Violence

Brian A. Pappas: Mandatory reporting is just one piece of a larger effort needed to address sexual violence on campus

The problem of police brutality in the U.S. has largely and rightfully highlighted police killings of unarmed Black men. Still, when police violence against women can be connected to women’s personal experiences with intimate partner violence and sexual violence, researchers helping craft policy must work toward a comprehensive understanding of both men’s and women’s experiences with law enforcement. Police brutality is not a new phenomenon. Researchers, scholars, and activists such as Andrea Ritchie, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Hillary Potter and grassroots movements like #SayHerName and INCITE! have long described and documented the problem of police brutality – specifically, police brutality against women and trans women of color. The #SayHerName brief documents cases in which women call police to report intimate partner or sexual violence, only to be met with inadequate, harmful, and abusive law enforcement responses. INCITE! has explained how police violence and intimate partner violence intersect in the lives of women of color, including women of color who are trans, bisexual or lesbian, immigrant, undocumented, living on tribal land, have prior criminal convictions, or are involved in sex work.

A judge ordering a shaming sentence for a perpetrator of intimate partner violence (IPV) may seem rational. Perpetrators commonly belittle, humiliate, and disgrace their partners within a larger pattern of physical abuse, and survivors often report feeling an abiding sense of shame as a result. Thus, humiliating a perpetrator may seem particularly apropos. Judicially imposed shaming sentences also appear to serve the criminal system’s retributive goals, sending a clear public message of intolerance for abusive behavior. These sentences may further be meant to rehabilitate, assuming that moral education flows from public humiliation. But even if these stigmatizing sentences have some legitimate purpose, any benefit is outweighed by the fact that they undermine the goals of violence reduction and survivor safety. Shaming perpetrators makes their victims more vulnerable, not less.