Book Review: The Feminist and the Sex Offender: Confronting Sexual Harm, Ending State Violence
| Published date | 01 April 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663920971781 |
| Author | Felicity Adams |
| Date | 01 April 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
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JENNIFER R LANDER
De Montfort University of Leicester, UK
ORCID iD
Jennifer R Lander
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2586-1133
Notes
1. Development Financial Institutions like the International Finance Corporation (IFC, World
Bank Group) and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development have adopted sets
of performance standards to promote social and environmental responsibility in their invest-
ments, governing involuntary resettlement, environmental impacts and specific guidelines
regarding the treatment of indigenous peoples. Many private banks have adopted voluntary
standards known as the Equator Principles, modelled on the IFC Performance Standards.
2. Concessionaires, Financiers and Communities will be featured in an extended book sympo-
sium hosted by the International Journal of Law in Context about the impact of private actors on
the rule of law.
JUDITH LEVINE and ERICA MEINERS, The Feminist and the Sex Offender: Confronting Sexual Harm,
Ending State Violence. London: Verso, 2020, pp. 1-213, ISBN: 9781788733403, £14.99 (Pbk).
The Feminist and the Sex Offender: Confronting Sexual Harm, Ending State Violence
(Levine and Meiners, 2020) is a powerful, reflexive and much needed abolition feminist
critique of carceral responses to sexual and gender violence and how feminism should
support us in transcending ineffective, racialized criminal legal responses and institu-
tions. The authors, Judith Levine and Erica Meiners, provide a deep analysis of the
frequently peripheralized relationship between feminism, sexual and gender violence,
and the intersectional harms perpetuated by the carceral state. Their timely account is
formed in view of the #MeToo movement and the retributive and narrow legal terrain
within the context of the sexual offences regime in the United States.
The authors provide a nuanced abolition feminist analysis of the sexual offences legal
regime in the United States. They define abolition feminism as:
A melding of anti-racist prison abolitionism – which is part of the Black radical tradition –
and feminism. It grows out of the recognition of the shared ideologies that undergird state
violence and interpersonal gender violence and the official and cultural conflation of
vengeance with justice. (p. 183)
By outlining this early in the book, they build on works by authors such as Incite!
(2001) and Angela Davis (2013) and they set the pace for the rest of the text.
Levine and Meiners divide their book into four central parts that are comprised of
multiple short chapters: Part I: Feminists Confront Sexual Harm, Part II: State Violence:
The Sex Offense Legal Regime, Part III: Fractured Resistance, and Part IV: Ten Ways to
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Social & Legal Studies 30(2)
Confront Sexual Harm, End State Violence, and Transform Our Communities. The first
three sections provide a holistic critique of feminist responses to sexual and gender
violence, the historical and contemporary sexual offences legal regime in the US...
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