Rebekah Bradley and Katie Davino hear similar comments repeatedly from the women they interview for their research at the University of South Carolina in clinical psychology and women's studies.
Prison is the safest place they've ever lived.
Violence and the threat of violence are mechanisms of control employed to achieve and sustain the dominance of one group or individual over the lives and resources of another. Every striking worker does not have to lose his or her job for other workers to fear striking. Every woman does not have to be raped and treated as the criminal rather than the victim by the legal system for all women to fear speaking up when they are raped. If we fail to address the ways that state-sanctioned violence, including the violence that takes place within families and in the neighborhoods of poor women and women of color, is a fundamental element in the reproduction of race, class, gender, and sexuality hierarchies, we will have missed the opportunity to clearly understand these systems and to work to dismantle them while seeking an inclusive and humane social order. Lynn Weber is director of Women's Studies at the University of South Carolina.