The weaponisation of ‘trauma-informed’ discourse in prison policy: An abolition feminist critique

Abstract

Taking an abolition feminist standpoint, this article develops a critique of the absorption of the language of ‘trauma-informed practice’ into gendered penal policy. We use Carol Bacchi's methodology for post-structural policy analysis, which centres around the question, ‘what is the problem represented to be?’, and apply it to an Australian correctional policy document designed to inform practice in the Victorian women's prison system: Strengthening Connections. We find that the policy constructs criminalised women's trauma as an individual psychological pathology that causes ‘criminal offending’ and makes them vulnerable to further harm. In effect, the prison is framed as both necessary for the protection of the community and for the protection of criminalised women themselves. We argue that these discursive distortions sanitise the structural violence of the prison and revalorise the carceral state under the guises of rehabilitation and therapy. Our contribution highlights broader implications and challenges for criminological research that engages attempts to ‘soften’ carceral conditions without reckoning with their capacity to entrench gendered carceralism.