As the only statewide membership sexual and domestic violence coalition in Massachusetts, Jane Doe Inc. (JDI) has a unique role in working to promote the safety, liberty, and dignity of victims and survivors. Drawing from the experiences of our members and our relationships with other partners, JDI works to:

Create social change by addressing the root causes of sexual and domestic violence and by promoting safety, justice, and healing for survivors,
Advocate for responsive public policy, promote collaboration, and raise public awareness,
Provide support to the Coalition’s members that provide comprehensive prevention and intervention services,
Make an impact on public opinion concerning the issue of sexual and domestic violence.
Achieving our goals involves working on two tracks to both prevent and respond to violence. On the more practical level, we provide trainings, networking opportunities, materials, organizing campaigns, and leadership on policy and systems change. On the other more conceptual level, we incubate ideas and frameworks to help keep the movement to address and end sexual and domestic violence moving forward. Ultimately, our work aims to support the independence, human rights, and dignity of victims and survivors everywhere.
We invite anyone and everyone to join us in taking a stand against sexual and domestic violence and finding ways to make a difference for victims and their children.

The What: JDI’s Key Work Areas

Because of the complexity of these issues, our work typically covers one if not all of these four main areas:

Prevention & Social Change

JDI promotes focused, evidence-based efforts to address the causes of this violence and abuse. We believe that we can stop violence against women. Our key prevention initiatives include Men’s Engagement projects like the Massachusetts White Ribbon Day Campaign and a primary prevention initiative to address LGBT Sexual and Domestic Violence.

Public Policy Advocacy

JDI works closely with our member programs and other state coalitions to ensure that administrative policy and practices of systems, state and federal legislation, and budget priorities, reflect the needs and experiences of victims and survivors.

Movement Building: Networking, Support and Training

JDI is a resource for our diverse member programs that provide life-saving and life-changing support and services for victims and survivors of sexual and domestic violence and their families as well as work to make their communities safer. At the core of JDI’s work is our commitment to ensure a strong, vibrant, and flexible movement through networking, support, and training in combination with our advocacy efforts.

Education and Public Awareness

JDI, alongside its member programs, strives to inform and reframe the public’s understanding of these issues. Our work with the media, awareness campaigns, and other public education efforts help make victims safer and increases the likelihood of prevention and social change.

Our priorities grow out of listening to the needs and priorities of our members. For instance, four of our current key initiatives at the Coalition are: re-envisioning the sexual violence movement; domestic violence homicide prevention; economic justice for survivors; and engaging men and boys to prevent violence against women.

Not surprisingly, most of our initiatives do not fall neatly into one of our four work areas. In each we are working to educate a particular audience, increase capacity of our members and others to meet the needs of victims and survivors, affect the relevant policy and practices of various systems, and ultimately, prevent the violence from occurring. Driving everything is our dual focus on promoting prevention and improving responses on the individual, community, institutional, and societal levels.

The How: JDI, its Members, and Other Partners

JDI and its Members

As the statewide coalition, our most important relationship is with our sixty members who are the hubs of expertise in their communities. These programs provide leadership by supporting a network of services and systems that respond to violence, by offering free and confidential services to victims and survivors, and by work to prevent sexual and domestic violence. The members make sure that JDI has its finger on the pulse of the experiences and needs of victims and survivors in communities throughout Massachusetts. As their state coalition, everything we do is designed to support the work of our member programs. Our member programs benefit from the coalition’s offerings of training, networking opportunities, resources, advocacy/organizing efforts, and more.

By working very closely with our member programs, the voices and experiences of victims and survivors and the programs that serve them inspire and inform our work on every level. Bottom line: JDI is effective because we are both member-centric and victim-focused.

JDI’s Relationships and Collaborations

Our relationship with our members is bolstered by our collaborations with many other national, state, and private partners. These relationships help us develop a deep and broad understanding of how the needs of victims and survivors, as well as their children, families, and communities, are changing; what impact policy, systems, practices, and funding changes are having; and what’s needed to create effective and life-saving solutions.

JDI serves as a convener and depends on a wide range of relationships and collaborations in order to do its work. Some of our collaborators are:

60-plus member programs who serve on all of our committees, project groups and board of directors.

Other state coalitions keep us engaged in and informed by a broader movement.

National advocacy and issue organizations work with us and on our behalf to promote national policy and projects.

Policy makers, both at the state and federal level, work with us to develop and monitor legislation, promote budget initiatives, and build processes that deepen the impact of our member programs.

Survivors provide the benefit of their experiences and wisdom so that our system change work is representative and helpful for survivors.

Community leaders work with us in municipal government, schools, police departments, and social services to integrate the issues of sexual and domestic violence through policy, training, and response to victims.

Businesses, large and small, work with us to build workplace responses as well as corporate giving pathways.

Our media partners help build public awareness and through their reporting hold systems accountable to survivors and communities.

These relationships uniquely situate JDI to have an impact and make a difference.

The Why: Behind How We Do What We Do

JDI, like every state sexual and domestic violence coalition, embodies the legacy and analysis of the rape and battered women’s movements. This means JDI works to bridge the diverse needs and priorities of our members while fostering a shared vision for a world free of inequality, oppression, and violence.

By adopting a human rights lens to end gender-based violence here and around the world, JDI looks to the margins to identify those who may be under-represented, overlooked, disenfranchised, or otherwise made invisible in this work. For example, when developing a training for law enforcement or health care providers, we focus on more than just making sure they know the relevant law and how to make referrals. We focus on increasing the capacity of professionals and systems to respond to victims in ways that respect their human rights and dignity. JDI believes that drawing these connections will lead to more viable and sustainable solutions that meet the needs of all sexual and domestic violence victims and survivors.

Updated 01/26/2023