Sexual Violence

Andrea Smith’s (2005) work Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide is a critical piece of work that brings to the table some important and relevant information and insights to gender, race, class, politics, Native Americans, communities of color, reproductive politics, and the criminal justice system (this list is NOT exhaustive). For example she interrogates the current “pro-choice” framework and argues that it “undergirds the mainstream reproductive rights movement [and] is inadequate for addressing the attacks on the reproductive rights of indigenous women, women of color, poor women, and women with disabilities” (p. 4). Additionally, she argues that “the antiviolence movement has relied on a racist and colonial criminal legal system to stop domestic and sexual violence with insufficient attention to how this system oppresses communities of color” (p. 5).

In the chapter titled “Better Dead than Pregnant” Smith talks about sterilization and long term contraception abuses towards women, listing off a number of different sterilization and contraception campaigns (often without consent) for Medicaid recipients, Native Americans, people in the “Global South”, and others that continue around the country and globe. Additionally, in this chapter she is critical of reproductive campaigns that advocate choice over rights, and those which “have not addressed racism in reproductive rights policies, marginalizing them as “women’s” issues” (p. 97). For example, “Some activists refuse to address racism in abortion policies, arguing that abortion access represents “genocide” for communities of color. These advocates fail to consider that restrictions to abortions can become another strategy to coerce Native women or women of color to pursue sterilization or long-acting hormonal contraceptives” (p. 87).  

Smith proposes that “a variety of scholars and activists have critiqued the choice paradigm because it rests on essentially individualist, consumerist notions of “free” choice that do not take into consideration all the social, economic, and political conditions that frame the so-called choices that women are forced to make” (p. 99).

She continues that “the choice paradigm continues to govern much of the policies of mainstream groups in a manner which continues the marginalization of women of color, poor women, and women with disabilities. One example of this marginalization is how pro-choice organizations narrow their advocacy to legislation that affects the right to choose to have an abortion- without addressing the conditions that put women in the position of having to make the decision in the first place” (p. 99).  She argues that “we must reject single-issue politics of the mainstream reproductive rights movement as an agenda that not only does not serve women of color but actually promotes the structures of oppression which keep women of color from having real choices or healthy lives” (p. 104-5). 

Overall, she argues that “conceptualizing sexual violence as a tool of genocide and colonialism fundamentally alters the strategies for combating it. We must develop anticolonial strategies for addressing interpersonal violence that also address state violence” (p. 139); [and] “it is critical that we develop responses to gender violence that do not depend on a sexist, racist, classist, and homophobic criminal justice system” (p. 170).