Mapping the Obstacles to Criminal Justice for Women Part 1 of 2

The criminal justice system has established increasingly tighter controls over the funding and functioning of domestic violence and rape crisis centres, and hence, over you, the advocate. Throughout the US, this criminal justice system control of advocates has succeeded in corralling crisis centres into a narrow role of passive service providers while crushing crisis centres' role as advocates and agents of social change.

In short, the current violence against women movement has become increasingly embedded in the criminal justice system. This creates a profound and highly unethical conflict of interest for advocates, and a dangerous void of advocacy for victims. Most advocates in the US today are unable to act independently on behalf of their clients in the criminal justice system, at exactly that point at which vigorous advocacy for victims is most needed.

It is bad enough that rape ...

and domestic violence victim advocates have no official powers for advocating in a system which has more unfettered power than any other government entity. At least back in the early years of the violence against women movement, advocates were independent agents. In the last ten years, however, criminal justice officials have cunningly gotten ever increasing control over advocates and their work.

Today, most core funding for domestic violence and rape centers flows from the federal government and is administered either by a state criminal justice office or state health department. In order to renew these grants every year, many states (including California) require that the victim centers obtain the signatures of their local law enforcement chiefs. This gives law enforcement officials direct veto power over the core funding of victim advocate centers. And whether you are aware of it or not, law enforcement is using this power to control you one way or the other.

In California, for example, the State Office of Criminal Justice Planning (OCJP) administers the violence against women funds. And every year, as a condition of grant renewal, OCJP requires all rape and domestic violence centers in the state to obtain the signatures of every local police chief in the center's area, the signature of the district attorney, and of other law enforcement officials. Naturally, if law enforcement officials feel that advocates are pushing them too hard to deal more seriously with violence against women, all law enforcement has to do is simply refuse to sign onto the annual grant request, or threaten to refuse to sign.

This is not an idle or theoretical threat. There are many cases around the country where law enforcement has indeed withheld their signatures from crisis center grant requests in order to punish centers for their vigorous advocacy. What's much more common, though, and in many ways more insidious, is the quiet touch. It's carried out in a couple of ways. Law enforcement officials may approach agency directors and boards to lodge their protests about certain advocates. Agency directors, knowing they need the official's signature, simply reign in the advocate, fire the advocate, and/or write policies into the agency rule books that prohibit advocates from confronting law enforcement. Such repression and firings of women's strongest advocates and ever more restrictive internal good-girl policies have become commonplace in rape and domestic violence centers around the country. Nowadays, an ardent feminist doesn't even get hired in the first place.

The predominance of counseling, social services, and accompaniment services have won out over vigorous advocacy and social change. Feminist analyses, activism, and strategies have been abandoned. Advocacy has been whittled down to service providing. Social change has become social work. And woe to the victim who thinks she has a real advocate on her side who is free and willing to stand up and fight for her rights.

Dependence on law enforcement signatures for grant funds, by itself, puts rape and domestic violence centers into a profound conflict of interest to the great detriment of their clients. It's a conflict of interest that has only worsened as the federal violence against women moneys have increased.

End Part 1.

Copyright © Marie De Santis,
Women's Justice Center,
www.justicewomen.com
rdjustice@monitor.net