Caitlin Wiesner, "Between the Street and the State: Black Women’s Anti-Rape Activism Amid the War on Crime" (U Pennsylvania, 2025)

New Books in African American Studies · Dec 11, 2025 · 1h 12m

Beginning in the 1970s, a series of government agencies established to carry out the federal “war on crime” offered financial and ideological support to the fledgling feminist movement against sexual violence. These entities promoted the carceral tactics of policing, prosecution, and punishment as the only viable means of controlling rape, and they expected anti-rape organizers to embrace them. Yet Black women anti-rape organizers viewed police as a source of violence within their communities, not a solution to it. Between the Street and the State: Black Women’s Anti-Rape Activism amid the…