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.