From Inquest:
For the past forty years, the criminal legal system has been the primary societal response to gender-based violence (which includes intimate partner violence, rape and sexual assault, and human trafficking) in the United States. Antiviolence advocates tout legislative victories, increased enforcement of laws criminalizing gender-based violence by police and prosecutors, and longer penalties as proof of society’s dedication to ensuring that those who do violence are held accountable.
Criminalization was meant to increase awareness of gender-based violence and decrease that violence by changing community norms about its acceptability. But those efforts have also led to increased rates of arrest, prosecution, conviction, and incarceration of the very people they were meant to protect: victims of violence. So many victims of violence have been caught up in the criminal legal system that an entire movement—known by the hashtag #SurvivedandPunished—has emerged to protest their revictimization by the criminal legal system.
Several factors may be responsible for the prosecution of people for crimes related to their own victimization. In the context of intimate partner violence, for example, law professor Carolyn Ramsey has suggested that women’s increasing economic power and the liberalization of divorce laws have created expectations that women will simply end violent relationships. When women fail to take advantage of this ostensible newfound freedom to leave their violent partners, their self-defense claims are seen as not credible, prompting prosecutors to pursue them. Continue reading >>>
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