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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.
- We bring movement-actors together with intention, aiming to build bridges by unearthing shared struggles and common root causes which shape diverse experiences of criminalization. We do this so that we can meet a highly-coordinated opposition with our collective strength. This means 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 all connected.
- We create change through cross-border, local-global and global-local dialogue, exchange and knowledge-sharing. We eschew stereotypes that sensationalize, racialize, romanticize, or exoticize any category of movement, activist, researcher, or scholar and reject binaries of all kinds. Instead, we work with those whose intersectional analyses and experience blur the lines of simplistic categorizations, and who seek to explode traditional understandings of positionality with their work.
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We create spaces for courageous conversations between movement-actors from various movements, from across regions, and who are working across different disciplines. Our "unusual mix" of advisors, partner organizations, researchers, and convening participants will also comprise those who hold diverse theoretical positions.