MAG A Z INE SENR NAM E (A MA PAGE ) JU LIANA | STER ANALYSIS
JUSTICE FOR VICTIMS OF SEXUAL VIOLENCE BEYOND THE COURTROOM HOWHOW T HETHE BLBLACK ACK LILIVES V E S MATTER M AT T E RMOVEMENT MOV E MEIS N T IS PLEADING FOR A CRIMINAL LAW REVOLUTION PLE A DING FOR A CRIMIN A L L AW RE VOLU T ION
T
he Black Lives Matter Movement (BLM) is not a single-issue movement, despite its central focus on racist police violence. It questions the whole criminal law system and whether justice is being fairly distributed by all—in the USA and beyond. In this critical moment, many reflect on whether the criminal law system is synonymous of justice for the victims of sexual violence. Associations such as Critical Resistance, INCITE! or Spring Up provide insight into how alternative forms of justice are not only possible, but are already being practiced in some communities. The Black Lives Matter movement
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advocates for civil disobedience in the face of racist police brutality, being responsible for the massive popular reaction to the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, among others. Despite this central focus on police violence, this movement has revealed itself to be a Pandora's box in which everything citizens across the world assumed to be rightful, democratic and egalitarian about their criminal systems was put into question. Calls to defund the police spread like wildfire among protesters throughout the USA, with crucial repercussions—in Minneapolis, the site of George Floyd's murder and birth of this year’s protest movement, the local police pledged to dismantle the department entirely, as City Council members
declared they would "end policing as we know it." This has, until this moment, mostly meant the reallocation of some resources towards the Minneapolis health department and not complete abolition, which has garnered various reactions. Such arguments for police and prison abolition, while never before as mainstream as they are now, are not new in the USA context. They have originated mostly from the anti-racist movement in which activists have advocated for the idea since the 1980s. It is not a coincidence that this debate primarily arose in the United States. With a prison population of around 2.3 million people - or one-fifth of the world’s incarcerated, according to the consequences of having been, for decades, a society that has
