Pink Crime: Fighting Against the Criminalization of Motherhood, Pregnancy, and Queer Identity
type: Product
description: 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 …
additional property: Author/Creator/Director
  type: PropertyValue
  value: Valena Beety
additional property: Publisher
  type: PropertyValue
  value: New Press
additional property: PubDate
  type: PropertyValue
  value: 2026
offers: Offer
  price currency: USD
  availability: https://schema.org/InStock
  item condition: https://schema.org/NewCondition

BreadcrumbList
item list element: Home
  type: ListItem
  position: 1
  item: /
item list element: mombian.com
  type: ListItem
  position: 2
  item: https://productregistry.org/merchant/mombian.com
item list element: Pink Crime: Fighting Against the Criminalization of Motherhood, Pregnancy, and Queer Identity
  type: ListItem
  position: 3
  item: https://productregistry.org/product/qvAB6Gly