This article analyses feminist discourses on the criminalisation of violence against women in Ecuador, after the enactment of a “post-neoliberal” constitution. It responds to arguments in feminist legal theory, which affirm that penal expansion thrives through neoliberal globalisation, and that certain feminists have sponsored this carceral-neoliberal alliance, over and above redistributive concerns. However, in Ecuador, many feminists who participated in a recent criminalisation process also endorsed the post-neoliberal government’s social redistribution programme. Ecuadorian feminism therefore complicates current discussions on carceral and (...) governance feminism, which link penal expansion with neoliberalism and an absence of redistributive concerns. Ecuadorian left-leaning feminists use rights-based frameworks to reconcile penal interventions with potential abuses of coercive power. This allows them to regard criminal justice as minimally problematic within the redistributive agenda they endorse. At the same time, the penal approach of Ecuadorian feminists runs the danger of marginalising legally pluralistic approaches to justice. (shrink)

The argument that the provocation defence is adeeply sexed excuse for murder and should beabolished is often dismissed as polemical. Thisarticle challenges this subordinating strategyfavoured by the law of provocation's apologistsand continues to make the case againstprovocation. Drawing on a range of theoreticalapproaches to questions related to polemic,anger, and ethics, it strives to valorisefeminist and queer anger about provocation'svictim-blaming narratives, while remainingcognisant of poststructuralistproblematisations of both law and law reform.

This article asks if the incorporation of Sumak Kawsay, a concept from Andean philosophy, into the Constitution of Ecuador, has impacted the legal regulation of violence against women. It examines the trajectory of penal reform in the field of domestic violence and suggests that the decolonial shift in the Constitution has failed to significantly disrupt the dominant framework of penality in which gender violence regulation is inscribed. At the same time, feminist demands have been reframed through the formations of criminal (...) law and the dominant political discourse, resulting in provisions that reproduce a positivistic logic and a family protection rationality, with problematic consequences for women’s access to justice on the ground. If securing success in legal reform entails translating emancipatory demands into established and unchallenged penal paradigms, the potential of decolonial notions is overshadowed by the language, formalities and underlying assumptions of criminal law. (shrink)

Most punishment theories acknowledge neither the full extent of the harms which punishment risks, nor the caring practices which punishment entails. Consequently, I shall argue, punishment in most of its current conceptualizations is inconsistent with treating offenders as equals qua persons. The nature of criminal punishment, and of our interactions with offenders in punishment decision-making and delivery, risks causing harm to offenders. Harm is normalized when central to definitions of punishment, desensitizing us to unintended harms and obscuring caring practices. Offenders (...) may be partially silenced and excluded by mainstream criminal justice practices which limit interaction between offenders and practitioners. When we ignore significant harms, or silence and exclude, we treat others as passive non-subjects. This partially objectifies offenders, and is inconsistent with treatment as equals. Penal theories employing harm-centred and harm-normalizing definitions of punishment can provide few resources to help practitioners either avoid, or recognize and respond to, harms. Care ethics, by contrast, motivates the avoidance of harm, ongoing inclusive engagement, and respectful interaction with others. I argue that defining punishment without presupposing harm facilitates the identification of morally problematic harms, and recognition of caring practices. I offer a principled argument, and political and pragmatic supplementary arguments, for responding to offenders without intentional harm and with care. Principles drawn from care ethics can help to strengthen mainstream criminal practices by structuring decision-making and action. Bottom-up alternative criminal justice practices share some values with these proposed guiding principles, allowing a partial test of the principles. I consider examples of restorative justice practices, therapeutic jurisprudence, community justice and other problem-solving court practices, in addition to considering how well mainstream punishment practices measure up to these principles. My analysis illuminates the strengths and weaknesses of the principles, and how they might contribute to securing treatment as equals for offenders in mainstream practices. (shrink)

Over the past 30 years a growing body of scholarship has highlighted the significance of practices of punishment and penality within contemporary Western societies. Penal expansionism, most dramatically evidenced in the United States, has drawn the attention of a raft of commentators, including that of French sociologist Loïc Wacquant. In this essay, Wacquant’s three recent volumes – UrbanOutcasts, Punishing the Poor and Prisons of Poverty – are considered with a particular focus on the theoretical and empirical contours of his over-arching (...) account of the rise of what he calls a ‘new government of social insecurity’. (shrink)