The Beyond Do No Harm Network (BDNH) is a group of Turtle Island-based health care providers, public health workers, impacted community members, advocates, and organizers working across racial, gender, reproductive, migrant and disability justice, drug policy, sex worker, and anti-HIV criminalization movements to address the harm caused when health providers and institutions and public health researchers and institutions facilitate, participate in and support criminalization.
The Beyond Do No Harm Network is a project of Interrupting Criminalization (IC), an initiative led by researchers Mariame Kaba and Andrea J. Ritchie. IC offers political education materials, organizing tools, support skill-building and practice spaces for organizers and movements challenging criminalization and the violence of policing and punishment to build safer communities.
Since 2018, IC has been working at the intersections of abolition and healthcare and developed the Beyond Do No Harm Principles, an invitation for health care providers, public health workers, and researchers to recommit to caring for people by refusing to participate in criminalization:
- End police and ICE presence in hospitals and in or near health care facilities
- End information gathering and documentation that is not directly relevant or related to the person’s course of care
- End screening and testing without explicit and informed consent
- End the practice of calling police on suspicion of fraudulent identification documents
- Stop calling police on people with unmet mental health or medical needs
- Stop calling police on people in possession of, distributing, or using drugs
- End mandated reporting
- Stop supporting prosecution in cases against people who manage their own care or offer community-based care, fail to seek care, refuse care, or fail to disclose their private medical information
- Stop participating in or supporting prosecution in cases of transmission of infectious diseases, including HIV
- Stop participating in or supporting prosecution in cases related to drug use or overdose
- Stop providing and/or sanctioning substandard/violative care for people who are in custody or incarcerated in jails, prisons, detention centers, residential centers, group homes, and state facilities
- Stop punishing other health care providers, public health workers, and researchers by calling police on them, reporting them for disciplinary action, or terminating their employment for their refusal to participate in systems of harm
- Stop collaborating with the criminal punishment system to violate people in custody, including through performing cavity searches at the request of police or prison officials; evaluating competency to stand trial; experimenting on and sterilizing people who are incarcerated; facilitating torture; or administering the death penalty.
We believe that trust is essential for health care. Criminalization in the context of seeking health care deters patients from seeking out necessary care and assistance out of fear of surveillance or persecution by law enforcement, child welfare, or immigration authorities. Moreover, participating in criminalization is not aligned with accepted medical, midwifery, and other healing philosophies, ethics or standards of care and almost always involves violating the principles of confidentiality and informed consent.
Therefore, we are asking health providers, public health workers, and researchers to be bold -- to refuse to participate in criminalization and recommit to caring for people.
We are asking health justice organizations, labor unions in healthcare, and professional associations/societies in healthcare for your commitment to implement these principles within your practices, institutions, professional associations, organizations and networks.
We will follow up with you about how BDNH can work with you to implement these principles, and invite you to participate in our virtual and in-person offerings within the network.
