Harmful Help: Black Women Intimate Partner Violence Survivors' Interactions with the Criminal Legal System

Background and Purpose: The criminal legal system continues to fail United States (US) Black women intimate partner violence (IPV) survivors. US Black women remain reticent to engage with these formal providers because their calls for urgent intervention are generally met with delayed and insufficient support, discrimination and retaliatory actions and added trauma in the wake of such harmful responses. The literature is replete with documented harms of these singular systems. Yet, a dearth of literature interrogates the continuum of interactions and the ways the police and court system intersect to preclude their immediate help-seeking efforts. The aim of this study is to explicate Black women survivors’ interactions with the criminal legal system during IPV help-seeking.

Methods: Using a community partnered participatory research (CPPR) approach, 30 in-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with women who have experienced a violent episode within the previous year. This study was part of a larger formative study to identify the psychosocial processes of help-seeking among US Black women IPV survivors. Purposive and snowball sampling methods were employed. Survivors who were seeking assistance from the domestic violence service provision system and/or domestic violence ministries at their church participated in the study. Data was collected during one 60-120-minute, face-to-face interview. Interviews were conducted in a private office where participants could speak freely. To further ensure survivors’ confidentiality, a Certificate of Confidentiality (CoC) was obtained from the NIH. To avoid the risk of coercion, audio recordings commenced upon obtaining participants’ approval. We employed a grounded approach and constructs from anticarceral feminism for thematic analysis. Atlas.ti was utilized for data management.

Results: Findings reveal the ways that Black women believe that the continuum of the criminal legal system have been harmful during their IPV help-seeking. Importantly, women identified the ways that intersecting oppressions, specifically the overlapping of oppressions resulting from their race-class-gender identities have been the basis for marginalization during their engagement. Survivors further noted that dysfunctional law and ongoing safety concerns have contributed to their criminalization during help-seeking. They further provided insight into the ways that collective community-based responses to all forms of IPV may be a means of more fully supporting this historically marginalized population of survivors.

Conclusions and Implications: Despite continued calls for reform, US Black women IPV survivors are harmed by the very system that is supposed to provide crisis intervention: the criminal legal system. Regardless of how dire their need, Black women’s experiences underscore the urgent need to examine and center Black women’s experiences in the transformation of the criminal legal system in a way that exacts justice rather than exposes the most vulnerable survivors to the most harm.