TW: Mentions of sexual assault and domestic abuse
Domestic abuse and marital rape have been offsets of a patriarchal society dating back to its inception. These acts have only compounded during the pandemic. Limited awareness, lack of accountability and call out, dependency on the perpetrator for money are reasons why they continue to perpetuate. Sociologists have devised a term ‘coercive control’ to characterise the power asymmetry in relationships. Coercive control is defined as a matrix of subtle practices like gaslighting, financial control, and fear of potential violence that accounts for domestic violence.
In the fight against domestic abuse, came carceral feminism. It is the strong advocacy of incarceration as a redressal mechanism for domestic violence. Incarceration is seen as the most logical and proximate outcome to any crime, right?
However, in case of domestic violence, what if I tell you that carceral feminism has only made things worse?
Firstly, carceral feminism is dependent upon self reporting of the incidence of crime, and this is bad because most women are unlikely to come forward.
Three reasons for this-
(i)they make excuses for their partners because they think these incidents are one-off and they deeply care about their partner and don’t want to be perceived as wrongful- “My husband was just too stressed/had a bad day”
(ii)they depend upon their partners for finances without which they have no place else to go or no means to earn for themselves
(iii)they are afraid to be alone- especially in India, the prevalent narrative across rural communities is that “the only family a married woman has is one she creates with her husband”. Because of this, a woman’s own parents are unlikely to accept her back into their homes.
Note here, that these reasons are not limited solely to rural women, even educated women are unlikely to leave their partners while subject to abuse because they are the same structures although less explicit, are internalised.
Hence, incarceration is practically impossible since it is contingent upon reporting, which as analysed above is unlikely to come from victims.
You might think, sure, women might not come forward now, but looking at people getting held accountable would motivate them to speak up?
Understand now, that very sparingly do people get held accountable. Far too frequently, cases of sexual assault are dismissed on lack of evidence. Even in the best case, when people are prosecuted, it doesn't nearly deliver victims the justice they are promised by the carceral State. This is evidenced by the fact that several perpetrators in acid attack cases, get their sentence reduced or removed altogether, if they are willing to take in the victim as their partner.
The trial stage of the crime comes much later into the discussion and relies on their being an airtight case with respect to alibis, witnesses and other forms of evidence collection. For this crucial process to occur fairly, we are reliant on the police for action.
Relying on the police as benefactors or good arbiters has its own problems
(i) When an incident of domestic abuse is reported, it is often met with misogyny, victim blaming, a report isn’t even filed in most cases, victims are either told off to “solve family squabbles within the house” or are asked derogatory questions that imply that it was their fault they were subjected to a crime. This looks like asking women what they were wearing, what they were doing so late at night etc. Hence, victims are turned away at the first chance itself.
(ii)On the other end of the spectrum, mandatory arrest laws are instituted and the law enforcement has to arrest someone when the crime occurs. This is again bad because the police usually end up arresting the victim on grounds of filing a false report owing to the lack of evidence. As a secondary impact, landlords use this as leverage to force female tenants from their homes, since police calls on their property are seen as grounds for removal.
Relying on state violence to curb domestic violence only ends up harming the most marginalized women.
You might still disagree and say that at least in some cases, women are at relief because there is hope for their perpetrators to be held to account.
Note, however, that this benefit is speculative. Like already discussed, accountability against perpetrators is sparse. More importantly though, carceral feminism never addresses the structural reasons (including but not limited to economic and social conditions) that exacerbate domestic violence. It either puts the burden on the victim to carry forth their story or it puts the police at the helm of power, whom we cannot look to as reliable allies.
What then is the alternative?
Ideas of restorative justice and transformative justice have been used to describe non-retributive means to pursue justice for domestic abuse victims. The concept of Abolitionist Feminism is gaining popularity as the answer to our concerns of addressing structural problems. This calls for abolition of the federal prison system, especially for women incarcerated for non-violent crimes and seeks to redirect the state resources from the prison into welfare programs, expanding communities and addressing systemic gendered violence by drawing attention to its roots.
While the change abolitionists call for is radical in a world where we are socially conditioned to believe that prisons are the most logical response to crimes, abolitionist feminism isn’t just pie-in-the-sky liberal thinking. If anything, it is ahead of carceral feminism insofar as it recognises that gendered issues are systemic rather than one-off incidents because we are able to prevent these situations from occurring in the first place.
Running common across all these notions is explicit recognition of harms that unfold in the context of poverty, sexism, homophobia, racism, ableism among others.
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