People experiencing intimate partner and other forms of violence have been taught that police, prosecutors, and courts are there to respond when they are harmed and to keep them safe. But in my practice representing survivors of gender-based violence, I have both heard about and witnessed first-hand the many ways that the criminal system punishes the survivors that it promised to protect. Survivors are harassed, harmed, and arrested by police. Their experiences of trauma are minimized and denied by prosecutors and judges. They are held criminally responsible for acting in self-defense and for the actions of the people who abuse them.
I wrote
Imperfect Victims: Criminalized Survivors and the Promise of Abolition Feminism
Coming out of law school in 1994, around the time of the passage of the Violence Against Women Act, I firmly believed that criminalization was the way to address intimate partner violence. As a new legal services lawyer, I encouraged my clients to turn to the criminal legal system because I believed it would keep them safe.
This book introduced me to the reality that that system was punishing survivors and showed me how Black survivors of violence were uniquely vulnerable to criminalization. I owe a massive debt to Beth Richie’s work.
Most domestic violence shelters have this message on their voicemails: “If you are in immediate danger, call 911.” But for many survivors, particularly women of color, calling the police can lead to disaster. Ritchie’s book came out at a time when people were beginning to talk about police violence against Black men, but before #SayHerName, Sandra Bland, and Breonna Taylor were regularly included in that conversation.
You might have known that Eric Garner was choked to death by the police in New York City; you didn’t know that several weeks later, police also choked Rosann Miller, then seven months pregnant, to death. Ritchie documents how police officers verbally, emotionally, physically, and sexually abuse women of color—and how we can resist police violence.
“A passionate, incisive critique of the many ways in which women and girls of color are systematically erased or marginalized in discussions of police violence.” —Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow
Invisible No More is a timely examination of how Black women, Indigenous women, and women of color experience racial profiling, police brutality, and immigration enforcement. By placing the individual stories of Sandra Bland, Rekia Boyd, Dajerria Becton, Monica Jones, and Mya Hall in the broader context of the twin epidemics of police violence and mass incarceration, Andrea Ritchie documents the evolution of movements centered around women’s experiences…
Until I read this book, I didn’t realize that my work with criminalized survivors had a rich historical context. One example: I didn’t know about Joan Little, who stabbed the correctional officer who sexually assaulted her with an ice pick, or about the grassroots survivor defense campaign that sprang up around her.
I could not have situated that specific campaign in the broader context of a non-carceral anti-violence movement that opposed the build-up of the criminal response to intimate partner violence (a battle they ultimately lost). Emily Thuma gave me that historical context—and a lot more to be angry about.
During the 1970s, grassroots women activists in and outside of prisons forged a radical politics against gender violence and incarceration. Emily L. Thuma traces the making of this anticarceral feminism at the intersections of struggles for racial and economic justice, prisoners' and psychiatric patients' rights, and gender and sexual liberation.
All Our Trials explores the organizing, ideas, and influence of those who placed criminalized and marginalized women at the heart of their antiviolence mobilizations. This activism confronted a "tough on crime" political agenda and clashed with the mainstream women's movement's strategy of resorting to the criminal legal system as a…
When Kim Williams overdosed, Leigh Stubbs and Tami Vance sought help and performed CPR on her until paramedics arrived and took her to the hospital. The doctors who examined Kim said that she had been sexually assaulted. Police focused on Leigh and Tami, mainly, if not exclusively, because they were lesbians.
Leigh and Tami were wrongfully convicted of the assault and sentenced to 44 years in prison. Beety, an innocence litigator, highlights how medical malpractice, unscientific expert testimony, prosecutorial misconduct, problematic judicial rulings, and, above all, homophobia led to Leigh and Tami’s (and other manifestly unjust) convictions.
Through the lens of her work with the Innocence Movement and her client Leigh Stubbs—a woman denied a fair trial in 2000 largely due to her sexual orientation—innocence litigator, activist, and founder of the West Virginia Innocence Project Valena Beety examines the failures in America's criminal legal system and the reforms necessary to eliminate wrongful convictions—particularly with regards to women, the queer community, and people of color...
When Valena Beety first became a federal prosecutor, her goal was to protect victims, especially women, from cycles of violence. What she discovered was that not only did prosecutions often fail to help…
We don’t usually hear about the toll that incarcerating a mother, a daughter, or a sister takes on the family left behind. Michelle Horton’s beautiful memoir gives us access to that experience. Horton’s life was upended after her sister, Nicole Addimando, was arrested for killing her partner in self-defense.
Horton documents the next several years of their lives as she, her parents, her son, and Nicole’s children (who Horton took guardianship of while Nicole was in prison) navigated Nicole’s arrest, trial, and imprisonment. Illustrative in the mechanics of putting together a successful survivor-defense campaign, it is heartbreaking and infuriating in its description of the toll Nicole’s prosecution took on the family.
In September 2017, a knock on the door upends Michelle Horton's life forever: her sister had just shot her partner and was now in jail. During the investigation that follows, Michelle learns that Nikki had been hiding horrific abuse for years. Stunned to find herself in a situation she'd only ever encountered on television and true crime podcasts, Michelle rearranges her life to care for Nikki's children and simultaneously launches a fight to bring Nikki home, squaring off against a criminal justice system seemingly designed to punish the entire family.
In this exquisite memoir, Michelle retraces the sisters' childhood and…
Since the 1970s, anti-violence advocates have worked to make the legal system more responsive to gender-based violence. But greater state intervention in cases of intimate partner violence, rape, sexual assault, and trafficking has led to the arrest, prosecution, conviction, and incarceration of victims, particularly women of color and trans and gender-nonconforming people. Imperfect Victims argues that only dismantling the system will bring that punishment to an end.
Amplifying the voices of survivors, including her own clients, abolitionist law professor Leigh Goodmark deftly guides readers on a step-by-step journey through the criminalization of survival. Abolition feminism reveals the possibility of a just world beyond the carceral state, which is fundamentally unable to respond to, let alone remedy, harm. As Imperfect Victims shows, abolition feminism is the only politics and practice that can undo the indescribable damage inflicted on survivors by the very system purporting to protect them.
Historical fiction inspired by the story of Mary Leakey, who carved her own path to become one of the world's most distinguished paleoanthropologists.
It's 1983 and seventeen-year-old Grace Clark has just lost her mother when she begrudgingly accompanies her estranged father to an archeological dig at Olduvai Gorge on the Serengeti plains of Tanzania. Here, seventy-year-old Mary Leakey enlists Grace to sort and pack her fifty years of work and memories.
Their interaction reminds Mary how she pursued her ambitions of becoming an archeologist in the 1930s by sneaking into lectures and working on excavations. When well-known paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey…
Historical fiction inspired by the story of Mary Leakey, who carved her own path to become one of the world's most distinguished paleoanthropologists.
It's 1983 and seventeen-year-old Grace Clark has just lost her mother when she begrudgingly accompanies her estranged father to an archeological dig at Olduvai Gorge on the Serengeti plains of Tanzania. Here, seventy-year-old Mary Leakey enlists Grace to sort and pack her fifty years of work and memories.
Their interaction reminds Mary how she pursued her ambitions of becoming an archeologist in the 1930s by sneaking into lectures and working on excavations. When well-known paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey…
