Gender-based violence, law reform, and the criminalization of survivors of violence

Abstract

Criminalization is the primary societal response to intimate partner violence in the US. This reliance on criminal legal system interventions ignores several unintended consequences. One of the serious unintended consequences of criminalization — perhaps the most serious unintended consequence — has been the increased rates of arrest, prosecution, conviction, and incarceration of those whom criminalization was meant to protect: victims of intimate partner violence. Criminalized survivors follow a variety of pathways into the carceral system, which fails to recognize their status as victims of violence and punishes them for failure to conform to victim stereotypes as well as for their acts.