Violence against women inside, outside, and around prisons
In dominant legal discourse, criminalisation, prosecution and punishment are inherent aspects of the justice paradigm. However, multiple forms of injustice and extreme violence are systematically reproduced inside and around penitentiary institutions; that is, not only inside prisons but beyond their porous walls. For example, women who provide care work for incarcerated people also suffer the effects of imprisonment. At the same time, the legitimacy of the prison is steadily reaffirmed through domestic and international legal mandates on mobilising the penal apparatus in response to human rights violations. It is thus necessary to evaluate the far-reaching implications of prioritising carceral punishment as a primary signifier of justice within international human rights (IHR).
Carceral violence against women (VAW) has been widely investigated by disciplines like criminology, psychology and socio-legal studies. Likewise, feminist research has unveiled the harm inflicted by the penal system on women -particularly those who are racialised, stigmatised, and impoverished- including victim-survivors of gender-based violence (Tapia Tapia 2021; Neumann 2023). However, there is less systematic research regarding the penal harms inflicted on women who support incarcerated relatives and friends. Although insightful work exists on the ‘secondary prisonisation’ of the families and communities of prisoners (Rodriguez and Turanovic 2018), a socio-legal approach that incorporates feminist political economy to study reproductive work in connection to prisons, is a pending task.
Building on recent fieldwork with feminist anti-carceral collectives in Ecuador and drawing from the work of feminist researchers from various disciplines, I am developing a theoretical concept I term ‘penal violence against women’. The concept refers to structural and cross-cutting forms of violence that the penal system distinctively inflicts (cis and trans) women, through its laws, institutions, procedures and acts of authority, regardless of women’s involvement in a criminal trial or state of incarceration. In this way, the concept can be used to analyse the exploitation of women’s underpaid and unpaid labour to sustain life in prisons, the imposition of ‘prison taxes’ and extortion, and the bureaucratic and procedural violence they suffer in their encounters with the penal system. Penal violence shares characteristics with other forms of VAW, including the exploitation of women’s bodies and labour for the benefit of colonial capitalism. It is thus crucial that IHR scholars and advocates consider these ‘indirect’ harms and reexamine their commitments to ‘human rights penality’ (Mavronicola 2024; Tapia Tapia 2023).
Penal violence as gender-based violence
In Ecuador, many women, especially those subalternised by the violence of poverty, racism and misogyny, have historically been deprived of basic resources to live with dignity. The state has also provoked a disproportionate surveillance and persecution of marginalised women, criminalising and punishing their survival strategies. For instance, non-white women tend to be hyper-policed when they enter the ‘informal’ economy, as their autonomous trading activities in the streets are repressed (Mujeres de Frente 2021). When they are forced to enter the illegalised economy to survive, they are also persecuted (Coba Mejía 2015; Aguirre Salas, Léon, and Ribadeneira González 2020). This oppression has been suffered especially by indigenous, Afro-descendant and rural women and girls.
In connection with the above, most women in Ecuador are imprisoned for non-violent survival offences, such as petty crimes against property and drug micro-trafficking, largely perpetrated to support their families’ livelihoods (Fleetwood 2014; Torres Angarita 2007). Furthermore, the procedures, or rather, labyrinths, that many women must navigate as defendants are not commensurate with their precarious economic situation. In fact, penal processes tend to selectively persecute women who cannot afford quality legal counsel (Coba Mejía 2015).
At the same time, when women are incarcerated, penal harms are inflicted on their families and communities. For example, detained women stop providing care that is vital to many people, as it is generally them who care for children, the elderly, people living with illnesses and disabilities, etc. This labour is typically unpaid and adds to women’s (under)paid working hours. Also, when women are incarcerated, young children are taken with them: in Ecuador, around 75% of women deprived of their liberty are mothers of children under the age of 18, and there are more than 50 children under 3 years of age living in prisons (Manrique 2024). After they turn 3, they are not legally allowed to remain with their mothers, which often causes an abrupt separation that can result in child abandonment or (violent) institutionalisation when they have no one ‘outside’ to take them in.
As we see, ‘criminals’ are not the only ones punished by the penal apparatus, and coercive power has a differentiated impact on women’s reproductive work. This is also the case of women relatives of incarcerated people who provide affective and material support to men. This includes partners, mothers, sisters, daughters and other women in the immediate environment of prisoners. Due to the rigid gender stereotypes and economic gaps that persist in many societies, women do not stop fulfilling their existing reproductive labour when they take charge of the processes and costs of imprisonment. This ranges from covering expenses that the state fails to pay to overseeing the administrative and judicial processes in which inmates are involved (RIMUF 2022).
According to available estimates, about 85% of the people who cover the costs of incarcerated individuals in Ecuador are women (Kaleidos 2021). These costs include food, medicines, toiletries, water, access to the commissary, etc. Women ‘outside’ must often go into debt, sell their belongings or extend their working hours to be able to make these payments (CDH 2023). According to a regional survey in Latin America, 33% of women had to start working because of their family member’s incarceration, 19% had to take additional work to increase the family’s income, and 12% kept their original job but increased the number of working hours (RIMUF 2022).
In addition, due to the distant ‘mega-prisons’ to which some people are transferred from their localities -often without clear motivations- visiting an incarcerated loved one can involve travel and accommodation costs. This systemic, gender-based economic violence is not only permitted, but inflicted by the state, which has a legal obligation to cover the needs of incarcerated individuals but fails to do it. There is substantial evidence that prisoners in Ecuador do not have access to sufficient food, acceptable hygiene, or basic health services (CDH 2023). More recently, in the context of prison militarisation, there have been allegations of inhuman and degrading treatment and starvation (CDH 2024; Amenesty International 2024). Again, it is mostly women who are speaking out against abuse, taking on grassroots political organising to protest the extreme violence that prisoners suffer, and also encountering state repression (Ponce 2024).
Furthermore, women are frequent targets of extortion by the organised crime gangs that are terrorising the country in partnership with transnational mafias (Goette-Luciak 2024). There are also indications of state agents’ involvement in drug trafficking circles (Reuters 2023). Although visits are currently suspended due to the ongoing militarisation (which is itself highly problematic), it was ‘normally’ the case that payments had to be made in exchange for the ‘right’ to bring in basic supplies or to be able to purchase products from the commissary. Women have also reported violent strip searches when they visit, which could amount to sexual violence.
In addition, it is also women who typically respond to the needs and losses of men when they are released from prison. They receive them, if they manage to survive, more violent and affected by the cruelty of the prison experience. Some prisoners are released in a precarious health conditions and others are reported dead without any detailed explanation of the causes (Amenesty International 2024). The government is failing to acknowledge and act on the violence perpetrated by a military whose support is largely required for a government to stay in power in a fast-declining country.
As a conclusion
The preceding facts and concepts demonstrate the need for more comprehensive and systematic research on penal violence against women to produce a new, empirically informed analytical framework that allows us to reshape legal thinking and persuade policy makers and legislators to take action. This scrutiny should extend beyond the boundaries of legal scholarship and encompass the practices of human rights advocacy. Penal commitments within human rights must be rethought in light of penal violence against women and its devastating consequences. This is a form of gender-based violence with serious economic, political and social consequences. In the wake of the carceral massacres and militarisation in Ecuador, as well as prison violence in many regions of the world, penal violence against women marks an urgent agenda for interdisciplinary socio-legal research.
References
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