Challenging the Pursuit of Criminalisation in an Era of Mass Incarceration: The Limitations of Social Work Responses to Domestic Violence in the USA

Abstract

This article critically reflects upon the social work field engaging the issue of domestic violence and its relationship to the criminal legal system in the USA. The historical trajectory of the contemporary battered women's movement beginning in the 1970s parallels the rise of criminalisation and mass incarceration particularly impacting marginalised racial communities. In the USA, the passage of the Violence against Women Act (VAWA) in 1994 as a part of the Crime Bill symbolises the convergence of historical forces contributing to the growing collaboration between the feminist movement, social work engagement with gender-based violence and the carceral state. Since the late 1990s, new social movement forces including advocates and activists from anti-violence programmes in the USA have contested this unquestioned reliance upon criminal legal remedies and the professionalisation that has depoliticised the social movement. This critique has developed an intersectional analysis that challenges gender-based violence as well as state violence and advanced an alternative set of frameworks and practices. This article employs contributions of critical criminology, critical race theory and empirical examples from the field of domestic violence and new social movements to analyse the limitations of social work policy, practice and research and to suggest future productive directions.