“Jails are not the shelters battered women need”: A Feminist Genealogy of Domestic Violence Criminal Legal Interventions in Ontario from 1980 to 2000

Abstract

For the past four decades, criminal legal interventions, such as mandatory arrest and specialized courts, have characterized the dominant response to domestic violence (DV). The predominately American literature has shown that criminalization has failed to decrease rates of violence against women (VAW) and support victims, is reactionary rather than intervening early to end abuse, and has led to the heightened criminalization of women victim-offenders. Building on this literature, this Canadian genealogical study shows how the criminal legal system came to be seen by many as a logical component of the Ontario VAW movement and its consequences on women criminalized for DV. This research utilizes a unique pairing of insights from feminist genealogy and Institutional Ethnography (IE) to analyze hundreds of historical records and 30 interviews with VAW activists, front-line service providers and criminal legal officials who were active during the 1980s and 1990s. With this weaving of theoretical and methodological tools, I reveal the narratives used by the dominant VAW movement in Ontario to frame experiences of violence that contributed to placing the response to DV within the purview of the criminal legal system. In addition, I show how activism at the community-level created protocols and legal interventions that were governed locally and implemented by front-line workers and institutional actors informed by the feminist lenses of their local advocates. I then trace the governance of the DV criminal legal interventions from their communities of origin to the expansion by the Ontario provincial government, demonstrating how the expansions contributed to the criminalization of women victim-offenders. I also interrogate the consequences of the DV criminal legal interventions on women experiencing violence and marginalized communities more broadly and explore the acts of resistance some advocates and front-line workers engage in to counter the harms of these interventions. Lastly, I draw attention to three historical strategies that existed prior to the expansion of the DV Courts that create opportunities for advocates, service providers, criminal legal officials and governments to intercede differently to address the contemporary problems of increasing rates of DV and criminalization of women victim-offenders. By interrogating historical records and centring the perspectives of participants, my study contributes important Canadian perspectives of how the DV criminal legal interventions in Ontario coordinated people’s actions as they relate to the carceral response to women arrested for domestic assault. In addition, through the inclusion of both institution-based and community-based archives, I demonstrate a methodological strategy for including marginalized voices when conducting historical research. My research also expands the use of IE into the study of the criminal legal system and their community-based partners and contributes to the broader feminist literature that interrogates the collaboration of advocates and the state in criminalizing VAW.