UC Berkeley

The criminalization of violence against women over the past forty years represents both social movement success and the paradoxical alignment of feminism with increasingly punitive carceral policies. This historical analysis of the shifting social movement field during its formative years from 1973 to 1986 refutes dominant social movement paradigms for understanding social movement cooptation and demobilization. The research interrogates the processes and mechanisms of contestation between social movement and the criminal justice system and, more broadly, relationships between civil society and the state. A closer focus at the historical construction of the anti-domestic violence social movement field during this period reveals the ways that the very dynamics of social movement success generate the conditions for an expanding carceral state. eventually resulting in hybridized spaces that blurred boundaries between civil society and the state and the domination of the field by criminal justice institutions and carceral political logics.

This historical case study examines key anti-domestic violence movement events, policy decisions and political and strategic debates with a focus the social movement's engagement with law enforcement and the pursuit of criminalization. The research also employs a social movement field analysis to investigate historical shifts promoting and resisting incorporation into the carceral state. This includes the exploration and analysis of organizational differentiation within the field and the creation of and adoption of political logics with an emphasis on their relationship to an expanding crime and punishment regime. An embedded case study of California and Minnesota, early innovators of hallmark social movement strategies and institutions pursuing criminalization, reveals the role of institutional innovations resulting from targeted strategic engagement with law enforcement and the consequences on the social movement field. Empirical findings are based upon 58 semi-structured interviews with key social movement leaders, governmental policymakers and criminal justice personnel. Interview data were supplemented by and compared with archival materials related to the anti-domestic violence social movement or criminal legal policy regarding or significantly influencing domestic violence nationally or specifically to California or Minnesota during the period 1973 to 1986.

The dissertation is divided into three articles, constructing a complementary and comprehensive set of empirical findings and analytical perspectives responding to the study's primary research questions: (1) why and how the movement so decisively turned towards criminalization; (2) how internal social movement dynamics interacted with external conditions; (3) proposed alternatives and the characteristics and dynamics of movement dissent opposing or offering alternatives to criminalization; and (4) the role of gender, race, class and sexuality in relation to these dynamics.

(1) The Construction of Carceral Feminism: The Anti-Domestic Violence Movement from Civil Rights to Victim Rights, 1973 - 1986. The first article examines the anti-domestic violence movement's civil rights and New Left era antecedents and their linkages with the victim rights movement that rises to prominence in the 1980s. The narrative opens with the founding of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV) in 1978 and closes in 1986 with the collapse of the progressive consolidation of the anti-domestic violence movement within NCADV following a struggle over Department of Justice funding. It draws upon connections and disjunctures between the civil rights and victim rights movements, finding four interlocking themes that explain the anti-domestic violence movement's shift from civil rights and New Left beginnings to an increasing alignment with the criminal justice system and the conservative victim rights movement. Two of the four themes relate to internal social movement dynamics, emphasizing the factors of (a) race and (b) social movement strategy. The final two themes relate to external conditions, emphasizing the (c) legitimization of state protection from violence arising from the civil rights era and (d) the expanding scope of crime control accompanied by the elevating role of the victim of crime.

(2) Dancing the Carceral Creep: Three Social Movement Law Enforcement Innovations and the Encroachment of the Carceral State, 1976 - 1986. The second article presents an institutional analysis of three early anti-domestic violence movement's innovations that developed in California and Minnesota to engage law enforcement. These include: (a) the 1976 litigation against the Oakland Police Department for failure to protect battered women; (b) the 1980 establishment of a model violence victim-witness program embedded within San Francisco District Attorney office; and (c) the 1980 development of a Coordinated Community Response in Duluth, Minnesota as a model of coordination and collaboration between domestic violence advocates and law enforcement. Through the case study of these three innovations, the research reveals how feminist social movement strategies combined overt mechanisms of social movement criminal justice engagement with covert mechanisms of feminist control. It demonstrates how successful, highly replicated models of social movement reform also served to legitimate and privilege criminal justice collaboration, contributing to an increasing occupation of law enforcement within the evolving anti-domestic violence movement field.

(3) Seeking Alternatives in the Shadows of the Carceral State: The Contested Construction of Carceral Feminism, 1973 - 1986. The third and final article investigates the array of strategic options available to and constructed by the anti-domestic violence movement, distinguishing between the spheres of (a) civil society, (b) the welfare state, and (c) the carceral state, the latter further divided into civil legal and criminal options. This research traces detailed social movement and congressional debates and decisions regarding domestic violence, organizing social movement motivations driving strategic decisions by the categories of: (a) pragmatic; (b) reformist; and (c) radical. The data further reveals how the devaluation of mental health and welfare state options due to their historical legacies of degradation of women contributed to the rejection of these options as viable alternatives to the criminal justice system. Rather, the promise of the criminal justice system as a new frontier and the anti-domestic violence movement's emphasis on system change contributed to the criminal justice system's appeal as a more promising option.