IS CRIMINALIZATION THE RIGHT RESPONSE TO DOMESTIC VIOLENCE?

LEIGH: For the last 40 years, criminalization has been the primary response to intimate partner violence in the United States. Anti-violence feminists touted criminalization as the remedy for police and prosecutors’ failure to treat this phenomenon as they would other crimes and championed policies that required police to make arrests and prosecutors to pursue any case where they had sufficient evidence to do so. But criminalization has not lowered rates of intimate partner violence in the United States, and there is little to no evidence that arrest, prosecution, conviction or incarceration deters intimate partner violence. What the social science evidence does highlight is how criminalization exacerbates conditions that correlate with intimate partner violence. Male under- and unemployment is among the biggest risk factors for intimate partner violence.

Criminalization makes it harder to find and keep work, increases