Women of color
generally speaking live in the dangerous intersections of gender and
race. Within the mainstream anti-violence movement in the United
States, women of color who survive sexual or domestic abuse are often
told that they must pit themselves against their communities, often
portrayed stereotypically as violent, to begin the healing process.
Communities of color, meanwhile, often advocate that women keep silent
about the sexual and domestic violence in order to maintain a united
front against racism. Therefore, the analysis proposed in this chapter
argues for the need to adopt anti-violence strategies that are mindful
of the larger structures of violence that shape the world in which we
live. That is, strategies designed to combat violence within
communities (sexual/domestic violence) must be linked to strategies that
combat violence directed against communities, including state violence
(e.g., police brutality, prisons, militarism, racism, colonialism, and
economic exploitation).
The traditional or mainstream
remedies for addressing sexual and domestic violence here in the United
States have proven to be inadequate for addressing the problems of
gender violence in general, but particularly for addressing violence
against women of color. The problem is not simply an issue of providing
multicultural services to survivors of violence. Rather, the analysis
and strategies around addressing gender violence have failed to address
the manner in which gender violence is not simply a tool of patriarchal
control, but also serves as a tool of racism, economic oppression, and
colonialism. That is, colonial relationships as well as race and class
relations are themselves gendered and sexualized.
Within the
context of colonization, racism, and class oppression, sexual and
domestic violence do not affect men and women of color in the same way.
However, when a woman of color suffers abuse, this abuse is not just an
attack on her identity as a woman, but on her identity as a person of
color. The issues of colonial, race, class, and gender oppression
cannot be separated. Women of color do not just face quantitatively
more issues when they suffer violence (e.g., less supportive media
attention, greater language barriers, lack of support in the judicial
system), but their experience is qualitatively different from that of
white women. Hence, the strategies employed to address violence against
women of color must take into account their particular histories and
current conditions of violence.
As the anti-violence
movement has attempted to become more "inclusive," attempts at
multicultural interventions against domestic violence have unwittingly
strengthened white supremacy within the anti-violence movement. That
is, all too often, inclusivity has come to mean that the "domestic
violence model" which developed largely with the interests of white
middle-class women in mind should simply add a multicultural component
to it. Anti-violence multicultural curricula are often the same as
those produced by mainstream groups with some "cultural" designs or
references added to this pre-existing model. Most domestic violence
programs servicing communities of color do not have dramatically
different models from the mainstream except for "community outreach
workers" or bilingual staff. Women of color are constantly called upon
to provide domestic violence service providers "cultural sensitivity
programs" where we are supposed to explain our cultures, sometimes in 30
minutes or less. Even with longer trainings (e.g., 40 one-hour
meetings), only one or two of those hours are devoted to "cultural
diversity." The naive assumption is that "the culture" of people of
color is something simple, easy to understand, requires little or no
substantive engagements with communities, and is homogeneous.
Furthermore, those people who are marginalized within communities of
color, such as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) or queer
people, sex workers, or addicts, are often marginalized within these
"cultural" representations.
Of course, many women of color in
domestic violence programs have been active in expanding notions of
"cultural competency" to be more politicized, less simplistic, and less
dependent on the notion of culture as a static concept. However,
cultural competency, no matter how re-envisioned, is limited in its
ability to create a movement that truly addresses the needs of women of
color because the lives and histories of women of color call on us to
radically re-think all models currently developed for addressing
domestic violence.
An alternative approach to "inclusion" is
to place women of color at the center of the organization and analysis
of domestic violence. That is, what if we do not make any assumptions
about what a domestic violence program should look like, but instead
ask: What would it take to end violence against women of color? What
would this movement look like? What if we do not presume that this
movement would necessarily have anything we take for granted in the
current domestic violence movement? And in fact, Beth Richie suggests
we need to go beyond just centering our analysis on women of color.
Rather, she suggests: What if we centered our attention on those abused
women most marginalized within the category of "women of color?" This
is of utmost importance because it is within this context, she argues,
that we must ultimately "be accountable not to those in power, but to
the powerless."
When we
center women of color in the analysis, it becomes clear that we must
develop approaches that address interpersonal, state (e.g.,
colonization, police brutality, prisons), and structural (e.g.,
racism, poverty) violence simultaneously. In addition, we find that
by centering women of color in the analysis, we may actually build a
movement that more effectively ends violence not just for women of color
but for all people.
The Need to Anchor Violence
against Women in Larger Systems of Racism, Colonialism, and
Inequality
The anti-violence movement has always contested
the notion of home as a safe place because the majority of violence that
women suffer happens at home. Furthermore, it is the notion that
violence happens "out there," inflicted by the stranger in the dark
alley, that makes it difficult to recognize that the home is in fact the
place of greatest danger for women. Ironically, however, the strategies
that the domestic violence movement employs to address violence are
actually premised on the danger coming from "out there" rather than at
home. That is, reliance on the criminal justice system to address
gender violence would make sense if the threat was a few crazed men who
we can lock up. But the prison system is not equipped to address a
violent culture in which an overwhelming number of people batter their
partners unless we are prepared to imprison hundreds of millions of
people.
Furthermore, state violence in the form of the criminal
justice system cannot provide true safety for women, particularly women
of color, when it is directly implicated in the violence women face as
described previously. Unfortunately, the remedies that have been
pursued by the mainstream anti-violence movement have often had the
effect of strengthening rather than opposing state violence. Thus, for
example, the anti-sexual/domestic violence movements have been vital in
breaking the silence around violence against women and providing
critically needed services to survivors of sexual and domestic violence.
However, these movements have also become increasingly professionalized
around providing services and, consequently, are often reluctant to
address sexual and domestic violence within the larger context of
institutionalized violence. As a case in point, many state coalitions
on domestic/sexual violence have refused to take stands against the
anti-immigration backlash and its violent impact on immigrant women,
arguing that this issue is not a sexual/domestic violence issue. As the
immigration backlash intensifies, many immigrant women do not report
abuse for fear of deportation. However, it is impossible to seriously
address sexual/domestic violence within communities of color without
addressing these larger structures of violence, such as militarism,
attacks on immigrants' rights and Indian treaty rights, the
proliferation of prisons, economic neo-colonialism, and institutional
racism and homophobia. Consequently, it is critical that those
interested in combating sexual/domestic violence adopt anti-violence
strategies that are mindful of the larger structures of violence that
govern our world
As a case in point, increasingly, mainstream
anti-violence advocates have demanded longer prison sentences for
batterers and sex offenders as a front line approach to stopping
violence against women. However, the criminal justice system has
always been brutally oppressive toward communities of color. In 1994,
for instance, one out of every three African American men between the
ages of 20-29 was under some form of criminal justice supervision.
Two-thirds of men of color in California between the ages of 18 and 30
have been arrested , Six of every then juveniles in federal custody are
American Indian. Two-thirds of women in prison are women of color.
Prisons serve to disguise the economic hardships of these
communities because prisoners are not included in unemployment
statistics. They then serve to exacerbate these problems within the
same communities. In addition, when prisoners are relocated to prisons
outside of their community, they are counted in the populations of the
prisons when the state allocates its resources by population. Thus, the
imprisonment of mass numbers of people of color leads to the draining of
resources from communities of color to the primarily white rural areas
where prisons are located.
The 13th Amendment expressly
permits the slavery of prisoners. Uncompensated prison labor is a
multimillion dollar industry. A large percentage of the goods and
services we receive are the result of prison labor. Prison labor then
undercuts unionized labor, forcing more people of out of jobs and into
poverty and thus more vulnerable to committing crimes of poverty.
Companies that profit from exploitation of prison labor include: TWA,
McDonald's, Compaq, Texas Instruments, Sprint, Microsoft, MCI,
Victoria's Secret, IBM, Toys R Us, AT&T, Eddie Bauer, Nordstrom,
Honeywell, Lexus, and Revlon.
Public funds are diverted
directly from public education and social services to prison
construction. Since education is one of the more effective
preventatives of future incarceration, essentially some youth are being
tracked toward higher education and others are being tracked into
prison. In 1992 there were more Black men in prison that in college.
Prisoners become seen as non-persons, deserving of any type
of abuse or enslavement. They generally lose the right to vote.
Eighty percent of experimental drugs are tried on prisoners. Women in
prison are routinely sexually abused with no recourse for justice.
Prisoners lack adequate nutrition, medical care, much less do they
receive anything rehabilitative. The denial of media access to prisons
ensure that this abuse continues unnoticed by the public.
Three out of four women in prison are mothers who routinely
lose custody of their children while in prison. Eighty percent of
imprisoned women have children and of those, 70% are single mothers.
When men of color are imprisoned they too are prevented for fulfilling
familial responsibilities and thus prisons effectively prevent
communities of color from raising physically and psychologically healthy
children.
In addition to suffering the brutalizing effects of
prison, Native prisoners are also finding that the State uses
incarceration to seize their tribal trust funds that are guaranteed to
them by treaty rights. The Native American Project of Columbia Legal
Services (CLS) and the Colville Confederated Tribes have filed suit
against the state of Washington for seizing trust fund disbursements
from tribal members since 1997.
Under such conditions, it is
problematic for women of color to go to the state for the solution to
the problems that the state has had a large part in creating. Consider
these examples:
In fact The New York Times recently
reported that the effects of the strengthened anti-domestic violence
legislation is that battered women kill their abusive partners less
frequently; however, batterers do not kill their partners less
frequently, and this is more true in Black than white communities .
Thus, ironically, laws passed to protect battered women are actually
protecting their batterers!
In addition, as Beth Richie
(1996) notes in her study of Black women in prison and as Luana Ross
(1998) describes in her study of incarcerated American Indian women,
women of color are generally in prison as a direct or indirect result of
gender violence. For example, they both document how women of color who
are involved in abusive relationships are often forced to participate in
men's criminal activities. In addition, in one study, over 40 percent
of the women in prison in Arizona were there because they murdered an
abusive partner. Thus, the criminal justice system, rather than
solving the problems of violence against women, often re-victimizes
women of color who are survivors of violence. In her study of Native
American women in prison, Luana Ross discusses how the criminal justice
system actually criminalizes the attempts of women of color to resist
and survive violence.
When we center women of color in the
center of anti-violence organizing and analysis, we also see how the
strategy utilizing state violence (i.e., relying on the police and the
criminal justice system) to curb private violence ultimately fails all
women. Reliance on the criminal justice system takes away our sense of
collective power to address violence ourselves. This leaves women
feeling disempowered and alienated. It also promotes an individualistic
approach toward ending violence such that the only way people think they
can intervene in stopping violence is to call the police. Community
accountability strategies require collective action. If we ask the
question, What can I do?, then the main answer will be to call the
police. If we ask the question, What can we do?, then we may be
surprised at the number of strategies we can devise. Ultimately,
violence will end only when our communities believe that domestic
violence should no longer be tolerated and we are empowered to make
non-violence a reality.
Increasingly, domestic violence
advocates are recognizing the limitations of the criminal justice
system. It is this recognition that gave rise to the joint statement
by Incite! Women of Color Against Violence and Critical Resistance on
"Gender Violence and the Prison Industrial Complex: Interpersonal and
State Violence against Women of Color.". This document critiques the
reliance of the anti-violence movement on state violence as the primary
strategy for eradicating violence against women in general and women of
color in particular. Since this statement was developed, many prominent
advocates and activists have signed it, including the National Coalition
Against Domestic Violence.
However, in critiquing the current
mainstream strategies against domestic violence, the question becomes,
what are the strategies that can end violence against women?
Unfortunately, many of the alternatives to incarceration that are
promoted under the "restorative justice model" have not developed
sufficient safety mechanisms for survivors of domestic/sexual violence.
"Restorative justice" is an umbrella term that describes a wide range
of programs which attempt to address crime from a restorative and
reconciliation rather than a punitive framework. That is, as opposed to
the U.S. criminal justice system that focuses solely on punishing the
perpetrator and removing him (or her) from society through
incarceration, restorative justice attempts to involve all parties
(perpetrators, victims, and community members) in determining the
appropriate response to a crime in an effort to restore the community to
wholeness. As described previously in this chapter, these models have
been particularly well-developed by many Native communities, especially
in Canada, where the sovereign status of Native nations allows them an
opportunity to develop community-based justice programs.
These models seem to have much greater potential for dealing
with "crime" effectively because if we want perpetrators of violence to
live in society peaceably, it makes sense to develop justice models in
which the community is involved in holding him/her accountable. Under
the current incarceration model, perpetrators are taken away from their
community and are further hindered from developing ethical relationships
within a community context.
The problem, however, with these
models in addressing sexual/domestic is that they work only when the
community unites in holding perpetrators accountable. However, in cases
of sexual and domestic violence, the community often sides with the
perpetrator rather than the victim. So, for example, in many Native
American communities, these models are often pushed on domestic violence
survivors in order to pressure them to "reconcile" with their families
and "restore" the community without sufficient concern for their
personal safety (see below).
In addition, the Aboriginal
Women's Action Network (AWAN) as well as Native American domestic
violence advocates have critiqued the uncritical use of "traditional"
forms of governance for addressing domestic violence. AWAN argues that
Native communities have been pressured to adopt "circle sentencing"
because it is supposed to be an indigenous "traditional" practice.
However, AWAN contends that there is no such traditional practice in
their communities. Moreover, they are concerned that the process of
diverting cases outside a court system can be dangerous for survivors.
In one example, Bishop Hubert O'Connor (a white man) was found guilty
of multiple cases of sexual abuse of Aboriginal women, but his
punishment under the restorative justice model was to participate in a
healing circle with his victims. Because his crimes were against
Aboriginal women, he was able to opt for an "Aboriginal approach" - an
approach, AWAN argues, that did little to provide real healing and
accountability for the survivors. In addition, Goel cautions that
using sentencing circles among Aboriginal Canadians without
understanding the whole history on which they are based, can lead to
greater problems for battered women. She argues that restorative
justice principles can be used, but not with domestic violence, until
Aboriginal (and Native American) women are returned to their original
status of equals with men, a set of social relations that were
systematically eroded under colonization.
Also of concern is
that restorative justice models proposed by its advocates to address
domestic violence have a tendency to locate this models almost solely
within the criminal justice system, as can be seen by the limitations of
the important anthology, Restorative Justice and Family Violence .
There are reasons why this tendency happens - many domestic violence
advocates argue that this models only work if they are backed by the
threat of incarceration should the perpetrator not act in good faith.
However, the problem with such an approach is that it can actually
strengthen the criminal justice system with all its inherent racism
rather than challenge it. Prison abolitionist Stanley Cohen argues that
alternative models are typically co-opted to serve state interests,
increase the net of social control, and often lose their community focus
as they become professionalized . Indeed, the history of prison reform
indicates time and time again that minor reform programs actually
strengthen the prison system and increase the number of people who fall
under its purview. For instance, women religious reformers in the
1800s advocated reforms for women prisoners being kept in the same
brutal institutions as men. These reformers imagined women prisoners
not as "criminal, fallen women" deserving harsh treatment, but as "sick"
or "wayward" women in need of a cure or proper retraining. They fought
for the establishment of sex-segregated "reformatories" rather than
prisons to provide women the guidance they needed to fulfill their
domestic roles. As a result, great numbers of women suddenly found
themselves in the criminal justice system receiving domesticity
training.
As Luana Ross points, the outgrowth of this ideology
as that women often find themselves in prison longer than men until they
can prove they have been "cured" Simply adding restorative justice to
the present criminal justice system is likely to further strengthen the
criminal justice apparatus, particularly in communities of color that
are deemed in need of "restoration." In addition, as will be discussed
later on in this book, a continued emphasis on simply reforming the
criminal justice system takes us away from considering grassroots,
political organizing strategies that have the potential to address the
roots causes of violence.
We face a dilemma: on the one hand,
the incarceration approach for addressing sexual/domestic violence
promotes the repression of communities of color without really providing
safety for survivors. On the other hand, restorative justice models
often promote community silence and denial around issues of
sexual/violence without concern for the safety of survivors of gender
violence under the rhetoric of community restoration. Thus, our
challenge is, how do we develop community-based models of accountability
in which the community will actually hold the perpetrator accountable?
While there are no simple solutions to violence against women of color,
it is clear that we will not develop effective strategies unless we stop
marginalizing women of color in our analysis and strategies around both
racial violence and gender violence.
The Fire Inside, by California Coalition for Women Prisoners
Letters from Prison Camp, by Kathleen Desautels
Invisibility of Women Prisoner Resistance, by Victoria Law
Remarks from "Forms of Resistance to the Prison-Industrial Complex", by Pilar Maschi
Where Love Flies Free: Women, Home, and Writing in Cook County Jail, by Ann Folwell Stanford
Women on the Inside, by Rachel Marie Crane-Williams
