Using a decolonial lens and centring the Global South, Feminism, Violence Against Women and Law Reform: Decolonial Lessons from Ecuador offers a re-theorising of the relationships between criminal law, gender, coloniality, human rights, and neoliberalism.
The book addresses the role of feminism in producing criminal law-centric responses to violence against women (VAW) by mapping the history of feminist-led criminal law reform in Ecuador, including during the time of the left-leaning regime that was in power between 2007 and 2017. Given that the state continued to expand penality during this “post-neoliberal” period, the book invites questions regarding the links between “carceral feminism”, neoliberal globalisation, and the co-option of social movements. Ecuador’s post-neoliberal Constitution recognised legal pluralism, the rights of Mother Nature, and Sumak Kawsay (the Andean approach to living well), but these anti-colonial perspectives did not have an impact on the framing of VAW.
The role of non-feminist actors in reframing feminist proposals, the lingering effects of colonial approaches to domestic violence and family life, and the role of human rights-based discourses in informing feminist justifications of penality are key phenomena that explain the punitive turn in the domain of violence against women.
Dr Silvana Tapia Tapia
Dr Silvana Tapia Tapia is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Birmingham Law School, University of Birmingham.
