State Criminality and Gender-Based Violence

Abstract

This chapter examines the nexus of state crime, settler colonialism, and dominant frameworks of gender-based violence (GBV). Foregrounding the experiences of Palestinian schoolgirls, it uncovers invisible and sexualized state gender-based violence to expand our understanding of the geopolitics of gender violence by showing the utility of the concept of “state crime” that legal theorists and criminologists have recently developed to analyze states' use of violence to control, discriminate against, and govern subjugated populations. Based on the girls' descriptions of what they experience on their way to school in Occupied East Jerusalem, the chapter expands standard definitions of gender-based violence in two ways: (1) it recognizes the policing of schoolchildren and its ideological justifications as a form of gender-based state terror and (2) it shows that schoolgirls experience the intimate invasions of their bodily safety by armed soldiers and police as a form of sexual violence.