Recent high-profile accusations of sexual violence and abuse have emerged within anti-globalisation protest cultures and social movements including the Socialist Workers Party (Penny 2013), WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (Spade & Willse 2014), Occupy! (Wanggren & Milatovic 2012) and the ‘Arab Spring’ (Miles 2011). Gendered violence and abuse threatens to undermine core principles at the heart of social justice struggles and can leave those affected with little choice but to distance themselves from collective organisation and activist spaces. As Emi Kane, a national organiser of INCITE!, warns us ‘the transformative potential of a movement is only as present as the strength or voice of the most marginalised’ (cited in Bhattacharjya et al 2013, p. 287). Action is needed to transform our global protest movements to promote principles of social justice, tolerance and social inclusion. A key dilemma that activist survivors of gendered violence face is the accusation from their comrades that their call for justice is in fact a harmful collusion with the dominant logics of the criminal justice system, which effectively undermines and divides a radical social justice movement. It has been noted that ‘rape victims’ are routinely mobilised to justify and secure a US imperial project: the expansion of the criminal justice system and surveillance technologies (Spade & Willse 2014). This can lead to anti-feminist discourses and the recirculation of rape myths and misogyny in radical social justice movements. In this paper I explore how gendered violence is effectively silenced in social justice movements, and think through possible strategies to carve out more constructive ways to talk about and challenge gendered violence and harms that happen in radical spaces and movements.
