From Love to Justice: Families’ Interrogation of Racial State Violence
| Author | Nadine El-Enany |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/09646639221094149 |
| Published date | 01 February 2023 |
| Date | 01 February 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
From Love to Justice:
Families’Interrogation
of Racial State Violence
Nadine El-Enany
Birkbeck Law School, Birkbeck College, University of
London, London, UK
Abstract
This paper explores how love, grief and kinship operate in families’struggles for truth
and justice following a death in custody of a racialised person in England and Wales.
Racialised people are disproportionately vulnerable to dying in police custody. Family
experiences following a custodial death are characterised by difficulty in obtaining infor-
mation, delays in processes, a lack of responsiveness from authorities and an absence of
resolution. Love, grief and kinship form the initial springboard for families’legal battles
for justice, with women often taking leading roles in demanding state accountability
through legal action and community-based campaigns. While kinship ties have tradition-
ally been understood in mainstream scholarship as closing off family units and mitigating
against principles of egalitarianism and solidarity, families’justice campaigns challenge this
narrative. Families can become politicised in the course of struggle, forming alliances
with groups proclaiming broader antiracist goals. This paper reveals the subversive
potential of love, grief and kinship in struggles for justice in racialised death in custody
cases.
Keywords
Death in custody, families, grief, justice, love, police, racism
Corresponding author:
Nadine El-Enany, Reader in Law, Birkbeck Law School, Birkbeck College, University of London, London, UK.
Email: n.el-enany@bbk.ac.uk
Article
Social & Legal Studies
2023, Vol. 32(1) 55–74
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/09646639221094149
journals.sagepub.com/home/sls
Introduction
‘[T]he pain we feel in solidarity is only a measure of their loss’.
(rboylorn 2016).
The origins of this project lie in my experience both of supporting families whose loved
ones have been killed in custody in Britain, and in witnessing the death of two of my rela-
tives, both Egyptian men, whose deaths were avoidable and connected to their material
conditions as former British colonial subjects. My mother’s uncle died from injuries he
sustained after being detained for 8 years in an Egyptian prison for being a member of
the Communist party. My father’s brother died of a treatable condition in an under-
resourced and extortionist Egyptian hospital. I have since found myself thinking about
the question asked by many of those whose relatives die while in the hands of the
state. Who is responsible for their deaths? Was it the hospital with its negligent and finan-
cially exploitative doctors? Was it the Egyptian government with its corrupt officials who
torture and imprison activists and deprive the vast majority of the population of access to
vital services? Or was it Britain, for colonising Egypt and leaving a people dispossessed
of resources and future? (see El-Enany, 2014). I could not avoid arriving at the answer
that Britain and its colonial legacies were somehow implicated in these deaths, and
have since reflected on the relevance of colonial violence in deaths in custody in Britain.
This article is driven by a concern that existing processes for investigating deaths in
custody fail to lead to successful prosecution of state agents. I do not question the import-
ance of criminal prosecutions for bereaved families. My focus is rather on whether the
legal process is capable of delivering justice, understood not only in terms of criminal
justice, but also in the reparative, transformative and preventative sense. Drawing on
the work of Sherene Razack, I question whether the coronial inquest system is capable
of achieving even the narrow task of determining the cause of death in custody death
cases due in part to its exclusion of consideration of histories and ongoing processes
of colonialism as the root causes of racial state violence (Razack, 2015: 9).
In the first part of the paper I consider the history of policing of racialised populations
on the British mainland, arguing that Britain is a domestic space of colonialism; a space of
control and exclusion in which racialised populations are disproportionately subject to
state violence, a violence which is uninterrogable by the law. Next, I examine the
cases of three black death in custody victims, Christopher Alder, Sean Rigg and
Olaseni (Seni) Lewis, arguing that custodial deaths and the coronial inquest system
affirm that all bodies, ultimately, belong to the state. For non-racialised families, this
knowledge comes only after a death, if at all. For racialised populations, it is ever
present. Within and at the borders of the racial state, black and brown people are profiled,
policed, halted, searched, brutalised, killed and examined post-mortem. In the final
section of the paper, I argue that love, grief and kinship in racialised families are political
in their manifestation as a constant effort to protect the bodies of loved ones from the
state, in life and after death. The paper identifies moments and modes of justice-making
and resistance by families whose loved ones have been killed in custody, including those
which address the root causes of racial state violence.
56 Social & Legal Studies 32(1)
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