You have been hurt by someone close to you. You are standing in front of a choice nobody prepared you for. You can call the police, and maybe they help or maybe they arrest you too, deport your partner, or make things worse in ways you couldn't predict. Or you don't call. And you carry it alone.
This is the situation millions of people face inside a system that spent decades calling itself feminist.
Carceral feminism is the name for what happened when the mainstream feminist anti-violence movement aligned itself with the criminal justice system, mandatory arrest laws, longer sentences, more policing and called it protection. This episode traces how it happened: from the genuinely radical battered women's movement of the 1970s, through the Violence Against Women Act of 1994, to the documented reality that mandatory arrest policies increased arrests of women and did not reduce domestic violence rates.
It asks who the carceral turn protected, and who it abandoned. Drawing on the work of Beth Richie, INCITE!, and the Color of Violence conference that brought two thousand people to UC Santa Cruz in 2000, it names the feminist alternative: community accountability, transformative justice, and the organisations already doing this work without adequate resources or recognition.
It also looks beyond the US, at Ni Una Menos in Argentina and the feminist movement in Kenya that took to the streets in 2024 — and at what it means to build feminist politics in a context where the state is not a potential ally but a known source of harm.
Further reading:
Elizabeth Bernstein, \"Militarized Humanitarianism Meets Carceral Feminism,\" Signs (2010)
Beth E. Richie, Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America's Prison Nation (NYU Press, 2012)
Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica Meiners, Beth Richie, Abolition. Feminism. Now. (Haymarket, 2022)
INCITE! Color of Violence anthology (South End Press, 2006)
Victoria Law, \"Against Carceral Feminism,\" Jacobin (2014) — free to read online
Survived and Punished — survivedandpunished.org
Audre Lorde Project — alp.org
Tags: carceral feminism, feminist anti-violence movement, VAWA, Violence Against Women Act, mandatory arrest, Beth Richie, INCITE, Elizabeth Bernstein, transformative justice, community accountability, Ni Una Menos, Kenya EndFemicideKE, Black feminism, abolitionist feminism, gender violence, state violence, anarchism
Show notes:
Feminism that calls the police
A Thousand Small Fires — Episode 12
The mainstream feminist anti-violence movement spent three decades building a system that protected some survivors by making things worse for others. This episode asks how that happened, who paid the price, and what a feminism that starts from the most marginalised looks like instead.
In this episode:
A question to carry:
What would a feminism that starts from the most marginalised look like — not as a correction to what came before, but as the actual starting point?
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