Training Synopsis:

For the last forty years, criminalization has been the primary response to violence against women in the United States. One serious consequence of the turn to the criminal legal system has been the increasing criminalization of victims of violence. Victims of violence are regularly arrested, prosecuted, convicted, and punished for crimes related to their own victimization. This happens, in part, because the criminal legal system only protects “perfect” victims, who have traditionally been portrayed as meek, passive, and more often women. But most victims of violence are “imperfect” victims in some way—they fail to conform to these victimization stereotypes. The “perfect victim” myth is deeply intertwined with systems of economic inequality: survivors who lack stable housing, reproductive autonomy, living wages, or healthcare access are more likely to be viewed as “imperfect” and thus undeserving of protection. Meanwhile, the criminalization of survival strategies—from sex work to substance use—further marginalizes those whose economic circumstances push them outside the narrow bounds of “respectability.” And in a criminal legal system that only recognizes one victim and one offender, once a victim of violence is labelled an offender or worse, a criminal defendant, their victimization is no longer legible to the system. This training will introduce the idea of imperfect victims, trace how (beginning in childhood) imperfect victims become trapped in the criminal legal system, and suggest policy interventions to prevent the revictimization of imperfect victims.

About the Trainer:

Leigh Goodmark, Associate Dean of Research and Faculty Development and Marjorie Cook Professor of Law
University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law

Leigh Goodmark (she/hers) is the Marjorie Cook Professor of Law and director of the Gender, Prison, and Trauma Clinic at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law. She is the author of Imperfect Victims: Criminalized Survivors and the Promise of Abolition Feminism (University of California Press 2023); Decriminalizing Domestic Violence: A Balanced Policy Approach to Intimate Partner Violence (University of California Press 2018) and A Troubled Marriage: Domestic Violence and the Legal System (New York University 2012). She is the co-editor of The Criminalization of Violence Against Women: Comparative Perspectives (Oxford 2023) and Comparative Perspectives on Gender Violence: Lessons from Efforts Worldwide (Oxford 2015). Professor Goodmark’s work on intimate partner violence has appeared in numerous journals, law reviews, and publications, including Violence Against Women, the New York Times, the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, the Harvard Journal on Gender and the Law, and the Yale Journal on Law and Feminism. From 2003 to 2014, Professor Goodmark was on the faculty at the University of Baltimore School of Law, where she served as Director of Clinical Education and Co-director of the Center on Applied Feminism. From 2000 to 2003, Professor Goodmark was the Director of the Children and Domestic Violence Project at the American Bar Association Center on Children and the Law. Before joining the Center on Children and the Law, Professor Goodmark represented clients in the District of Columbia in custody, visitation, child support, restraining order, and other civil matters. Professor Goodmark is a graduate of Yale University and Stanford Law School.