IEFV | How Minneapolis Women Confront Interpersonal Violence, Neighborhood Crime, & State Criminalization in the Age of Policing Reform

By Amber Joy Powell

Prior research illustrates how race-class subjugated communities are over-policed and under-protected, producing high rates of victimization by other community members and the police. Yet few studies explore how gender and race structure dual frustration, despite a long line of Black feminist scholarship on the interpersonal, gender-based, and state violence Black and other women of color face. Drawing on interviews with 53 women in Minneapolis from 2017 to 2019, Powell’s article examines how gendered racial vulnerability to both crime and criminalization shape dual frustration toward the law. Powell’s findings illustrate that police fail to protect women of color from neighborhood and gender-based violence, while simultaneously targeting them and their families. Despite their spatial proximity to women of color, white women remained largely shielded from the dual frustration of crime and criminalization. Attention to the gendered racial dimensions of dual frustration offers an intersectional framework for understanding women's vulnerability to violence and cultural orientations toward the law.

About the Speaker

Amber Joy Powell is a first-year Assistant Professor of Sociology & Criminology at the University of Iowa. Her primary research and teaching interests include gender-based violence against racialized communities, crime, punishment, and law. More specifically, her scholarship examines how legal institutions, such as courts, police, and detention centers, perpetuate gendered and racialized violence against criminalized communities of color. She has worked extensively with Michelle Phelps interviewing residents of North Minneapolis about their experiences of victimization, policing, and policing reform. Her most recent work examines how youth detention centers respond to youth claims of sexual victimization. Thus far, her research has been published in Gender & Society and Law & Society Review, and the American Journal of Sociology.

This event is approved for 1.0 hour of Minimum Continuing Legal Education Credit by the State Bar of California. UCI School of Law is a State Bar-approved MCLE provider.

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About the IEFV
The mission of the UCI Initiative to End Family Violence (IEFV) is to be the premier site for research, education, clinical care, and community collaboration on family violence prevention and intervention.