The Violence of Protection: Policing, Immigration Law, and Asian American Women

Celebrated as a feminist victory upon its passage as part of the Clinton Crime Bill, the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) is a landmark piece of legislation that provides protections for survivors of gender and sexual violence. However, as Lee Ann S. Wang shows in The Violence of Protection, VAWA primarily funds law enforcement efforts to rescue women, and in doing so, creates conditions of racial violence against survivors from communities who are already policed, surveilled, and face immigration enforcement. Through ethnographic fieldwork with legal and social advocates serving Asian American survivors of gender and sexual violence in the San Francisco Bay Area, Wang shows how these advocates grapple with laws which require survivors to cooperate with policing in order to receive protection. Engaging in methodologies of feminist refusal, theories of racial assemblage, and abolition feminisms, The Violence of Protection theorizes the victim as a legal subject and exposes the racial violence enacted when State-provided legal safeguards are leveraged to expand punishment against survivors, their communities, and others.

Lee Ann S. Wang is Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.