Cinzia Arruzza

In fact, the criminal justice system disproportionately targets poor and working-class men of color, including migrants, while leaving their white-collar professional counterparts free to rape and batter; it also leaves women to pick up the pieces: traveling long distances to visit incarcerated sons and husbands, providing for their households alone, and dealing with the legal and bureaucratic fallout of imprisonment. Likewise, anti-trafficking campaigns and laws against “sexual slavery” are frequently used to deport migrant women while their rapists and profiteers remain at large. At the same time, the carceral response overlooks the importance of exit options for survivors. Laws criminalizing marital rape or workplace assault won’t help women with nowhere else to go, nor those with no way to get there. Under such conditions, no feminist with even a shred of sensitivity to class and race can endorse a carceral response to gender violence.