Challenging co‐optive criminalisation: Feminist‐centred decarceration strategies for interpersonal and sexualised violence
| Published date | 01 March 2022 |
| Author | Brunilda Pali,Victoria Canning |
| Date | 01 March 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/hojo.12463 |
Received: 9 March 2021 Accepted: 7 December 2021
DOI: 10.1111/ho jo.12463
SPECIAL ISSUE
Challenging co-optive criminalisation:
Feminist-centred decarceration strategies
for interpersonal and sexualised violence
Brunilda Pali1Victoria Canning2
1Brunilda Pali is a Senior Researcher,
University of Leuven, Belgium
2Victoria Canning is a Senior Lecturer in
Criminology, University of Bristol
Correspondence
email:brunilda.pali@kuleuven.be
Abstract
Feminism and prison abolitionism are not theoreti-
cally or politically homogenous, and yet in their main-
stream versions they are often situated at polar ends of
the debate on how to respond to domestic and sexu-
alised violence. The disproportionately gendered nature
of sexualised and interpersonal violence has largely cen-
tralised such abuses in feminist movements. However,
histories of abolitionism – particularly in continental
Europe – havelargely failed to address the severity of this
violence and its impacts. In this article, we highlight the
implications of so-called ‘carceral’ feminism on ending
sexualised and interpersonal violence, while addressing
key – and reasonable – critiques of abolitionism. Our
central argument is that criminal justice has failed to sig-
nificantly reduce and/or end sexualised or interpersonal
violence. As such, we explore feminist-centred, restora-
tive, and transformative alternatives, not only to prison,
but to societies that continue to embed systematic levels
of sexualised and interpersonal violence.
KEYWORDS
decarceration, feminism, prison abolitionism, restorative justice,
sexualised and interpersonal violence, transformative justice
© 2022 The Howard League and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
68 wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/hojo HowardJ. Crim. Justice. 2022;61:68–86.
THE HOWARDJOURNAL OF CRIME AND JUSTICE 69
1 INTRODUCTION
The disproportionately gendered nature of sexualised and interpersonal violence – in that most is
perpetrated by men against men, women, trans and non-binary people, children and, indeed, ani-
mals – has largely centralised such abuses in feminist movements. Moreover, sexualisedviolence
is a very specific form of violence which seeks to own, hurt, humiliate, silence and degrade, to
fail to recognise or to destroy physical and emotional autonomy, and can lead to forms of trauma
and harms which can manifest emotionally, physically, socially, economically and psychologi-
cally (Harvey, Garcia-Moreno & Butchart, 2007; Kelly, 1988;Marx,2005;Taylor,2020). Interper-
sonal violence similarly erodes a sense of security,safety and well-being, with homicide a possible
threat and, for increasing numbers of women, a reality. It has even been argued that the severe
impacts of some such abuses warrant recognition as torturous violence, and yet often continue to
be overlooked as such (Canning, 2022).
Sexualised and interpersonal violence and homicide remain on the rise globally. On structural
scales, it seems that no fewer women are being killed, no fewer people raped or abused, even as
dependence on prisons and criminal justice interventions expands. Although statistics on sexu-
alised and interpersonal violence and family-related homicide are notoriously difficult to estab-
lish, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (2018) suggests that the annual number of female
deaths worldwide resulting from interpersonal violence and family-related homicide is on the
increase. The UN Women has even referredto the increase of all types of violence against women
and girls during the Covid-19 pandemic as a ‘shadow pandemic’.1
Taking this as the central problem, this article outlines variablefeminist approaches to current
debates on responding to such violence. In thinking about responses to sexualised and interper-
sonal violence, feminism is generally represented as torn between two polarised strategies, on the
one hand by relying on the law and state institutions – especially the police, criminal courts and
prisons – for answers (so-called, not unproblematically, ‘carceral feminism’), and on the other
hand by rejecting punitive and state-centric responses and looking at alternative and informal
forms of justice (Terwiel, 2020). Terwiel (2020) has pointed out how in this representation, femi-
nist ‘engagement with the criminal legal system is marked as carceral,and informal, community-
based justice efforts exemplify non-carceral feminism’(p.423). Instead of creating ideological bina-
ries, Terwiel (2020) argues that thinking in terms of a spectrum of decarceration maybeamore
relevant objective to develop as a means of progressing the ‘carceral/abolitionist’debate often pre-
sented in criminological approaches.
As decarceral and abolitionist feminists, we extend Terwiel’s analysis of critiques of ‘carceral
feminism’ to (often justifiable) feminist critiques of abolitionism. As a basis to challenge what we
term ‘co-optive criminalisation’, we outline three key claims around abolitionism that we often
encounter in research, teaching, conferences and political endeavours, as well as in wider liter-
ature. To be sure, we take relatively broad approaches to a complex and complicated field, and
do not intend to flatten or obscure the multilayered socio-historical dimensions of feminist and
abolitionist perspectives, activism and research. Rather,we hope to solidify critique of limitations
on criminal justice, and address issues in our own experiences of abolitionist criminology from a
feminist perspective (see also Downes (2019) for further discussion).
From here we recentralise our key argument: that is, despite intensefeminist labour and dedi-
cation to end sexualised and interpersonal violence through criminal justice systems, prisons have
endemically failed to end such violence. As discussed above, rates of deadly violence are increas-
ing,notdecreasing. We term the structures around this ‘co-optive criminalisation’. This includes
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