Donna Coker

Restorative Justice, Navajo Peacemaking and Domestic Violence

I argue that RJ processes may be beneficial for some women who experience domestic violence, but only if those processes meet five criteria: prioritize victim safety over batterer rehabilitation; offer material as well as social supports for victims; work as part of a coordinated community response; engage normative judgments that oppose gendered domination as well as violence; and do not make forgiveness a goal of the process. I review my earlier study of Navajo Peacemaking in light of these criteria. I also explore the significant differences between Peacemaking and other processes that are said to be derived from Indigenous justice models, noting in particular that the process is completely controlled by the Navajo Nation.

Race, Poverty, and the Crime-Centered Response to Domestic Violence A Comment on Linda Mills’s Insult to Injury: Rethinking Our Responses to Intimate Abuse

Linda Mills (2003) criticizes our current crime-centered approach to domestic violence. I share her concern that this approach is harmful for women (or at least, for some women). I disagree, however, with Mills’s analysis and with the reform proposal that flows from that analysis. As I describe in this essay, Mills focuses mostly on psychological harms rather than material and social conditions. The result is to diminish the importance of power in understanding the phenomenon of domestic violence, the political position of the battered women’s movement, and the design of an appropriate response.

Foreword: Addressing the Real World of Racial Injustice in the Criminal Justice System

U.S. Supreme Court criminal procedure jurisprudence inhabits an unreal world where law enforcement abuse of power and racist law enforcement practices are rare. The defendant who attempts to challenge this “raceless world” by making a claim of racially biased prosecution faces the nearly impossible task of proving that prosecutors acted with an intent to discriminate. The Supreme Court’s opinions in United States v. Armstrong and United States v. Bass made this task all that more difficult by holding that to gain discovery to support a selective prosecution claim, the defendant must first prove that “similarly situated” whites were treated more favorably. As Gabriel Chin summarizes: “one cannot even get discovery without evidence, and one can rarely get evidence which will satisfy a court without discovery.” In this article, I address the “real world” of criminal law enforcement. In the first section, I discuss the overwhelming empirical evidence of the criminal justice system’s unjust and unequal treatment of African Americans and Latinos. In section two, I criticize the Court’s response in Armstrong and Bass to claims of racially biased prosecution, demonstrating that the “similarly situated” standard is an indeterminate standard: by focusing on one potential area of similarity and ignoring others, courts hostile to these claims easily find that the defendant has failed to meet his burden. Finally, in the third section, I discuss the most prominent rationale for race disparities in federal drug enforcement arrests and prosecution: federal agents are focusing on violent street gangs engaged in large-scale drug trafficking and these gangs are predominantly African American in membership. The validity of the claim is weakened by research that finds that most federal prisoners convicted on drug charges are non-violent offenders and most are not affiliated with a criminal organization. Furthermore, it is largely impossible to disaggregate racial differences in arrests and prosecution that are the result of enforcement patterns from those that are the result of actual differences in offending. In the final analysis, the decision to define some drug sellers as gang members, some organizations as “gangs,” and to ascribe the violent behavior of some gang members to that of others is wholly within the discretion of the prosecutor and not subject to proof requirements. In the final section, I examine the potential for change in the racist operation of the criminal justice system. Changing white misperceptions of crime and criminal offending have the potential to result in legislative and policy changes. I identify four obstacles to changing white perceptions: (1) deeply imbedded racist stereotypes of black criminality; (2) the tendency of whites to understand race discrimination only in terms of intentional acts of a bad actor; (3) the invisibility of white privilege to whites. In conclusion, I examine the Innocence Movement for its potential to be a vehicle for challenging white support, or complacency regarding, racial injustice in the criminal justice system.

Domestic Violence and Social Justice: A Structural Intersectional Framework for Teaching About Domestic Violence

My Domestic Violence and Social Justice law school course is organized around a structural intersectional framework to encourage students to recognize how structural inequalities inform the types of abuse perpetrated, individual and community responses to abuse, meanings that a victim ascribes to abuse, and factors that increase the risk of abuse. The course challenges the dominant neoliberal ideology focus on individual responsibility that eclipses shared responsibility. The course combines experiential exercises, a presentation by members of a community-based survivor organization, discussion of a hypothetical case with a legal practitioner, and court observation to help students apply theoretical insights to practical issues of individual representation and policy-making.

Introduction: Pedagogies of Domestic Violence.

We have been conducting research on, teaching about, and advocating against domestic violence and other forms of gender violence for a combined total of more than 60 years. Not surprisingly, we have observed significant shifts in how we understand domestic violence and its relationship to other forms of violence and inequality, how we configure and implement our teaching objectives, and the place of the study of domestic violence within higher education. Our courses on domestic violence are now taught as a regular part of the curriculum in our respective academic homes: Madelaine Adelman is an anthropologist in a social research and interdisciplinary justice studies faculty, and Donna Coker is a legal scholar with a background in social work who is part of a law school faculty. We teach about domestic violence because we want to ensure that our students, whether they already are or may become parents, voters, or frontline workers such as law enforcement officers, lawyers, social movement activists, and social service agency staff (Wies & Haldane, 2011), understand “that social inequalities are not ‘natural,’ but rather are the result of . . . policies and social practices” (Coker, 2016, 1434), and “gain knowledge of and empathy for the constrained ‘choices’ facing battered women, understand the frequent disjuncture between ‘leaving’ and safety, and close the gap between cultural perceptions and lived realities” (Adelman, Rosenberg, & Hobart, 2016, p. 1451). We teach about domestic violence because, frankly, we are weary of mainstream accounts that continue to blame “bad apples” rather than a society that devalues women’s lives, discern between “good” deserving women and “bad” ones undeserving of public support, and fail to address root causes of this phenomenon in effective, inclusive, and progressive ways. We hope our students can draw on decades of individual and community-based organizing against domestic violence to inform their responses to this entrenched social problem. This special issue grew out of an invited roundtable titled “Structural Inequality and Violence Against Women” at the Law & Society Association annual meetings held in San Francisco in 2011, when colleagues exchanged classroom experiences and