This week, I’m running a big sale on paid membership, and also offering a new exclusive pack of stickers in celebration of the announcement of my book, The Wife Appliance, which will be out next year. Learn more about the book and the sale here.
Two weeks ago, I interviewed Justine van der Leun about criminalized survival, and why women so often end up in prison for “crimes” of self-defense. The truth is that women often end up in prison for behaviors that aren’t criminal at all—not just for self-defense or for killing. Today we are talking about the widespread victimization of women at the hands of the legal system.
Patriarchy specifically targets mothers, and women from oppressed groups, then weaponizes our identities. Sometimes it uses these identities to prosecute and incarcerate us. Attorney and activist Valena Beety has worked to overturn wrongful convictions, taught other lawyers about the injustices in the criminal justice system, and is now a powerful advocate for systemic change. She joined me on the podcast to discuss her new book, Pink Crime: Fighting Against the Criminalization of Motherhood, Pregnancy, and Queer Identity.
Some of the topics we discuss on today’s podcast include:
The ways our criminal justice system (and associated systems, like CPS) silence and control women.
How motherhood creates unique vulnerabilities within the criminal justice system.
How women can end up in jail or prison even when they are innocent, and even when there was no crime at all.
The criminalization of tragedies: stillbirth, infant and child deaths, and miscarriages.
Prosecutions of abortions and miscarriages.
How our fear promotes victim-blaming, and how victim-blaming revictimizes women who survive trauma.
Criminalized victimization, and how the legal system weaponizes women’s trauma against them.
Bias in prosecution, and how prosecutors get tunnel vision and decide a woman deserves punishment no matter what.
The ways in which we criminalize and punish disabled mothers.
How a coercive system weaponizes women’s trauma, and can easily induce false confessions.
Pink Crime is an incredible book. Read it. Buy it. Give it to your friends. Pre-orders matter greatly for the success of a book, and they show publishers the importance of feminist work. I hope you’ll consider pre-ordering it. Valena has graciously offered a coupon code for my readers, that you can use to buy her book here. Simply enter code TNP30.
I’ve listed all of Valena’s books, as well as all of the books I mention on the podcast, at the Liberating Motherhood Bookshop.
The excellent paper by Valena that I reference in the podcast is here.
Valena recently published an article about the weaponization of CPS against queer parents here.
About Valena Beety
A wrongful convictions litigator and former federal prosecutor, Valena Beety is the McKinney Professor of Law at Indiana University-Bloomington Maurer School of Law and a co-founder of the Indiana Innocence Project. Her book Manifesting Justice received a Gold Medal in Women’s Issues from the Independent Publishers Book Award, and her coursebook The Wrongful Convictions Reader is used in classrooms nationwide to teach about wrongful convictions. Her latest book, Pink Crime, examines the Criminalization of Motherhood, Pregnancy, and Queer Identity
She lives in Indiana with her wife, daughter, and tripod dog.
You might also like…
Justine van der Leun: Criminalized Survival
In patriarchy, there is no sure escape from violent relationships. The courts and police may not help. Friends and family may turn their backs. And even when a woman’s life is in danger, she does not have the same right to self-defense as a man.
TJ Raphael: Coercive Adoption, Liberty Lost, and Who Gets to Be a Mother
“The adoption industry needs vulnerable pregnant women.” — TJ Raphael
Soraya Chemaly: Male Supremacy
Why is misogyny so widespread, even when men claim to love and care about women, even among those who believe they are feminists? Male supremacy helps explain this phenomenon.
