Future Program Areas
Future priority areas include:
Restorative Justice for Sexual Harm
Expand and transform options for responding to and reporting sexual harm, including establishing access to voluntary restorative justice processes on college campuses. We believe survivors hold wisdom and knowledge to make choices that benefit their healing and their communities, and that more options than existing reporting options are needed -- to support healing, value and enable accountability, and prevent repeat harm. CIJ holds expertise on policy, legal, and systems changes needed so that restorative and alternative justice processes can be offered in Title IX settings.
Inclusive Families / Relationship Structures
Develop legal rights and greater cultural understanding to support people in a variety of consensual family and relationship structures, including polyamory, platonic partnerships, and other structures. People’s families and relationships take many shapes today; yet family law is only beginning to develop to support, recognize, see, validate and extend rights to people whose families are built on connections of care beyond those represented most commonly today. CIJ is engaging in research to prepare for innovative legislative advocacy and for creating education/multimedia offerings to extend rights and increase equity and inclusion supporting people in a variety of family and relationship structures.
Past CIJ impact areas have included:
Trauma-Informed Education
CIJ believes there is an urgent need to build more understanding of trauma in our culture, and to create trauma-informed systems and classrooms -- supporting the more than 70% of adults who have experienced trauma, 20% of whom go on to develop posttraumatic stress disorder. In 2019, CIJ’s leadership wrote an investigative op-ed and engaged in communication with stakeholders that led Stanford Graduate School of Business to reform its most popular elective course of forty years, taken by over 90% of the business school student body, to develop more trauma informed teaching practices and course policies. As a result of our research and advocacy, experts at Stanford in trauma were newly consulted in the course’s program design, and all five offices at Stanford that deal with sexual assault were engaged in a dedicated process to improve the course - overseen by Stanford’s highest-up equity & inclusion representative (who reports to Stanford’s President). CIJ instigated change that helped Stanford build win-win solutions benefiting students, educators, campus culture, and the business school’s culture of innovation at large.