Two of the members of our Survivor Advisory Board — Monique Jordan and Natyasha Demery — are serving life sentences for defending themselves from abusive partners. They were convicted in Cobb County, and are petitioning for resentencing under the Georgia Survivor Justice Act. Both have been incarcerated for nearly 20 years. Help us bring them home so they can reunite with their families and experience freedom again.
Read their storiesGeorgia Survivor Defense Project
Surviving violence
should not be a crime.
We are a survivor-led advocacy project working to free incarcerated survivors of gender-based violence, support their re-entry when they come home, and end the criminalization of survival in Georgia.
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The Issue
In Georgia and across the country, thousands of people are serving extreme prison sentences for actions they took to survive abuse or gender-based violence.
Survivors are criminalized for:
Self-defense
Defending themselves or a third party against violence from an abusive partner.
Coercion & control
Being coerced into committing a crime by their abuser, or charged with "failure to protect" a child from an abusive partner.
Poverty
Engaging in survival crimes of poverty due to conditions created by abuse, or facing homelessness while fleeing violence.
What happens in court:
Survivors are disbelieved and disregarded in the legal system. Evidence of abuse is ruled inadmissible, lost by police, or simply overlooked or downplayed. Survivors are portrayed as aggressors, and prosecutors who do not understand the dynamics of intimate partner violence argue the abuse was a "two-way street."
Who is most vulnerable:
Criminalization falls hardest on survivors from communities that do not have good relationships with police, survivors who are financially dependent on their partners, survivors with no safe place to escape to, immigrant survivors who lack citizenship status, and survivors who are Black, brown, queer, and trans — in relationships that do not match stereotypical definitions of victims as cisgender white women abused by male partners.
A new opportunity for survivors to come home.
In May 2025, Georgia enacted the Georgia Survivor Justice Act with near-unanimous, bipartisan support in the General Assembly, won by a coalition of survivors, families, and advocates across the state. The law allows survivors of gender-based violence to bring up their history of abuse in court when relevant to their alleged crime — both at the pre-trial stage, to mount a more complete affirmative defense or seek a lesser sentence, and in the post-conviction stage, so that currently incarcerated survivors can petition to have their sentences reduced.
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Two incarcerated survivors are fighting for freedomafter twenty years behind bars.
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