Carceral lock-in: How organizational conditions stymie the development of justice alternatives in a rape crisis center

Many perpetrators of sexual violence are themselves victims of similar crimes. Such “complex victims” do not fit neatly into the dichotomous categories of victim and perpetrator essential to the functioning of the adversarial criminal-legal system. How anti-rape activists attempt to incorporate complex victims into their work illustrates challenges they experience when wrestling with the carceral state more broadly. In this article, I draw on 32 months of participant observation and 40 in-depth interviews to show how organizational conditions—departmental silos and physical infrastructure—prevent activists’ treatment of complex victims. Building on the concept of path dependence from organization theory, I argue that carceral understandings of harm become “locked-in” despite activists’ anti-carceral attitudes. This article identifies barriers to the treatment of complex victims, further explains feminist activists’ simultaneously contentious and coalitional relationship with the carceral state, and introduces the concept of carceral lock-in to help understand impediments to justice alternatives.

Dialogue in Peace Education Theory and Practice1

This article reports a case study of a peace educator (Haley), an interventions program coordinator for a domestic violence shelter and rape crisis center, reaching thousands of youth in the Midwestern United States. The findings of the study raise implications for employing dialogue as a pedagogy for peace in formal schooling and infusing peace education throughout the school curriculum. In particular, the findings offer insights about the attributes of the peace educators who are able to implement dialogue effectively in their classrooms, and the vital characteristics necessary in the formal school setting to employ Freirean dialogue.

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

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.

Intersecting Indictments

Chapter 4 examines black feminist–led antiviolence organizing in Boston and Washington, D.C. In these highly segregated cities, black feminist organizations led coalitions that crossed lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, and neighborhood. In Boston, the Combahee River Collective, composed of black lesbian socialist feminists, helped to forge a multiracial, multigendered Coalition for Women’s Safety. In Washington, black women at the D.C. Rape Crisis Center organized the first national gathering of U.S. Third World feminist antiviolence activists, built an alliance with Prisoners Against Rape, and shaped the antiracist principles of D.C.’s first “Take Back the Night” marches. These intersectional coalitions reoriented discourses of violence against women toward a critique of state harm and alternatives to criminal justice.

“I Don’t Like Being That Hyperaware of My Body”: Women Survivors of Sexual Violence and Their Experience of Exercise

The experience of exercise among women survivors of sexual violence is a multifaceted phenomenon. In effort to inform treatment interventions, we used a phenomenological approach to describe the lived experience of exercise among women survivors of sexual violence. Data analysis from a focus group discussion and individual interviews with eight women survivors receiving services at a rape crisis center (RCC) revealed four themes: exercising (and not exercising) fosters safety, exercising is risky, past trauma restricts exercise choices, and exercising is beneficial. Findings indicate that survivors’ experience of exercise is related to their connections with self and their social environment. Survivors’ choices related to exercise were impacted by their stage of recovery. A variety of social-contextual factors appeared to support or impede motivation to exercise and it was not disinterest in exercise or low confidence in the ability to exercise, but restricted exercise options perceived as safe that influenced exercise motivation.

Assessing Receptivity to Empirically Supported Treatments in Rape Crisis Centers

Survivors of sexual violence are at risk for PTSD, depression, and anxiety. There are several empirically supported treatments (EST) that are effective for addressing these trauma symptoms; however, uptake of these ESTs among Rape Crisis Center (RCC) counselors is low. This research project sought to determine counselors’ attitudes toward evidence-based practices (EBPs); their perceptions of the intervention characteristics of three specific ESTs: Prolonged Exposure (PE), Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT) and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Therapy; and differences in attitudes and perceptions based on agency setting (urban/rural) and counselor education. The Consolidated Framework for Advancing Implementation Science (CFIR) was used to construct a web-based survey to send to all RCCs in Texas (n=83) resulting in an overall agency response rate of 72% (n=60) and responses from 76 counselors. Counselors’ attitudes towards EBP and perspectives on specific ESTs suggest that dissemination and implementation efforts are needed within the RCC service sector to advance the uptake of CPT, EMDR and PE.

Contested Discourses in Multidisciplinary Sexual Assault Response Teams (SARTs)

This qualitative study explored how law enforcement officers, forensic nurses, and rape crisis advocates who are members of coordinated service delivery models such as Sexual Assault Response Teams (SARTs) describe their process of engaging with one another and managing their differences in professional orientation, statutory obligations, and power. Using semi-structured interviews with 24 SART responders including rape crisis center advocates, law enforcement, and medical personnel, we examined the ways that SART members discursively construct one another’s role in the team and how this process points to unresolved tensions that can manifest in conflict. The findings in this study indicate that interdisciplinary power was negotiated through discursive processes of establishing and questioning the relative authority of team members to dictate the work of the team, expertise in terms of knowledge and experience working in the field of rape response, and the credibility of one another as qualified experts who reliably act in victims’ and society’s best interests. Implications of these findings for understanding and preventing the emergence of conflict in SARTs are discussed.