Gender Futures:
Law, Critique and the Struggle for Something More  

3-4 April 2009 @ Westminster University, London  

PLENARY SPEAKERS:

Andrea Smith, Associate Professor, American Culture and Women's Studies, University of Mitchigan, USA

"Women of Color and State Violence"

Women of color live in the dangerous intersections of gender and race.  Within the mainstream anti-violence movement in the United States, women of color who survive sexual or domestic abuse are often told that they must pit themselves against their communities, often portrayed stereotypically as violent, to begin the healing process.  Communities of color, meanwhile, often advocate that women keep silent about the sexual and domestic violence in order to maintain a united front against racism.  Therefore, the analysis proposed in this paper argues for the need to adopt anti-violence strategies that are mindful of the larger structures of violence that shape the world in which we live.  That is, strategies designed to combat violence within communities (sexual/domestic violence) must be linked to strategies that combat violence directed against communities, including state violence (e.g., police brutality, prisons, militarism, racism, colonialism, and economic exploitation). 
The traditional or mainstream remedies for addressing sexual and domestic violence here in the United States have proven to be inadequate for addressing the problems of gender violence in general, but particularly for addressing violence against women of color.  The problem is not simply an issue of providing multicultural services to survivors of violence.  Rather, the analysis and strategies around addressing gender violence have failed to address the manner in which gender violence is not simply a tool of patriarchal control, but also serves as a tool of racism, economic oppression, and colonialism.  That is, colonial relationships as well as race and class relations are themselves gendered and sexualized.
        
The anti-violence movement has always contested the notion of home as a safe place because the majority of violence that women suffer happens at home.  Furthermore, it is the notion that violence happens "out there", inflicted by the stranger in the dark alley, that makes it difficult to recognize that the home is in fact the place of greatest danger for women.  Ironically, however, the strategies that the domestic violence movement employs to address violence are actually premised on the danger coming from "out there" rather than at home.  That is, reliance on the criminal justice system to address gender violence would make sense if the threat was a few crazed men who we can lock up.  But the prison system is not equipped to address a violent culture in which an overwhelming number of people batter their partners unless we are prepared to imprison hundreds of millions of people. 

Furthermore, state violence in the form of the criminal justice system cannot provide true safety for women, particularly women of color, when it is directly implicated in the violence women face as described previously.  Unfortunately, the remedies that have been pursued by the mainstream anti-violence movement have often had the effect of strengthening rather than opposing state violence. Thus, for example, the anti-sexual/domestic violence movements have been vital in breaking the silence around violence against women and providing critically needed services to survivors of sexual and domestic violence.  However, these movements have also become increasingly professionalized around providing services and, consequently, are often reluctant to address sexual and domestic violence within the larger context of institutionalized violence. As a case in point, increasingly, mainstream anti-violence advocates have demanded longer prison sentences for batterers and sex offenders as a front line approach to stopping violence against women.  However, the criminal justice system has always been brutally oppressive toward communities of color.   This paper will explore organizing strategies being developed by women of color to address violence within their communities that do not rely primarily on the state.