"WHAT KIND OF POLICE DO YOU CALL ON THE POLICE?"
Gender, Sexual Violence and Continuities in Black Freedom Struggles.
Althea Legal-Miller
November 17th 2021
For the fourth seminar in our series, Dr. Althea Legal-Miller, Senior Lecturer at Canterbury Christ Church University, presented her research “‘What kind of police do you call on the police?’: Gender, Sexual Violence and Continuities in Black Freedom Struggles.” Her work examines continuities in Black women’s organizing against police sexual violence from 1964 to 2014.
Dr. Legal-Miller explained that sexual violence by police is “prevalent and pervasive” with a long history that is rooted in and inseparable from the very origins of the carceral system. Officers have used their powers of arrest and detention, weapons, and equipment to enact sexual violence through strip searches, pseudo-medical examinations, kidnapping, beatings, and rape. Sexual abuse continues to be the second-highest report of police misconduct after excessive force. 99.1% of these reports are filed against male police officers. Nor is this sexually violent behavior limited only to police, but also the guards and attendants running prisons and jails.
Countless cases demonstrate that officers strategically picked victims based on their estimation of whose testimony was least likely to be taken seriously. Black women have been particularly targeted with this violence, which illustrates how gendered and racialized systems of oppression produce different kinds of state violence. From the Civil Rights Movement to the Movement for Black Lives, police have also used sexual violence as a way to punish women for protesting.
Despite the urgency and pervasiveness of police sexual violence, Dr. Legal-Miller explained that this topic has been largely sidelined within both feminist and civil rights movements. She discussed how “the limits and obstacles of allyship” and respectability politics have contributed to the process of determining which issues “deserve” coordinated national attention by activists.
Accordingly, Black women’s organizing has led the effort to push back against police sexual violence. Through the collecting and sharing of stories from survivor-victims, organizers pushed back against the assumption that police sexual violence was merely a “local” issue. Dr. Legal-Miller’s work traces a fifty year period, juxtaposing the efforts of Dorothy Heights during the Civil Rights Movement with the Oklahoma City Artists for Justice founded in 2014.
The Q&A produced generative discussions on the impact of Andrea Ritchie’s work, the language used to discuss sexual violence, and the role of carceral feminism in shaping responses to police sexual violence. The parallels between police sexual violence in the United States and the United Kingdom were also discussed, especially regarding the legacy of Olive Morris’s organizing work and the responses to Sarah Everard’s murder by a police officer.
