Imperfect Victims: Criminalized Survivors and the Promise of Abolition Feminism

Goodmark (Decriminalizing Domestic Violence), founder of the University of Maryland’s Gender Violence Clinic, spotlights in this disturbing study the ways in which the criminal justice system victimizes survivors of gender-based violence. According to Goodmark, the push in the 1980s and ’90s to increase enforcement of laws prohibiting gender-based violence cast women in the role of “imperfect victims” and encouraged “vengeful equity” arrests that treat women the same as men, despite evidence that “when [women] do use violence, they do so in self-defense.” (In California, for example, women’s arrests increased by 400% after the passage of mandatory arrest laws for intimate partner violence.) Goodmark also documents police abuse of sex workers and victims of gender-based violence, and highlights prosecutors’ frequent use of material witness warrants to detain trafficked and abused women indefinitely to compel their testimony. According to Goodmark, criminal punishment of women who fight back against their abusers is unjustifiable on all four of its supposed grounds—rehabilitation, incapacitation, deterrence, and retribution—and leaves women with profound collateral harm, including difficulties finding housing and employment, even after their release from prison. Elsewhere, Goodmark cites evidence that diversion programs aimed at keeping girls out of the juvenile justice system are not equally available to Black youth. Throughout, Goodmark buttresses her call for an abolition feminism opposed to the carceral system with harrowing case studies and hard data. This provocation hits the mark. (Jan.)