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Knowledge and Narratives
Justice beyond Jails / Just Futures Collaborative | 18 March – 17 September 2026
On March 18, 2026, Just Futures Collaborative, with its campaign partners– Athena Network, International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) and International Women’s Rights Action Watch Asia Pacific (IWRAW-AP)– will launch Justice beyond Jails, a global campaign prompting attention to how responses to gender-based violence (GBV) are often centered on policing and incarceration. The campaign explores approaches to safety, accountability, and justice that center those who have experienced gender-based harm, beyond criminal legal systems. The campaign brings together interactive narratives, publications, dialogues, and collaborative learning spaces that will roll out over the coming months.
The problem with punishment
For decades now, a key focus of feminist activism has been responding to and eliminating GBV. And one of the main tools in our playbook to respond to GBV has been to demand harsher laws, tougher sentences, and intensive enforcement-heavy approaches. It feels like action, but here is the uncomfortable truth that both data and our shared experience are telling us– it's not really working.
The UN Women Data Hub shows roughly 1,529 legislative measures across 191 countries to address violence against women and girls, and 148 countries have laws specifically addressing domestic violence/intimate partner violence. However progress on reducing it has been painfully slow, with only a 0.2% annual decline in partner or sexual violence over the past two decades, according to a 2025 WHO report. Meanwhile, the WHO found that funding is collapsing: in 2022, only 0.2% of global development aid was allocated to programmes focused on prevention of violence against women, and funding has further fallen in 2025. A global survey conducted by UN Women of 428 women's rights and civil society organizations found that more than a third — 34% — have suspended or shut down programmes to end violence against women and girls. More than 40% organizations have scaled back or closed life-saving services such as shelters, legal aid, psychosocial and healthcare support due to immediate funding gaps. It is important to note that there is still a lack of systematic research that looks at rates and reduction of GBV across all regions and forms.
Criminal legal responses tend to treat GBV as an individual act, extracting it from the context and environment that foster pervasive violence. It addresses an act of violence with more violence. This, despite the fact that overwhelming evidence shows that people who are harmed often do not want to approach systems that jail people– either because they do not want the person who has caused the harm to be imprisoned, or because they are reluctant to rely on systems that often also criminalize their existence. Instead, they want support, services and protection from more violence or retribution.
All too frequently, criminal legal systems do not recognise forms of GBV experienced by marginalised communities– for instance, in some countries the definition of rape is explicitly limited to a male perpetrator and female victim. In many countries in the SWANA region, for instance, rape is defined only as "a man having sexual relations with a woman without her consent" — language that excludes male survivors, same-sex assaults, and non-vaginal penetration.
And very often these systems do not hold those in power accountable. As the International Commission on Jurists has stated, in the context of criminal legal systems more generally, “Ultimately, criminalization – in law and application– is the product of political decisions made in the service of existing relations of power that often detrimentally affect persons belonging to already marginalized or disadvantaged groups.”
Harsher laws are not the answer and often do not enable justice. In fact, studies conducted on domestic violence laws show no systematic causal link exists between stricter penalties and reduction in domestic violence.
Cases get registered, politicians claim victory, but the violence continues.
What punitive approaches actually produce
They punish those who are already marginalized (migrants, sex workers, those living in poverty, etc) while the rich and powerful are often not held accountable. The "ideal victim" is a black and myth that excludes women from racialized groups, migrants, refugees, trans and gender non-conforming people, disabled people, sex workers, and others. Marginalized communities are disproportionately imprisoned for GBV while the powerful escape accountability. For example, reports have shown that many countries do not recognize violence suffered by queer people from their own families as domestic violence; many other countries do not recognize marital rape; many countries exclude certain migrant groups from their sexual violence laws etc. Similarly, criminal legal systems are not often accessible for people who are dependent on others, such as disabled people or children, or for those whose identities are criminalized, such as sex workers, drug users, migrants, or queer people, among others. Research documents this pattern across jurisdictions: Goodmark finds that one of the most serious unintended consequences of criminalization has been increased rates of arrest, prosecution, conviction, and incarceration of those whom criminalization was meant to protect, with racial disparities running throughout — in the United States, for example, Black women are incarcerated at 1.6 times the rate of white women, Latina women at 1.2 times.
They control those who have been harmed rather than protect them or provide them with justice. Carceral systems frame people who have been harmed as "victims" in need of state protection — stripping away the very agency the systems claim to restore. People who have been harmed who don't fit the mold of the innocent, sympathetic victim are dismissed or discredited. Rights to movement, privacy, and due process get curtailed — not only by abusers, but also by the state. This dynamic is documented in Survived & Punished and Project Nia's 2022 report Defending Self-Defense, and in the joint submission to the UN Human Right Council’s Universal Periodic Review of the United States. In extreme cases, women who have been harmed may be placed in "protective custody," effectively incarcerated for their own "safety".
They fuel dangerous agendas. Anti-gender and anti-democracy groups weaponize GBV narratives to demonize people facing discrimination based on race, gender, sexual orientation, immigration status, disability, and more. It has even led some countries to pull back their protections. Turkey's President Erdoğan, for instance, withdrew the country from the Istanbul Convention in July 2021, claiming that the Convention had been "hijacked by a group of people attempting to normalize homosexuality" and undermine the country's social and family values— despite rising levels of GBV. Other countries declined to ratify in the first place: EuroMed Rights reported that Hungary refused to ratify the Convention on the grounds that it promotes a "dangerous gender ideology". Latvia's parliament voted to withdraw in 2025, with legislators arguing, according to Euronews, that the treaty promotes "radical feminism based on the ideology of gender".
They fail on every side. Those accused of harm can also find their rights gutted — held indefinitely on bond, denied adequate legal support, imprisoned on faulty evidence. As the UK Center for Women’s Justice notes, carceral systems often presume guilt without due process and fail survivors and accused alike.
Most survivors don't want it. As UN Women reports, fewer than 40% of women who experience violence seek help of any sort. In the majority of countries with available data, women who do seek help look to family and friends, and very few seek support from formal institutions, such as police and health services. Fewer than 10% of those seeking help appeal to the police. They want shelter, safety, and custody of their children — not necessarily incarceration. Long processes, victim-blaming, and fear of retribution keep them away. Studies also show similar trends among trans people; they report facing discrimination and violence from service providers and hence do not approach formal institutions to seek support.
The deeper problem: carceral logic
The Justice beyond Jails campaign calls our attention to a deeper problem: GBV is not a series of individual crimes to be prosecuted away. It is a sociopolitical crisis. At its core, carceral logic assumes that locking someone up is both the natural and sufficient response to harm. In doing so, it sidelines survivors and leaves unaddressed the very conditions that make violence possible and pervasive. The law presents itself as neutral and fair, but those who end up punished are overwhelmingly from marginalized communities, many of them survivors themselves.
This forces a restrictive, often binary, and provocative debate around GBV laws as a whole, that does not investigate the impact of criminal laws or explore more productive responses by the State and other stakeholders to respond to and eliminate GBV.
What actually works
Community-based interventions. Economic support. Feminist organizing that shifts norms and empowers survivors. Crisis response systems that prioritize immediate safety. Addressing root causes, like gender inequality and unequal power, economic inequality and poverty, intergenerational trauma, structural discrimination across status, identities and experience, and the pervasive reliance on carcerality– and not just symptoms. These are evidence-based strategies that actually reduce harm. The evidence is not the obstacle — political will is. Choosing prisons over these strategies isn't a neutral default. It's a decision, made over and over, at the direct expense of survivors and communities.
The Justice beyond Jails campaign
For Justice beyond Jails, the question isn’t whether we respond to GBV–it’s– how do we respond with strategies that create justice, safety and freedom for all? How do we interrogate the overwhelming and serious limitation of punitive responses to GBV?
In addition to calling the criminal legal response to GBV into question, the campaign also challenges the growing weaponization of violence narratives, especially how these narratives are misused in ways that demonize people who already face discrimination and exclusion because of their race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, (im)migration status, health status, religion and ethnicity, disability, etc.
The campaign aims to:
- Create safe spaces for conversations that interrogate the effectiveness of legal reform strategies that the feminist movement and other stakeholders have adopted to counter GBV and to pose this against narratives, evidence, and data focused on strategies that work
- Center a feminist accountability-based approach (as opposed to an incarceration-based approach) to respond to GBV
- Amplify the message that GBV in all its forms is unacceptable and a strong impediment to human rights
The campaign is for:
- Anyone who is a part of movements, organisations, service providers, governance mechanisms, legal systems, communities and more that work against GBV
- Anyone who is interested in reflecting and exploring with us on what really works to prevent and protect against GBV
Campaign activities
In the coming weeks, the campaign will launch the Justice beyond Jails interactive story-telling tool – an open access online tool that places users inside the stories of people navigating their experiences of GBV and the criminal legal system. We will also be conducting webinars and learning sessions for cross-movement analysis and learning. We will launch a social media campaign to highlight our core messages. Finally, we will be publishing a blog series and sharing advocacy materials to equip fellow activists, organizers and advocates to explore what “justice beyond jails” means for their own work.
You can follow this campaign:
- Social media
- Add link to the campaign page
- Add an option for people to leave their email ids if they want to be informed
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