What one first notices about the title of this book is a very clever double entendre. The abusive state refers to not only the life conditions of women who are subjected to sexual violence at home or in the public sphere but also to the character of the governmental actors and institutions involved in the responses to these phenomena. The book is an excellent exploration of how the feminist movement to improve the lives of women affected by rape and battering has been preempted, indeed perhaps hijacked, by the movement for greater criminalization in the United States since the 1970s.
Kristin Bumiller's work includes an interesting and well-documented set of perspectives on the current state of the treatment of sexual violence, including the production of cultural images, the significance of symbolic gang-rape trials, professional discourses on intimate violence, the real lives of battered women, and the implications for international human rights policy. In each of these foci she provides insightful analyses of an agenda gone wrong. The feminist impulse to create humanistic women-centered solutions to structural inequities have been diverted; instead, those “needs” have been reconstructed by professionals who have taken control and have become as undermining of women's autonomy as were their physical abusers. In perhaps one of the two most effective, indeed compelling, segments of the book, Bumiller critiques the agenda of attorneys in rape cases that are orthogonal to the interests of the victim of the violence being prosecuted.
It is common knowledge that defense counsel go to the limit in portraying the rape victim as unsympathetic, either because she was complicit in the events generating the prosecutions or is a sexually promiscuous woman. More illuminating and less studied are the interests of the prosecuting attorneys, which impel them to offer a narrative of rape that meets the simultaneous goals of portraying the alleged perpetrators as lurking, disreputable members of frightening minority groups and the victims as innocent Madonna-like figures.
Via the records from two highly publicized cases, Bumiller effectively demonstrates the latter phenomenon: that it is prosecuting attorneys' assessments of what happened in the course of the sexual violence that they insist be reported in the course of the trial and not the experience of the victim of the attack. In the New Bedford, Massachusetts, gang-rape case that was popularized in the film The Accused, the victim's attempt to fully describe and characterize her experience was short-circuited by the lawyers and the court because it differed from the narrative of the state.
Bumiller also analyzes the equally emblematic case of the “Central Park jogger” who was left for dead but survived, without any memory of the event. Although she was unable to report her experience, the case allowed for the narrative that has become welcome in a neoliberal world: that an upper-middle-class woman (potentially all economically privileged women) was prey for bands of “wilding” minority men. The zeal to ensure that an identified class of perpetrator would be punished for a crime commonly feared by all women, horrifically, led to the conviction and incarceration of several very young black and Hispanic men who spent more than a decade in prison on the basis of miscarriages of justice. Bumiller's thesis is that the impetus to incarcerate as the only resolution to sexual violence has made women pawns of an overreaching, ideologically driven state. The machinery of criminal justice appears to have prospered under this response to the feminist movement's concern about sexual violence, but women have not.
Bumiller's work echoes the findings of other scholars detailing how feminists have been unable to control the consequences of the plans they either set in motion or for which they have provided support in the realm of domestic relations. Lenore Weitzman, in a pathbreaking project more than two decades ago (The Divorce Revolution: The Unintended Social and Economic Consequences for Women and Children, 1985), documented that the no fault reform in divorce law, intended to lessen the stress of families by substituting irreconcilable differences for fault, has had devastating financial consequences for women while proving to be very profitable for men.
Similarly, in The Illusion of Equality: The Rhetoric and Reality of Divorce Reform in 1991, Martha Fineman documented that community property policies, aimed at equalizing claims of men and women to marital property actually privilege husbands who have greater earning power when marriages dissolve. The Fineman research also intersects with Bumiller's work in a very specific way: The professionals who become involved in divorce and child custody disputes (like the social workers handling the cases of sexually exploited women in Bumiller's study) presume that they are more able to make decisions for the “clients” than the clients themselves. In both settings—divorce and sexual violence—pathological situations may be extended rather than resolved, and the voices of women are replaced with those of the police officers, lawyers, social workers, psychologists, and others.
The assessments of numerous feminist scholars reinforce the problem of women losing control over the situations that undermine their health, safety, and well-being, as well as the solutions to same, but Bumiller, through her analyses of both the structural barriers to effective support and the narratives of many women who have experienced sexual abuse and battery, makes a compelling case for change. The changes she envisions entail women retaking control over support systems and regaining the quality of community that marked the feminist movement in the past by providing of shelters, child care, employment assistance, and long-term housing solutions.
In 1989, Carol Smart, a British legal scholar, suggested in Feminism and the Power of Law that women need to reject the law's antifeminist grand theorizing and its unreformably patriarchal quality and turn instead to other institutions that understand our lives and serve our needs. In an Abusive State documents this phenomenon with respect to sexual violence and the potentially more effective responses.
