WMNS 1103 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: Paternalism, Moral Panic
30 May 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Rethinking Antiviolence Strategies
Lessons from the Black Women’s Movement in Britain
Julia Sudbury
• Presenting South Asian cultures s alien and unfathomable is a way to erase the colonial
legacy of violence, exploitation and cultural intermixing
• There’s an implication that South Asian women need to be protected by British law from
brutal South Asian patriarchy.
• British assumed the role of “white knight” and imposed colonial violence against women
• The depiction of African Caribbean and South Asian communities in Britain as sites of
civil disorder, violence and criminality is what lead to the high rates of police
surveillance and incarceration
• It was argued that women’s liberation shifted social and psychological constraints that
had previously prevented women’s aggression and led to a violent female crime wave
• British and united States women’s scholars produced dozens of books on violent women,
seeking to challenge the paternalistic notion promoted in mainstream criminology that
women aren’t aggressive
• However conservatives used this research to fuel a moral panic about the dramatic rise in
violent crimes by women. This and the general backlash against feminism led to
hardened attitudes towards women by police and the public. People thought women’s
violence was evidence that the liberation movement had gone too far.
• When women aren’t being disciplined by male family members, the state steps in (ie
social workers, psychiatrists etc) to supervise these women who offend gender norms.
• Paternalistic notions of femininity are mediated through prisms of race and class,
targeting, punishing and incarcerating black and working class women.
• The backlash of feminism in the 1990’s led to popular representations of women who
appropriate power and force as manipulative or evil
• We need to rethink the criminalization of the racially marginalized, sexually abused and
financially exploited
• For many poor women and women of color, abuse early in life can be the root of
addiction and later criminal problems. Male violence and coercion is often implication in
lives of incarcerated women.
• Without a general campaign to release all women prisoners, speaking for the “innocent
minority” limits the politics of antiviolence
• The antiviolence movement has been complicit in the law and order agenda that’s
emerged in many developed countries as a response to globalization. Racialized practices
of punishment became central to the politics, economies, and social order of the West.
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