Confronting Police Sexual Violence, Envisioning Collective Healing: Methodological Contributions of a Survivor-Centered, Community-Based Study

This article details the methodological contributions of a five-year, mixed-method, community-based participatory action research study on police sexual violence (PSV) in New York City—the first of its kind conducted outside of prisons and jails in the city with the nation’s largest police force. In partnership with a coalition of 200 community-based organizations, this study draws from two virtual town halls, a citywide survey of 3778 New Yorkers, and 37 in-depth interviews with survivors of PSV to generate three key theoretical contributions. First, the data produce a critically expanded redefinition of PSV as a vast continuum of sexually aggressive officer behaviors, including legally sanctioned acts within everyday policing, that broaden our understanding of sexual violence, police violence, and state power at large. Second, centering survivor-led analyses reveals the cumulative psychosocial and material impacts of PSV across individual lives and entire communities, theorized as a form of state betrayal that functions as collective terror(ism). Third, survivors reimagine justice not as punitive retribution, but as collective healing requiring embodied, relational, and structural transformation. These contributions demonstrate that community-based, survivor-centered research is not only a more ethical approach to studying state harm, but also a more epistemically accurate way to understand the complexities of invisibilized forms of state and interpersonal violence.