Recently, Pam Bondi justified DOGE’s cuts of essential, lifesaving grants as “wasteful,” specifically naming “listening sessions of individuals with lived experience” as a wasteful expense. While the other Department of Justice funds slashed are equally important, I wanted to take a moment to specifically address the listening sessions since meaningful engagement of people with lived experience is one of my strongest areas of specific expertise.
Who are “individuals with lived experience”?
Put simply, people with lived experience (or PWLE for short) are those who’ve directly experienced an issue that a government agency or nonprofit works to address. In most fields, PWLE can be another way of saying “survivors.”
What are “listening sessions”?
For folks unfamiliar with how victim services are evaluated (which simply means that we assess them to see how well they’re working): Listening sessions mean you meet with people who have directly experienced the issue and current efforts to address it in order to better understand how to make the services better and how to prevent the issue. In human trafficking, for example, this means listening sessions with survivors to learn more about what parts of current efforts are working, what parts are not working well, and how we can help make sure more people who need services can access them.
Why do we need listening sessions?
Survivors are not all the same. Sometimes, the survivors who have access to the ears of people making the decisions do not know or understand the unique needs of survivors who aren’t like them. Listening sessions are a way to value survivors’ voices and hear their needs and experiences.
Who facilitates a listening session?
Usually someone with knowledge of the issue, how to facilitate objectively, and how to communicate with people with trauma backgrounds in less-traumatizing ways.
What happens after a listening session?
Usually, there will be a transcript of a listening session. If not, there will be someone (often even two people) who are there to take thorough notes to make sure nothing is missed. Then people who are trained to notice important themes or patterns will review the transcripts/notes a few times to highlight themes and note how they came up. So, for example, if a listening session had 15 survivors there, and the reviewer notices that 11 of them mentioned not being able to use shelter services, they might flag “inaccessibility of shelter services” as a theme. If they notice that 10 of the 11 are in rural communities, they might flag that there are more challenges with accessing services in rural areas. If they noticed that the rural areas have shelters there, they might then want to dig a little more to find out why these survivors can’t access the shelters that are there. This process of learning, listening, digging deeper, and then repeating to ask the additional questions that have come up, in a cycle, is how we keep improving victim services. It’s how we make sure that we can care for survivors and help them rebuild.
So what does this mean about Pam Bondi?
So when Pam Bondi says funding national listening sessions for people with lived experience is “wasteful,” what she’s ultimately saying is that she doesn’t care what survivors need. She doesn’t care if the DOJ is funding the right things or not. She thinks DOGE knows better than survivors what services and prevention are important. She doesn’t want to improve services for crime victims.
Survivors’ voices are not a “wasteful” or irrelevant luxury.
They are the foundation of any good practice, and meaningful engagement of people with lived experience, to include listening sessions, should be a regular and essential part of all victim services.