College campus-based surveys of sexual assault in the United States have generated one of the most high-profile and contentious figures in the history of social science: the ‘1 in 5’ statistic. Referring to the number of women who have experienced either attempted or completed sexual assault since their time in college, ‘1 in 5’ has done significant work in making the prevalence of this experience legible to the public and to policy-makers. Here I examine how sexual assault surveys have participated (...) in structuring the ontology of date/acquaintance rape from the 1980s to today. I review the foundational work of feminist social scientists Diana Russell and Mary Koss, with particular attention to the methodological practices through which the concept of the ‘hidden’ or ‘unacknowledged’ rape victim emerged. I then examine a selection of early 21st-century sexual assault surveys and highlight the ongoing preoccupation with survey methodology in responses to their results. I argue that the survey itself has been a central actor in the ontological politics of sexual assault, and only by closely attending to its performativity can we understand the paradoxical persistence both of critical responses to the ‘1 in 5’ statistic and of its effective deployment in anti-violence policy. (shrink)

Building on recent feminist scholarship on the complicity of feminist antiviolence movements in the build-up of mass incarceration, this essay analyzes the epistemic occupation of feminist antiviolence work by carceral logic, taking the Gender-Responsive Justice and Community Accountability movements as countervailing examples. Both strategies claim to be a feminist response to violence. Gender-Responsive Justice arises from feminist criminology and has genealogical roots in the American prison reformatory movement. Community Accountability stems from grassroots intersectional and decolonial feminisms that are fundamentally at (...) odds with the professionalization and state-centrism of the mainstream antiviolence movement. We argue that Gender-Responsive Justice is a form of carceral humanism that repackages carceral control as the caring provision of social services, while Community Accountability advances a radically creative abolitionist and decolonial project of an irreducibly epistemological order. (shrink)

In 1977 Michel Foucault contemplated the idea of punishing rape only as a crime of violence, while in 1978 he argued that non-coercive sex between adults and minors should be decriminalized entirely. Feminists have consistently criticized these suggestions by Foucault. This paper argues that these feminist responses have failed to sufficiently understand the theoretical motivations behind Foucault's statements on sex-crime legislation reform, and will offer a new feminist appraisal of Foucault's suggestions.