Fifth session of the Permanent Forum on People of African Descent

Side Event Proposal for Fifth Session of the UN PFPAD



Title: Seeking Redress for State Violence Against Black Women and Girls

Date:Friday 17 April from 12:45 to 13:45 pm

Co-sponsors: Solitude International Consortium, Aging People in Prison Human Rights Campaign, Geneva Graduate Institute Afrique Students Association and Feminist Collective, Malcolm X Center for Self-Determination, Women’s Council.


Language: English
Description: Across the diaspora and through the centuries, state violence against women and girls of African descent has operated as a core instrument of colonial power. Under regimes of enslavement and mass incarceration, state violence against Black women and girls has produced massive direct and indirect harms: police violence, family separation, economic deprivation, intergenerational dispossession, and corrosive impacts on health and life expectancy. The event will connect these continuities to the imperative for transitional justice for impacted Black women and girls across the African diaspora, focusing on mechanisms for truth-telling and documentation, accountability, guarantees of non-repetition, and economic reparations.

Location: Palais du Nations, Room III, building A

Lead Organizer: Tomiko Shine, [email protected] (permission granted)
 
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Seeking Redress for State Violence Against Black Women and Girls
Detailed Side Event Plan 
Objectives
Document continuity in gendered anti-Black state violence from slavery to contemporary mass incarceration, including school pushout, adultification, ultra-punishment of women and girls, and ripple effects in families and communities.
Examine avenues for legal and political accountability in a constrained and shifting landscape, particularly remaining international pathways in light of US disengagement.
Advance economic redress: reparative policy designs that center experiences of Black women and girls and address intergenerational harm.

Working Agenda

Welcome and framing (10 min) – Tomiko
Panel discussion (25 min) 

• Legacies of gendered state violence against women and girls of African descent

How has state violence against Black women and girls functioned historically as a tool of colonial power, and how does that logic persist today?

 

• Transitional justice pathways: truth, accountability, non-repetition

What transitional justice strategies are plausible across the diaspora (including in settler colonial nations like the US)? 

What role can UN mechanisms or other international solidarity action play?
 

• Economic accountability + material redress

What does it look like to center women and girls of African descent in claims for material redress for state violence?

Facilitated Q&A (20 min) – Tomiko