Imperfect Victims: Criminalized Survivors and the Promise of Abolition Feminism

It’s estimated that one in three women around the world experiences intimate partner violence. The United Nations refers to it as the shadow pandemic.
Leigh Goodmark’s latest book, Imperfect Victims: Criminalized Survivors and the Promise of Abolition Feminism, explores the American criminal legal system’s response to gender-based violence. Goodmark argues that the system fails to decrease or prevent this violence - instead, she says, it punishes the victims.
In a discussion of Imperfect Victims, Goodmark blends case studies and statistics, stories of criminalized survivors, and analysis of how the legal system harms them. As one reviewer writes, the author will “challenge us to rethink long-ingrained notions of violence, safety, healing, and punishment and to work towards creating the world we want to see.”
Goodmark, the Marjorie Cook Professor of Law at the University of Maryland Frances King Carey School of Law, co-directs the Clinical Law Program, and directs the Gender, Prison, and Trauma Clinic, which represents incarcerated and formerly incarcerated survivors of violence and trauma. She also serves as an adjunct faculty member with the Monash Gender and Family Violence Prevention Centre in Melbourne, Australia.