Judith Levine

Erica R. Meiners

With analytical clarity and narrative force, The Feminist and the Sex Offender contends with two problems that, despite their inextricable linkages, are typically siloed in the era of #MeToo and mass incarceration: sexual and gender violence, on the one hand, and the state's unjust, ineffective, and soul-destroying response to it. Levine and Meiners ask if it's possible to confront the culture of abuse, to hold harm-doers accountable, without recourse to a criminal justice system that redoubles injuries, fails survivors, and retrenches the conditions that made such abuse possible. Drawing on personal experience, reportage, and history, The Feminist and the Sex Offender develops an intersectional feminist approach to ending sexual violence. It maps with considerable detail the unjust sex offender regime while highlighting the alternatives we urgently need.

Confronting Sexual Harm, Ending State Violence

The Feminist and The Sex Offender

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Some of these feminist lawyers, sensitive to the harms of criminalization, are careful to propose only civil pen-alties, or the establishment of these behaviors as torts—that is, harms for which a person can win damages in court. But the hyperbole — calling these acts rape — has roused lawmakers to criminalize them, and in some cases attach heavy penalties, including incarceration. In other countries, such laws have already been used to ugly, decidedly unprogressive ends. For instance, in 2008, Israel prosecuted the lover of a Jewish woman for rape, not because the sex was coerced but because the man had failed to clarify that he is Arab. In the UK in 2015, a complainant brought suit after belatedly "discovering" that a partner was trans.14 And in dozens of countries, with the United States in the lead, conviction for HIV nondisclosure and transmission—a model for stealthing, and equally unprovable — has turned lovers into sex offenders.

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