Pink Crime: Fighting Against the Criminalization of Motherhood, Pregnancy, and Queer Identity
Women and queer people are disproportionately charged with crimes that they not only didn’t commit, but that weren’t even crimes at all. These “no crime” convictions, argues author Valena Beety, are rooted in bias, junk science, and cultural panic. “Three-quarters of all wrongly convicted women were charged with crimes that never occurred,” she asserts. Beety, professor of law at Indiana University-Bloomington Maurer School of Law, co-founder of the Indiana Innocence Project, and a former federal prosecutor, is also a queer mom via IVF; the topic is both professional and personal for her. In this timely and eye-opening volume, she shows how racism, homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, ableism, and misogyny have created a legal system where people are charged because of who they are, not because of what they have done. “Pink crime,” she writes, “names the harms inflicted on women and queer people by a criminal legal system that enforces old ideas about gender and sexuality.” It is “the social narratives that push marginalized people from the center to the margins, and criminalization as the tool to control, demean, and separate them.” Under this umbrella we find “no crimes” such as “pregnant mothers charged with child abuse and fetal harm based on junk science; mothers incarcerated for the tragic but natural deaths of their children; doctors and patients prosecuted for harm to an embryo during in vitro fertilization; parents separated from their children for providing gender-affirming care; drag entertainers arrested for performing as a different gender; and queer people accused of ‘grooming.’” Through a specific examples and legal analysis, Beety shows how false confessions, junk science masquerading as forensics, gender stereotypes, police and prosecutor “tunnel vision,” and collaboration among doctors, social workers, and police have led to wrongful convictions. Even though innocence advocates have sometimes overturned them, she says, too often the focus is on “the most ‘worthy’ wrongfully convicted individuals and the lawyers who ‘rescue’ them,” rather than the underlying systemic problems. She also shares suggestions from numerous lawyers, advocates, and others on how people can combat pink crime on a systemic level by learning from queer elders such as AIDS activists; building coalitions, community, infrastructure, and resources; leveraging journalists and social media; and making specific changes to conviction and post-conviction processes. She calls on readers to take what they have learned and to speak out in order to create change. Beety’s arguments are persuasive. My one criticism is that she refers to Montana’s Senate Bill 458 several times as the “LGBTQ Erasure Act” as if that was its real name. The bill is in fact simply titled “Define sex in Montana law.” LGBTQ advocates have referred to it as the “LGBTQ Erasure Act,” and that is certainly an appropriate label for the heinous bill, which defines “sex” only by reproductive characteristics–but Beety’s description and analysis of the bill’s contents are enough to damn it; she doesn’t need to add a name that some may view as hyperbole, which may lessen her credibility among those she is trying to persuade. That small point aside, this is a well-reasoned and highly recommended volume that shows how seemingly disparate types of “crimes” are actually part of a system rooted in long-standing bias and given new impetus by conservative extremists. It should become a key volume for anyone interested in any form of social justice, particularly those interested in bridge-building across various types of advocacy groups.