Interview with professor Tamar Pitch: Feminism and the uses of criminal law

I. Presentation

Tamar Pitch is Professor of Legal Philosophy and Sociology of Law at the University of Perugia Law Department. She is the director of the journal “Studi sulla Questione Criminale”, and is a frequent contributor to other Italian and foreign journals. In 2007, she was awarded the Premio Capalbio for her book La Societa della prevenzione. She was nominated Distinguished Foreign Scholar of 1999 by the American Criminological Society. In her books, articles and research, professor Tamar Pitch has worked on crime and social justice, deviance and social control, law and gender, human rights, issues of equality and discrimination, and, most recently, the privatization of formerly public policies, services and spaces.[3]

II. Context

In recent years, women´s, feminist, and sexual-gender diversity movements have questioned various institutions, including academic ones, questioning the centers of knowledge production and the professional curriculum. Of particular interest here, first of all, are social protests focused on the defense of life through adherence to the growing #MeToo and Ni Una Menos movements that had led to international mobilizations against femicides, transfemicides and transvesticides. To a comparable magnitude, the so-called “green tide” has unleashed an important legal, political and cultural movement focused on abortion regulations considering both health and restrictions on the decision-making freedoms of pregnant people. Finally, a complex plot that involves social protests for the recognition of sex work that involve tensions between the mobilization of organized prostitutes and certain sectors of feminism.

In the open demands of feminisms in the Latin American scenario we are faced with the possibility of tackling contemporary feminist problems taking into account the crossroads between citizenship, rights and the State crossed by the growing debates about the uses of punitivism, and testify possible approaches regarding the demands of both feminist movements and the movements of sexual-gender dissidence towards rights and justice. In the context of these debates, we wanted to have a conversation with professor Tamar Pitch about the challenges for feminisms when facing punitivism. We spoke with Professor Tamar Pitch about the keys that can allow us to understand these social phenomena from her perspective from criminal legal sociology.

In this interview, professor Tamar Pitch addresses some central topics in which feminist movements have made use of criminal law to organize their claims and the law itself has also acquired expressive feminist features. Being questions possibly typical of a “global agenda” of feminism, professor Tamar Pitch points out her point of view regarding the right to abortion, the growing use of the figure of the victim and security policies, as well as the dissent around the recognition of sexual work in the framework of the expansion of the “Nordic model” of abolitionism. This interview is part of the course Contemporary Feminist Problems in which Tamar Pitch is a visiting professor.

III. Interview

1. In your book Limited Responsibilities: Social Movements and Criminal Justice you show how social actors, in social conflicts, resort to criminal law. Considering some clues from this proposal, how can we think of a certain tension between the punishment of the bodies of women, trans, transvestites, transsexuals, intersex, lesbians and gays in relation to the strategies of criminal punishment of certain sectors of both the feminist movement and the sexual dissent movement facing the issue of violence related to gender, sexuality and reproduction?

The present cultural climate is very different from the one in which women’s movements and feminisms emerged in the early 70s (I am here talking about the Italian situation, the one I know better). At the time, all social movements were fiercely anti-institutional and anti-authoritarian, and their critique of the criminal justice system resonated with similar critiques coming from various sectors of society, prisoners and guards included. Today, our cultural climate is rife with what has been called penal populism. But there is another reason, I believe, for the turn to criminal law by the collective actors you mention. Criminal law and language are powerful symbolic tools that have been used to legitimize one’s demands and therefore oneselves as political actors. Today, the language of criminalization has become the most used by many collective actors, as assumption of the status of “victim” appears the only way to have “voice” and have some kind of political leverage. The shift from “oppression” to “victimization”, and recourse to the criminal justice system, have also been helped by the adoption of the term “violence” to indicate all that is supposed to impact negatively on the lives of people.

2. In your book Un diritto per due. La costruzione giuridica di genere, sesso e sessualità you show different feminist strategies related to the decriminalization of abortion. How do you observe agreements within the feminist movement regarding the decriminalization of abortion and, simultaneously, a radical disagreement regarding the decriminalization of sex work?

The prohibition of abortion is first of all the denial to women of one of the first rights which have been granted in the history of western civilization, i.e. habeas corpus. This limitation to women’s freedom goes together with the criminalization or the stigmatization of their sexual freedom, as it is clear in the old dichotomy good women / bad women that underlines most discourses and laws dealing with what is called “prostitution”. Normative heterosexuality, on the other hand, oppresses not only women, but all those identifying with what you call “dissident sexualities”. At the core, there is the defense of a traditional family model, equated with what is not only normal, but also “natural”: a man, a woman and their progeny. Compulsive heterosexuality, prohibition of abortion, stigmatization of sexual freedom gives to men, de facto, control over women, just as the stigmatization of “dissident sexualities” is functional to the maintenance of this model. From a legal reform point of view: abortion should simply disappear from penal codes, thus recognizing that asymmetry between women and men in human reproduction which until now has been reversed by law, by giving men a power they do not have in nature.

Prostitution has always been a contentious issue within feminism. While abortion clearly addresses the question of women’s freedom, prostitution has more ambivalent aspects. On the one hand, since most prostitutes are women and most clients are men, it indicates both an asymmetry of power between the sexes and the way most men interpret their sexuality. It is true that most women sell sexual services because they have few alternatives and also that some (or many) are coerced into prostitution, though probably sexual trafficking is being exaggerated.  On the other hand, selling sexual services, rather than, for example, working in a factory or in other underpaid, irregular or dangerous jobs is considered, by many prostitutes’ collectives, a legitimate choice, which these collectives demand not only to be fully decriminalized, but also de-stigmatized and legally recognized. The conflict between prostitutes’ collectives and a consistent part of the feminist movement is today exacerbated by this last’s request of the universal adoption of the so-called Nordic model, which calls for the “abolition of prostitution” through the criminalization of clients. Such demand is based on the idea that prostitution is an extreme case of gender violence.

3. Within feminisms, attempts to position themselves as victims have long been questioned. In your book La Societa della prevenzione you suggest that a certain model of victim reconfigured our understanding of citizenship and, in relation to that, a certain tendency towards the “privatization” of prevention. Could you elaborate on this proposal?

In the past 30 years the status of “victim” has conquered center stage in our cultural and political context, in relation with a number of processes which go under the name of “neoliberalism”. Nowadays, public discourse appears to divide society between the “good” and the “bad”, where the good are also the potential victims of the bad. The “good”, of course, and therefore the “victims”, are to be considered the only real citizens.

4. Professor, one last question in order to collect a good part of the reflections developed here. Can security policies serve the egalitarian purposes of the feminist movement?

Security policies are often justified as necessary for the protection of women (plus children and older people). Yet, if we were to extend the rationale of these policies all the way down, in order to protect women, we should expel all men from cities, countries, the entire planet. We know that women are more in danger at home than in public spaces, so that the sterilization of these last, pursued by security policies, while advocated on behalf of women, actually have as their standard subject an adult, not too rich, but neither poor, man. Security policies supplanted social welfare policies: yet, only these last can build trust, diminish insecurity, ensure a degree of equality among people.

IV. Further thoughts

The interview with professor Tamar Pitch allows us to critically investigate some feminist demands through which certain rights are vindicated and the public policies of the State are questioned. In this regard, Tamar Pitch invites us to think about how criminological language has been used by feminist movements to legitimize themselves and articulate their own voice. With the recent case of Argentina and Colombia[4], in Latin America bills are disputed that fight for a mixed criminal regime of access to voluntary interruption of pregnancy, and even a complete decriminalization of abortion. Without ignoring the need to negotiate in conflictive terrain, Tamar Pitch suggests an exciting horizon in which abortion should disappear from the Penal Codes.

Regarding the question of the status of prostitution, Tamar Pitch highlights how sex worker groups have activated a decriminalizing discourse while denouncing different forms of exploitation. Although this conflict is not new in feminisms, the context in which it takes place is novel, where in various regions the abolition of prostitution struggles for the application of the “Nordic model” of criminalization of the demand for sexual services. As a last aspect, professor Tamar Pitch encourages us to reflect on the way in which feminist demands have been conveyed in security policies to the detriment of welfare policies that could facilitate greater autonomy for women. An aspect that, without a doubt, forces us to investigate how it is articulated in different regional contexts.