The “Bait and Switch” of Sexual Assault Response: Expanded Carceral Power at a Rape Crisis Center

Abstract

Rape crisis centers (RCCs) were established during the mainstream anti-rape movement in the United States during the 1970s. In the decades that followed, RCCs began to depend on governmental grants to stay open, shifting the antagonistic relationship that existed between many RCCs and state structures. Previous research has conceptualized this RCC institutionalization as a reluctant concession requisite to the continuation of victim services and the anti-rape movement. This article draws upon three years of ethnographic research and 40 interviews at a United States RCC to illustrate how institutionalization facilitated one RCC’s complicity in the expansion of the carceral state. I propose the transformation of this RCC illuminates a sexual assault response “bait and switch” that serves carceral agendas. I reach this conclusion using data drawn from three themes: (1) the outsourcing of the hotline and conversion to criminal-legal victim services, (2) criminal-legal integration that did not expand the influence of the RCC, and (3) the facilitation of the criminalization of victims through a process of net widening. Building from previous research, these findings document the result of criminal-legal integration at one RCC: the expansion of the carceral state into the center, to the detriment of victims and efforts to end sexual assault.