Yesterday I had young siblings in my office, in a constant hypervigilant state out of fear that their father will break out of jail or be released. They saw him severely assault the mother, and there is a trial date coming up. They want nothing more than for him to stay in jail, and they vocalize that desire incessantly. One of the children asked me if he could have his bones removed so his father couldn’t break them. And I don’t even work in domestic violence – just in a place where there are regular people, families. This has prompted me to write a post about “anti-carceral” activist, law professor and author Leigh Goodmark @leighgoodmark, who would like to take away any and all options that survivors have for putting their abusers in jail, no matter what the abuser has done. And she’s pretending to speak on our behalf in mainstream media and conferences everywhere. Survivors should speak out and speak back against her dangerous agenda.
- Leigh Goodmark is a law professor at the University of Maryland who says she is a “feminist abolitionist.” On her website she states: “I would argue that the criminal legal system serves no useful purpose in addressing intimate partner violence. I would acknowledge that victims of violence continue to be invested in using that system—in part, because it is the only justice that we offer them.” This is highly condescending and simplistic language, which draws on pervasive stereotypes of survivors as mindless sheep. She implies that survivors support the justice system only because we don’t know any better, and can’t come up with solutions ourselves. She will re-make the system for us – no matter what we want or think. Goodmark is the same old survivor-silencing foot in a new boot, still marching under the assumption that the issue of domestic violence will be decided between law enforcement, academia, agencies and the government. The role of survivors is to quietly sit in the corner and cry.
- “Abolition feminism” is larger than Goodmark, but I am going to concentrate on her work for now, in part because she is gaining a lot of mainstream attention and platforms.
- Goodmark believes that no one should go to jail for anything (although she is careful about how and where she says that), and she uses DV as a vehicle for those views. DV is frequently not treated as a crime even when it involves serious assault. It wasn’t illegal at all when I was a child. In effect, Goodmark is making a career out of trying to take us right back to 1970, when beating your wife got you a walk around the block with a buddy or cop patting you on the shoulder.
- There are plenty of recommendations in Goodmark’s work that are easy to agree with, such as the view that money should be diverted from punishment-oriented solutions to preventative measures, including employment, housing, trauma treatment, and poverty reduction. I and many others would also agree with her that the “justice system” we have now is dysfunctional and oppressive. It makes sense that some survivors, including survivors of groups (such as people of color) who have been targeted by police would want other options. But she uses all of these basic truths to dress up an agenda that is extremist and seeks to eliminate survivor choice.
- Many of the “solutions” that Goodmark proposes sound reasonable but are very misleading:
It is popular to refer to “restorative practices” as an alternative to incarceration for DV, which Goodmark frequently uses as a phrase without explaining. I am a trainer in Restorative Practices (RP), and I have been implementing it in schools for years. I have engaged in the process with both youth and parents. Most ethical practitioners of RP would not use it if there is a possibly dangerous or threatening power dynamic among participants, which excludes DV automatically. An RP conference gathers together the “communities” of both someone who has been harmed and the harm-doer, to tell the harm-doer about how “his” actions have affected them and hold him accountable socially. This is what Goodmark recommends in her latest book. But we all know how much of a community of supporters the victim is likely to have (very little), and how much the whole group is likely to really know/believe about the dynamics of DV (even less). The moderator does not have complete control, in true life, of what is said, and it is very likely that the survivor would be socially pressured into forced “forgiveness” or other agreements that may not be in her best interest, in order to please the group.
What breaks my heart about the idea of restorative practices for DV is that I would have jumped at the chance when I was in the marriage or even after – because many victim-survivors will do anything to make things “better,” to try to be heard and understood by the abuser and everyone else. But my abuser (and most) would never have agreed to it voluntarily. If he had been forced into it, he would have presented a wholly charming, touching, reasonable (or even pitiful) face in the RP conference, winning the goodwill of everyone there, while continuing to abuse and control me in private. Restorative practices in general can be a field day for a con artist, since it is built around relationships, morality and “second chances.” It would have served as yet another chance to groom and manipulate me and my support system, and it probably would have worked.
I could write a whole essay as to why RP is a really bad idea in most real-world DV situations, and at some point I will, but we should take her references to “restorative” this-or-that (because she throws throws the term around a lot without defining it) with a major grain of salt.
- Unfortunately, Goodmark’s stance that eliminating poverty is the answer to DV is too simplistic. For example, Finland, a European country that has one of the highest standards of living in the world, also has a very high rate of domestic violence. Not unlike the US, in Finland 1 out of 3 women are abused in intimate partner relationships. Their DV murder rate is a lot lower – but their general murder rate is tiny compared to ours. There’s a lot to discuss in regards to this – but it’s another part of her analysis that I hold in doubt.
- Goodmark has made her reputation defending women accused of killing their abusers, which is a very worthwhile cause. But when she speaks she frequently brings up the issue of arrest and prosecution of survivors, and then generalizes that into “unjust” over-prosecution of perpetrators, as if they were one and the same. DV has a low prosecution and conviction rate for perpetrators, and is not the driver of over-incarceration in our society. The title of her upcoming book, Imperfect Victims: Criminalized Survivors and the Promise of Abolition Feminism illustrates that bait-and-switch in a nutshell: ‘buy my book and see me as a hero because I fight for incarcerated survivors (yayy!) and then I’ll tell you that the only way to keep survivors from being arrested is to de-criminalize DV entirely.’ It would be like saying that the only way to prevent bullying would be to eliminate schools entirely.
Survivors have been sidelined from the discussion about our own lives for far too long. We can insist that the safety of victims and children be paramount, and that each survivor’s definition of safety and justice should be heavily considered in the handling of every case (not just the opinions of law enforcement, or academics, or politicians, or an anti-carceral movement filled with the same defense attorneys and public defenders who have always tried to keep perpetrators out of jail).
I’m posting this in a spirit of humility and respect, with the understanding that survivors may not all agree, but we need to stop letting others speak for us.
@sophia_abuse #NothingAboutUsWithoutUsDV
Facing Down the Dementor 