ABSTRACT
The violence to liberty done by the NSA and the Patriot Act distracts the public from the more substantial oppression realized in Family Law Court, under the influence of the Violence against Women Act (VAWA), feminist jurisprudence, and child custody legal practice. Together, these radical social engineering mechanisms have institutionalized misandry and helped produce a male suicide holocaust. (Bergamini, 2010, emphasis in original)
The backlash against feminist criminology is intertwined with broader resistance to feminism and other progressive social movements. Carol Smart noted in 1979 that changes in women’s social or economic status have long been perceived as threats to the patriarchal gender order and are therefore “viewed with considerable misgiving, whilst any reinforcement of the value of women’s traditional, domestic role has been perceived as a stand against further social decline and disorder” (Smart, 1979, p. 50). The contemporary backlash exists at the nexus of economic and ideological retrenchment seeking to enforce the hegemony of neoliberal conceptions of justice as formal equality. Critical criminology is linked to the backlash against feminism in two key ways. First, critical criminology is an important location for the study of antifeminism and its implications. Second, criminologists who study women or gender have frequently been attacked by antifeminist scholars and commentators.
