#SomaliMeToo: Somali-American Relationship with Police and Restorative Justice in the Face of Sexual Violence
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Date
2021-05
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The Ohio State University
Abstract
The relationship between immigrant communities and policing institutions has been examined extensively in the geography literature. This project extends this literature to focus on the Somali-American community which exists at a unique intersection of citizenship, class, race, and religion. This paper posits that the relationship between policing institutions and this community has been extensively damaged by post-9/11 surveillance programs, which systematically harassed and served to "other" Somali-Americans. Furthermore, the paper also seeks to explore how this eroded relationship led to the public, Twitter-based reckoning of serial sexual abusers within the community that took hold during the summer of 2020, otherwise known as #SomaliMeToo, and what this event means in a larger movement towards prison and police abolition. The research is conducted using two core methodologies; the first, an auto- ethnography which centers the author's own experience as a Somali-American, and the second, digital observations of Twitter posts. Observations show that the Twitter-based eruption was connected to the lack of trust between the Somali-American community and the police. However, rather than spurring further restorative justice practices via the Internet, community members instead erupted and immediately turned towards private healing and justice. This paper concludes by envisioning new ways Twitter and the Internet more generally can be used as a tool for restorative justice and considers what form these spaces and future work within the community will take, while also recognizing the problematic and constrained nature of digital spaces.
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Keywords
Somali, Sexual Assault, Police, Immigrant