ABSTRACT
On the flip side, an assumption of innocence surrounds and protects white, wealthy, and gender-normative people with citizenship status. Carceral feminism reifies conceptions of innocence: the state will protect women (“which” women is, of course, always the question) while punishing the bad, violent people. Abolition pushes us to ask more from the future and to continue to recognize and challenge the heterogendered and racialized logics embedded within the naturalization of prisons and incarceration in our communities. The impact of the dichotomization on people who are able to claim innocence or goodness, though, is a feeling of false safety. Being surrounded only by other “good” and “innocent” people translates into a false assurance that the risks of violence are minimized. The critique of slut-shaming is a direct rebuke to the idea that sexual innocence is required for women to avoid sexual violence. These movements have directly, and often successfully, addressed the fictions and limitations of “innocence” as a justice strategy.
