Resisting Gender Violence and the Prison Industrial Complex

--An interview with Victoria Law

By Angola 3 News

Victoria Law is a longtime prison activist and the author of the 2009 book, Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women (PM Press). Law’s essay “Sick
of the Abuse: Feminist Responses to Sexual Assault, Battering, and Self
Defense,” is featured in the new book, entitled The Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism, edited by
Dan Berger.

In this interview, Law discusses her new article, which provides a history of radical feminist resistance to the criminalization of women who have defended
themselves from gender violence. Furthermore, Law presents a prison
abolitionist critique of how the mainstream women’s movement has embraced the US criminal
justice system as a solution for combating violence against women.

Previously interviewed by Angola 3 News about the torture of women in US prisons, Law is now on the road with the Community
and Resistance Tour.

Angola 3 News: In your essay “Sick of the Abuse,” you write that “a woman’s right to defend herself (and her children) from assault became a feminist
rallying point throughout the 1970s.” You focus on the four separate stories of
Yvonne Wanrow, Inez Garcia, Joan Little, and Dessie Woods. All four
women were arrested for self-defense and their cases received national
attention with the support of the radical women’s movement. Can you briefly
explain their cases and why they were so important for the women’s liberation
movement of the 1970s?

Victoria Law: Yvonne Wanrow was an American Indian mother of two living in Washington State in the 1970s. In 1972, her 11-year-old son was grabbed from his bike by William Wesler, a known child
molester. He escaped and fled to the house of a family friend named Shirley
Hooper, whose 7-year-old daughter had been raped by Wesler earlier that year.
When Hooper called the police, they refused to arrest Wesler.

Understandably shaken, Hooper called Yvonne Wanrow and asked her to spend the night. Wanrow, who was 5 foot, 4 inches, and had recently broken her leg, brought her gun. At
five in the morning, Wesler came to their house. When he refused to leave,
Wanrow went to the front door to yell for help. She turned around to find
Wesler, who, at 6 foot 2, was towering over her. She shot and killed him.

At her first trial, the judge instructed the jury only to consider what had happened at or immediately before the killing. This omitted (1) Wesler’s record
as a sex offender; (2) Wesler’s assault on Hooper’s 7 year old; (3) His
attempted assault on Yvonne’s son

Wanrow was convicted of murder and sentenced to 25 years.

However, various groups and people involved in the women’s movement and the American Indian movement had taken up her cause. They recognized that a woman had the right to
defend herself and her family from assault. They held events that raised
awareness, educated people, and tied her case into issues of violence against
women and the systemic violence against Native people in the US. They also
raised funds for her legal defense, which enabled her to have a better defense
than she might have been afforded otherwise.

As a result, in 1977, the Washington State Supreme Court granted her a new trial, partially on the basis that the jury should have considered ALL relevant facts
when considering self-defense. At her new trial in 1979, Wanrow pled guilty to
reduced charges & received a suspended sentence, 5 years’ probation and 1
year of community service. The court decision also established that that
women’s lack of access to self-defense training and to the “skills necessary to
effectively repel a male assailant without resorting to the use of deadly
weapons” made their circumstances different from those of men.

Two years later, in 1974, Inez Garcia shot and killed the man who had blocked her escape from rape. She was arrested and charged with 1^st degree (or
premeditated) murder. Like Wanrow, her cause was taken up by the women’s
movement, which organized teach-ins and fundraisers and galvanized popular
support with the recognition that women had the right to defend themselves
against rape.

During her first trial, the judge did not allow testimony about the rape as part of the evidence. After her conviction, the women’s movement continued to rally on
her behalf and hired feminist attorney Susan Jordan to take over her defense.

Two years later, an appeals court reversed her conviction because the trial judge had instructed the jury not to consider the rape

During the re-trial, Susan Jordan challenged potential jurors about their preconceptions of rape, making the assault an integral part of the case from the beginning. Garcia was acquitted. The entire jury agreed that the rape and
threat of further harm were adequate provocation for Garcia’s action.

That same year, Joan Little, a black woman and the only female prisoner in North Carolina’s Beaufort County Jail, killed Clarence Alligood, a sixty-two-year-old white male guard, after he had entered her cell, threatened
her with an ice pick and forced her to perform oral sex. Little was charged
with first-degree murder which, in North
Carolina, carried a mandatory death sentence.

Again, there was a HUGE outpouring of support from various movements, including people and groups in the women’s liberation and Black Liberation movements as well as more mainstream groups. During her trial, Little’s defense exposed the
chronic sexual abuse and harassment endured by women in the jail and prison
system. Countering the prosecution’s argument that Little had enticed Alligood
into her cell with promises of sex, the defense team called on women who had
previously been held at the jail. They testified that Alligood had a history of
sexually abusing women in his custody.

Little herself testified about Alligood’s assault.

After seventy-eight minutes of deliberation, a jury acquitted Little, establishing a precedent for killing as a justified self-defense against rape.

Dessie Woods was a Black woman in Georgia who shot and killed a man who tried to rape her and her friend while they were hitchhiking. She was sentenced to 22 years.
Black nationalist women took up the case of Dessie Woods, framing it as a case
of colonial violence. Radical (White) feminists also took up her cause and used
it as a way to challenge white feminists to examine not only sexism and
patriarchy but also racism and colonialism.

However, unlike the cases of Little, Wanrow and Garcia, the larger White feminist movement(s) did not rally to her cause.

Even though she did not have the massive outpouring of support as the other three women, the prolonged support that she did have eventually won Woods her freedom
in July 1981. A lawyer from the People’s Law Center
challenged the use of circumstantial evidence and the use of a special
prosecutor (hired by the dead man’s family). The U.S. Court of Appeals
determined that there had been insufficient evidence to convict and imprison
her.

The first three cases were groundbreaking in that they established legal precedents stating that women had a right to defend themselves (and their children) from
sexual assault. In the case of Inez Garcia, her lawyer Susan Jordan extended
the legal interpretation of “imminent danger” beyond the immediate time period,
thus laying the groundwork for battered women’s defense—that a woman who kills
her abuser is acting in self-defense even if she is not under attack at that
time.

A3N: What impact did activism have in these four cases?

VL: The activism and organizing around those four cases enabled the women to have better legal defenses than they would have otherwise been afforded. For
example, $250,000 was raised for Joan Little’s defense. Almost $39,000 was
spent on social scientists who devised an “attitude profile survey:” designed
to detect patterns of (racial) prejudice. The defense used their findings to
win a change of venue from conservative/racist Beaufort
County to Raleigh, which was key in her acquittal.
Without the money garnered by supporters, Joan Little, a poor Black woman,
would never have been able to have that kind of legal support. Instead, she
would have been convicted and executed.

A3N: How are things different today, in 2010?

VL: We don’t see the same outpouring of support for women arrested for self-defense today. We can look at the case of the New Jersey Four, who are four Black lesbians arrested
and incarcerated for defending themselves against a homophobic attack on the
street. Their case has garnered support from groups working around incarcerated
women’s issues and queer issues, but it hasn’t been taken up as widely as, say,
the case of Joan Little or even Dessie Woods. Women who are incarcerated for
defending themselves against partner violence receive even less public
attention and support.

A3N: Shifting our focus to the issue of domestic violence, you write that the early women’s shelters formed by the radical women’s movement in the 1970s
“utilized the self-help methods, egalitarian philosophies, and collective
structures that had developed within the women’s liberation movement, striving
to be democratic alternatives in which women had the space to safely
communicate, share experiences, examine the root causes of the violence against
them, and begin to articulate a response. However, these efforts received
nowhere near the amount of attention, publicity, and support that the women’s
movement paid to Wanrow, Garcia, Little, and Woods.”

Why do you think these projects, as well as court cases where women defended themselves from intimates, did not receive the attention they deserved?

VL: Then (and now), people saw battering as a “personal” issue and were reluctant to get involved. Some felt that marriage (or partnership) somehow condoned
abuse. Others felt that this was not an issue that a movement could be built
on. Perhaps it was also recognized that the issue could divide a movement.
After all, when reading histories of revolutionary groups during the 1960s and
1970s, we see that abuse and misogyny often went unaddressed.

A3N: What did these radical activists identify as the “root causes” of violence against women were? What is your personal opinion regarding these root causes?

VL: Radical activists identified society’s misogyny and patriarchy as root causes of violence against women. They pointed out that women are most often the ones
who are attacked and abused because they are often the ones with less power
(both physically and in terms of resources).

I strongly agree with this analysis and feel that only when we radically transform societal attitudes around gender and power will we be able to have a
world without gendered violence.

A3N: The number of battered women’s shelters grew (by 1982, there were an estimated 300-700 shelters nationally), but you write that “the increased
interest in the issue by those who did not identify with the women’s liberation
movement resulted in a watering down of the radical feminist analyses that led
to the first refuges for battered women. These emerging institutions emphasized
providing services without analyzing the political context in which abuse
occurred. There was a shift from calling for broad social transformation to
focusing on individual problems and demanding greater state intervention.”

How do you think this watering down and shift towards greater state intervention has since played out in later decades, leading up to today?

VL: Today, abuse is treated as an individual pathology rather than a broader social issue rooted in centuries of patriarchy and misogyny. Viewing abuse as an
individual problem has meant that the solution becomes intervening in and
punishing individual abusers without looking at the overall conditions that
allow abuse to go unchallenged and also allows the state to begin to co-opt
concerns about gendered violence.

For example, 29 states have some form of mandatory arrest policy in a DV call. There is also the possibility of dual arrests (in which both parties are
arrested). In addition, many states now have “no-drop prosecution” in which the
District Attorney subpoenas the battered spouse to testify with threats of
prosecution if she recants or refuses.

The shift towards greater state intervention has also resulted in resources such as battered women’s shelters mirroring some of these same abusive practices (such
as isolating the survivor). It also ignores ways in which the state inflicts
violence upon women. I would greatly recommend the INCITE! anthology, entitled The
Color of Violence, which explores various aspects of violence against
women.

A3N: If you were dialoguing with those sectors of today’s anti-violence movement that embrace the criminalization approach, what are the key points you would
make in arguing that prisons are not the answer? What do you think is the best way to reduce and
prevent violence against women both inside and outside prisons?

VL: The threat of imprisonment does not deter abuse; it simply drives it further underground. Remember that there are many forms of abuse and violence and not all are illegal. It also sets up a false dichotomy in which the
survivor has to choose between personal safety and criminalizing/imprisoning a
loved one.

Arrest/imprisonment does not reduce, let alone prevent, violence. Building structures and networks to address the lack of options and resources available to women is more effective. Challenging
patriarchy and male supremacy is a much more effective solution (although not
one that funders and the state want to see).

A3N: Can you please tell us about recent cases of women who are facing charges or have been wrongly convicted for defending themselves?

VL: There’s the case of the New Jersey Four, whom I mentioned above.

There’s also Sara Kruzan, a 31-year-old woman incarcerated at the California Institution for Women. When Sara was 11, she met a 31-year-old man named G.G. who molested her and began grooming her to become a prostitute. By
the age 13, she began working as a child prostitute for G.G. and was repeatedly
molested by him. At age 16, Sara was convicted of killing him. She was
sentenced to prison for the rest of her life despite her background and a
finding by the California Youth Authority that she was amendable to treatment
offered in the juvenile system.

There’s been a letter-writing campaign to the governor urging clemency. Sara is also up for resentencing and needs letters of support. The Campaign
for the Fair Sentencing of Youth and the California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP) are working on publicizing and garnering
support for her case. However,
we’re not seeing a fraction of the support from women’s or other non-prison
groups that the cases of Wanrow, Garcia and Little received in the 1970s even
though you would think that her story would provoke widespread outrage and
calls for release.

I recently received an e-mail from CCWP about Mary Shields, a domestic violence survivor incarcerated for nineteen years on a seven-to-life sentence for attempted murder. This past September,
Mary was found suitable for release by the Board of Parole Hearings. In 2006,
the Parole Board had also found Mary “suitable for release” but rescinded its
decision after Governor Schwarzenegger recommended against release. This time
around, the governor has until January (when his term will be up) to either let
the Board's decision stand or recommend that it be reversed and so CCWP is
calling for people to send letters supporting Mary’s release.

A3N: Anything else to add?

VL: I want to remind readers that if we’re not coming up with solutions to gender violence, then the fall-back becomes relying on prisons and policing to keep
women (and other vulnerable people) safe. It is also imperative to support
women incarcerated for killing their abusers as well as to support battered
women on the outside and to remember that abuse isolates people.

We should be working to end violence against women without strengthening government control over women’s lives or promoting incarceration as a solution
to social problems.

--Angola 3 News is a new project of the International Coalition to Free the Angola 3. Our website is www.angola3news.com where we provide the latest news about the Angola 3. We are also creating our
own media projects, which spotlight the issues central to the story of the Angola 3, like
racism, repression, prisons, human rights, solitary confinement as torture, and
more.