ABSTRACT
This paper attempts to look at the ways in which women’s struggles against domestic violence are criminalized and also how this type of racialized, classed, and gendered violence is connected to processes that fuel prison expansion–including the U.S-led war on drugs, the criminalization of immigration, the rampant policing in communities of color, and the reliance on the police and the criminal legal system to address domestic violence. It is my intent to place domestic violence and its connection to criminalization in a politicized context for two reasons: the first is to repudiate the tendency to look at women’s response to abuse as individualized or unconnected to other types of marginalization and the second is to provide a more complex analysis of how women’s differing social identities or positionalities, as women of color or immigrant women for example, may affect their experiences of both state and interpersonal violence. doi:10.1300/J015v29n03_05 [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. 76 E-mail address: <docdelivery@haworthpress.com> Website: <https://www.HaworthPress.com> © 2006 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.]
