About us
Advisory Committee
Steering Committee
Knowledge and Narratives
What we do
The issue
Criminalization - long used to maintain and sustain power - is increasingly being used as a tactic by anti-gender and anti-democracy forces, both through state and non-state mechanisms. These include attacks on freedom of expression, erosion of bodily autonomy, regulation of sexuality and gender, increased policing of borders, and restrictions on movement and migration.
The criminal legal system is generally deemed to have four main functions: deterrence, retribution/restitution, incapacitation, rehabilitation. We are interested in a fifth, less explicit, function: the expressive power of the law [1] and the state's ability to mobilize its "symbolic resources.” [2]
In this way, states and dominant social groups are able to lift up some narratives over others and articulate a dominant narrative – e.g. that the criminal legal system is a system of justice. Criminalization "marks" specific groups or people as deserving of punishment and justifies state and social violence, exclusion and discrimination against them.
Research shows that criminalization has a long-lasting impact on communities that it targets, ranging from poorer health outcomes to inter-generational effects such as entrenched poverty and a lack of access to resources and services.
Furthermore, carceral policies are costly to the state and divert necessary funds from social welfare systems, such as healthcare, education, and public infrastructure. In addition, they are also often not effective at doing what they promise: addressing harms and rights violations.
Despite this, an increasing number of feminist and social justice groups have sought results and influence by advocating for harsher criminalization on a range of issues - e.g. gender-based violence, hate crimes, child, early and forced marriage, female genital cutting - despite the fact that there is little evidence to suggest that these work, and growing evidence that they cause harm in numerous ways. These strategies often misguidedly aim to make criminalization "work for us".
[1] Sunstein, C. R. (1996). On the Expressive Function of Law. University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 144(5), 2021–2053.
[2] Tsai, G. (2016). The Morality of State Symbolic Power, Social Theory and Practice. Florida State University Department of Philosophy. Vol. 42, No. 2, Special Issue: Dominating Speech, 318-342.
What do we do to address this problem?
1.
Strengthen, support and amplify sustainable, cross movement, transnational, feminist collaboration- We bring movement-actors together with intention, aiming to build bridges by unearthing shared struggles and common root causes that shape diverse experiences of criminalization. We do this so that we can meet a highly-coordinated opposition - including anti-gender and anti-democracy actors with our collective strength. We bring people together to not just collaborate instrumentally but act with the genuine belief that we (and the issues around which we organize) are connected. We eschew stereotypes and categories and work with those whose work explodes false binaries and borders.
2. Increase the flow of resources to support cross-movement work that challenges criminalization
- In order to strengthen the resilience of our movements, we advocate for greater resources of all kinds to flow to those doing bold and innovative work, to support and sustain cross-movement collaboration that challenges criminalisation.
3. Generate new, compelling and regionally diverse knowledge and narratives about criminalization and its alternatives
- Through rigorous research and cross-border, local-global dialogue and knowledge-sharing, we produce a regionally diverse body of knowledge that documents trends in criminalization and alternatives.By constructing spaces for courageous conversations, we co-create compelling narratives to recapture the public imagination and legal and policy dialogue.