Carceral feminism
Examining the contemporary anti-trafficking movement in the United States, Bernstein introduced the term to describe a type of feminist activism which casts all forms of sexual labor as sex trafficking.
She sees this as a retrograde step, suggesting it erodes the rights of women in the sex industry, and takes the focus off other important feminist issues, and expands the neoliberal agenda.
Bernstein argued that feminist support for anti-trafficking laws that equate prostitution with sex-trafficking have undercut the efforts of sex workers themselves in previous decades to organize for their rights, instead bolstering their criminalization.
A similar trend has been described outside of the US context—for example, Miriam Ticktin argued that anti-immigrant sentiments in feminist campaigns against sexual violence in France have served border control and other forms of policing.
[10] Some examples of this are with Alex Press in the mentions of his Vox article about the #MeToo link that brought forth a movement about the incarceration of domestic violence victims.
Since its introduction in 2007, the term "carceral feminism" has been used widely by activists to make such critiques and has made its way into discussions and debates in media forums such as Twitter and Vox.
[16] Sex workers are often victims of gender-based violence and sexual assault by police officers, heightened by the criminalization and lack of security services surrounding their work.
Davis further submits that this is why female prisoners serve on average longer sentences than men and are over-medicated, in order to keep them under the control and surveillance of the state, since the theory of eugenics stipulates that women who are genetically unfit due to insanity must be kept in jail for as long as possible so that they would bear fewer children.
Carceral feminist strategies’ reliance on law enforcement to address gendered violence and harms have resulted in mandates that have contributed to mass incarceration.
Kim highlights how anti-carceral feminism finds its roots communities of colour, who have suffered the most at the hands of state-sanctioned violence and punishment.
They, along with abolitionists, view the carceral state as the primary site for the perpetuation of violence and oppression that largely targets populations depending on racial, class, gender and other identity markers.
The anti-carceral feminist movement pushes towards solving this issue and fighting the criminalization and incarceration of women who are victims of sexual and domestic violence.
The organization seeks to help women who end up incarcerated in domestic or sexual violence cases prove the crime they committed was potentially an act of self-defense.
However, with the progression of technology and the addition of DNA evidence, it was revealed that the sole perpetrator of the rape was Matias Reyes, meaning that the other five men were innocent.
Additionally, in this case, minority groups can be, as a result, more negatively affected by the harsher punishments that carceral feminism aims to support.
Many feminists who are prison abolitionists also argue that these events reflect a historical trend of weaponizing the protection of white cisgender women against men of color and queer people by emphasizing on stereotypes that portray them as threatening or dangerous.
