Feminist Approaches to Criminal Law

Handbook of Criminal Law, (Eds. Markus Dubber and Tatjana Hörnle) OUP 2014

20 Pages Posted: 24 Mar 2017

See all articles by Prabha Kotiswaran

Prabha Kotiswaran

King's College London - The Dickson Poon School of Law

Date Written: December 22, 2013

Abstract

The criminal law has a special place in the history of feminist struggles for law reform. Indeed in many countries, the women’s movement was inaugurated with the struggle for criminal law reform, typically on rape. Conversely, the feminist legal critique has had a tremendous influence on criminal law, doctrinally, procedurally and institutionally. Indeed some have claimed it “as the only academic movement of the 1980s that made an impact on criminal law.” Bold doctrinal law reform even in an area like rape, one of the earliest sites of feminist intervention, has however become enmeshed in the intractable stickiness of patriarchal social norms, which are hard to displace. Even so, over the few past decades, the feminist project in domestic criminal law has morphed into a hugely successful intervention at the international and transnational levels producing a set of unintended consequences that feminists themselves are increasingly perturbed by. In this chapter, I offer an overview of the feminist project in criminal law, mapping in particular its rising influence while also elaborating on the stakes involved and the costs and benefits of these successes. I seek to reveal various strands of the internal feminist critique of such successes, which suggest that feminists need to pause and reassess their non-reflexive resort to the state and the criminal law as a means of furthering feminist goals.

Suggested Citation

Kotiswaran, Prabha, Feminist Approaches to Criminal Law (December 22, 2013). Handbook of Criminal Law, (Eds. Markus Dubber and Tatjana Hörnle) OUP 2014 , Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2939176

Prabha Kotiswaran (Contact Author)

King's College London - The Dickson Poon School of Law ( email )

Somerset House East Wing
Strand
London, WC2R 2LS
United Kingdom

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