are harmed or threatened by laws, policies, practices, or events. This includes the loss or disruption of economic, physical, social, political, cultural, or environmental well-being resulting from systems of power and decision-making.

People with lived experience are those directly affected by social, health, or public health issues—and by the strategies designed to address them. Lived experience is knowledge based on someone’s perspective, personal identities, and history, beyond their professional or educational experience. This knowledge provides vital insight that can inform and improve research, policies, practices, and programs
[Adapted from Office of Human Services Policy]

Disability Justice

A framework that recognizes the interlocking oppressions that disproportionately affect Black, brown, indigenous, LGBTQ+, immigrant, incarcerated, and houseless people living with disabilities, among others. The Disability Justice Movement, along with Disability Studies, centralizes the needs and experiences of people experiencing intersectional oppression.

The Disability Justice Movement, founded by queer disabled women of color, strives for collective liberation. It seeks to eradicate the pathologization, exclusion, control, surveillance, and punishment of people living with disabilities and to construct systems that uphold self-determination and dignity and provide resources and support for all people to thrive. 

Equity & Equality

Equality is evenly distributed tools and assistance whereas inequality is unequal access to opportunities. 

Equity provides custom tools to identify and address inequality. Justice is fixing the system to offer equal access to both tools and opportunities. 
[Adapted from Tony Ruth’s Equity Series]

Humanize 

The act of making laws, policies, practices, and institutions more humane by centering the needs, dignity and well-being of people in how systems are shaped and managed.

Language Justice 

The right of all people to communicate, understand, and be understood in the languages and modalities that feel most authentic and accessible to them. Language justice challenges English dominance and the erasure of Indigenous and signed languages, confronting the colonial and punitive systems that silence and marginalize people through language. “We live in a context where people are discouraged from speaking their native languages, or signing ASL and other forms of sign language. A context where people have been punished, criminalized and discriminated against for doing so, where thousands of Indigenous languages have been forcibly disappeared across the globe. Language injustice perpetuates violence in the ways that it silences, erases, and dehumanizes whole populations of people. Language Justice allows us to disrupt privilege and colonization, challenging English dominance and Western-centered knowledge, communication, and leadership.” 
[Adapted from a summary of the struggle for language justice by Move to End Violence]

Medical Mistrust 

The suspicion or fear of medical and public health systems informed by historical legacies and lived experiences of racism, harm, discrimination, violence, violations of boundaries or consent, queerphobia, and/or misogyny when accessing care or medical treatment.

Power 

The ability or authority to decide what is best for oneself, or others; determine access to resources; and the capacity to exert control. Oppression occurs when power or authority are exercised in unjust, abusive, or controlling ways. Power arrangements are the ways in which access to power and authority vary for people within a shared configuration. Power dynamics describe how power affects relationships between two or more people.

Punitive 

Relating to punishment or the infliction of suffering in response to perceived transgression, harm, or wrongdoing. While imprisonment is one aspect of the punitive state, laws, policies, and practices can also be punitive. For example, welfare policies use sanctions to enforce compliance, immigration policies approve or deny status on the basis of ‘good character’ tests, and schools use tactics of isolation to train children to obey. Punitiveness also shows up in social settings when people respond to conflicts with tactics like shunning, public shaming, and attempting to destroy someone’s livelihood and support networks, replicating binary ideas of “good” and “bad” that render some people disposable.
[Adapted from Abolitionist Futures Glossary]

Reform/Repeal/Abolish 

To reform a law or policy means advocating for and carrying out changes that improve justice or efficiency within existing laws or systems.

To repeal means to remove or reverse a law or policy by either replacing the law with an updated, amended version; or a repeal without replacement which abolishes it altogether.

To abolish a law or policy means to formally and officially end a law or policy, making it no longer valid or binding. This can be done through various means, including a legislative appeal, court decision, or constitutional amendment. Repealing a law or policy without replacement is the same as abolishing a law or policy. 

Reproductive Justice

The human right to control one’s body, including sexuality, gender, work, and reproduction. That right can only be achieved when all women, girls, and people with female reproductive organs have the complete economic, social, and political power and resources to make healthy decisions about their bodies, families, and communities in all areas of their lives. The Reproductive Justice movement, was founded in 1994 when a group of Black women gathered in Chicago after having participated in international and national conferences. They shared frustration about the global reproductive health status of Black women and the limitations of a privacy-based “pro-choice” movement when women of color and low-income women had minimal choices. The Founding Mothers of the Reproductive Justice movement determined the necessity of adopting a human rights framework that addresses issues of bodily autonomy with reproductive decision-making. 
[Adapted from In Our Own Voice: National Black Women’s Reproductive Justice Agenda]

Sex Work Discrimination

The removal of criminal penalties for buying and selling sexual services, specifically those categorized as prostitution. Sex work includes the entire field of sexual services, both legal and illegal, including pornography, exotic dancing, fetish work, web-based work, and prostitution. Prostitution is the kind of sex work most often criminalized, and it is the direct, in-person exchange of sex for money or other things of value. Criminalization makes all sex workers more vulnerable to violence and less likely to report it. It prevents sex workers from accessing healthcare and other critical services, feeds our mass incarceration system, and further marginalizes some of society’s most vulnerable groups, such as Black trans women and immigrants. Decriminalization is not the same as legalization, it removes criminal penalties entirely while legalization allows the state to regulate sex work under specific conditions. 
[Adapted from Decriminalize Sex Work]

Shadow Prisons

Secure facilities in which people convicted of sex offenses are indefinitely detained in state custody beyond the terms of their prison sentences because they are alleged to be affected by a poorly defined “mental abnormality” that predisposes them to commit a hypothetical future crime.

State-Sanctioned Violence

The use of force, coercion, and denial of access to human needs by a government or state against its own people to enforce policies and suppress dissent. It can manifest in various forms, including police brutality, military actions, discriminatory practices, and unjust living conditions. The people who bear the brunt of state-sanctioned violence are those who experience multiple forms of oppression, including people who are Black, brown, trans, queer, women, disabled, undocumented, unhoused, drug users, sex workers, currently or formerly incarcerated, and/or are living with stigmatized health conditions.

Transformative Justice 

A political framework that actively resists punishment and alienation as responses to conflict, harm, abuse, or violence. As a political practice, it seeks to address and confront oppression on all levels and treats this concept as an integral part of building accountability and promoting healing. 
[Adapted from Transform Harm and Philly Stands Up!]