Research as resistance: operationalizing epistemic justice in domestic, family, and sexual violence research with criminalized women who use drugs

Background Epistemic justice requires that people hold meaningful authority over knowledge that concerns them. For criminalized women who use drugs, this authority is denied: overlapping credibility deficits across drug use, criminalization, and domestic, family, and sexual violence (DFSV) domains render their knowledge illegitimate, their accounts not credible, and their definitions of the problem absent from research. Existing lived experience frameworks have not extended to this population; involvement remains consultative rather than authoritative, reproducing the hierarchies such frameworks aim to disrupt.Methods This paper draws on We Keep Us Safe, a co-designed research project led by criminalized women with lived experience of DFSV and drug use. Drawing on interviews (n = 21) and workshops (n = 3) with criminalized women and men who use drugs, it reflexively accounts for the project’s design, governance, and conduct.Results Five lessons emerge: credibility deficits operate as research design problems; shifting decision rights to lived experience researchers transforms what research can produce; risk governance embedded in research structures can reproduce harm; co-design generates analysis and knowledge inaccessible through conventional methods; and lived experience leadership carries costs institutions rarely resource.Conclusion This paper offers a methodology through which DFSV research can move beyond tokenistic inclusion toward genuine epistemic authority.