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100 J. Crim. L. & Criminology 1255 (2010)
Lost in Translation: Domestic Violence, the Personal is Political, and the Criminal Justice System

handle is hein.journals/jclc100 and id is 1263 raw text is: 0091-4169/10/10004-1255 THE JOURNAL OF CRIMINAL LAW & CRIMINOLOGY Vol. 100, No. 4 Copyright 0 2010 by Kimberly D. Bailey Pdrned in US.A. CRIMINAL LAW LOST IN TRANSLATION: DOMESTIC VIOLENCE, THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL, AND THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM KIMBERLY D. BAILEY* Current criminal justice domestic violence policies have been severely criticized by some feminist scholars as undermining victim autonomy. This criticism is puzzling given the fact that these policies were drafted in response to the activism offeminists involved in the early battered women's movement and that autonomy, or the agency of women, was a key goal of this movement. This apparent paradox can be explained, however, by the fact that activists involved in the early battered women's movement and actors in the current criminal justice regime speak in two different languages. Thus, victim autonomy is a concept that got lost in the translation of some of the goals of the early battered women's movement into criminal justice policy. While this Article acknowledges that victim autonomy is not the chief goal of the criminal justice system, it still urges proponents of current criminal justice policies to take seriously the fact that a high number of victims currently do not want to engage with the criminal justice system. This number is an important metric in analyzing the Assistant Professor of Law, Chicago-Kent College of Law, B.A., 1995, Indiana University; J.D., 2000, The University of Michigan Law School. I would like to thank Katharine Baker, Felice Batlan, Jennifer Collins, Melissa Hamilton, Cynthia Ho, Emily Houh, Harold Krent, Susan Kuo, Adele Morrison, Melissa Murray, Emily Sack, Christopher Schmidt, and Deborah Tuerkheimer for their extremely helpful comments on various versions of this Article. I would also like to thank the University of Cincinnati College of Law Faculty and the Chicago-Kent College of Law Faculty who attended presentations of this paper and provided wonderful insights. I would also like to thank those who attended presentations of this paper during the Law and Society Conference in May 2009 and the Southeast/Southwest People of Color Conference in March 2010 for providing a thoughtful discussion that also helped with the development of this paper. Finally, I would like to thank Maribel Nash for her invaluable research assistance. 1255

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