Around age 4 or 5 is when Natasha Johnson first felt “unsettled” when she sensed any sort of injustice. “I felt very sort of charged [with] wanting to right wrongs,” she said.
That early sense, plus witnessing arguments between her parents and later questioning why authoritative figures were combative toward her elementary school classmates, put Johnson on the path to a law career. Now, the born-and-raised Brooklynite is one of the leading advocates for calling attention to gender-based violence and genital mutilation and cutting, both of which informs not only her work as an attorney but in other trauma-informed practices.
“My work in some ways is retroactive,” Johnson said. “We are always going to be responsive to the acts of perpetrators. However, knowing that the work that I do lives in the space of proactiveness, we try to meet someplace in the middle.”
There are a billion survivors of female genital mutilation and cutting worldwide, Johnson said, with about 500,000 in the United States —65,000 of whom are within the five boroughs of New York City.
With former City Councilmember Helen Rosenthal, Johnson co-authored the guidelines that became the blueprint for New York City’s first task force on female genital mutilation (FGM) and cutting; after two years, an initial report assessing the task force’s recommendations is due at the end of next January, while elements of the task force itself are being replicated for similar initiatives in Seattle and Connecticut, Johnson said.
“That’s three out of 50 states, so we have a lot of work to do,” she said.
Johnson, 47, first started engaging with gender-based violence while in law school. She said that while working at Safe Horizon, a nonprofit supporting survivors of domestic violence, she would frequently worry about her clients— women trying to get home safely while their batterers might still be lurking, whether orders of protection would be carried out for survivors, or if survivors even had enough money to get food for themselves and their families.
Working with such traumatic situations for so long led Johnson to seek some kind of outlet where she could periodically recenter herself. She began practicing yoga, and realized that practice could also assist the many survivors she came in contact with. “It became a tool for clients who were experiencing the harm [of gender-based violence],” she said.
She founded the Zuna Group, an umbrella for the many tools she’s developed to help survivors. “I wanted to create infrastructure where the business of being good was supported,” she said. Under the Zuna umbrella is an app that covertly helps link survivors of gender-based violence and a new endeavor in using yoga mats as a way of raising awareness of FGM.
“One of the points of yoga is to find space in your body and find space in your home,” Johnson said. She was inspired to create a line of yoga mats after observing a leading yoga teacher’s mat worn down to threads. “If you can’t find space on your yoga mat, then how do you engage with your body?”
The yoga mats should be in practitioners’ hands by the end of the month, although Johnson is fully aware the recent longshore workers’ strike might put a crimp in those plans. In the meantime, she remains true to making sure that her work is centered where it all began.
“I come and go very frequently—I very literally feel the world is my oyster,” she said, “but I’ll always have a home in Brooklyn.”