21

Medical Violence Against People of Color

and the Medicalization of Domestic Violence
Ana Clarissa Rojas Durazo

He said, “Do you want to press charges?” He stood tall in front

of me, in uniform and with might, and right, on his side. I lay on
the hospital bed, recently emerging from a protective unconscious
sleep. I wanted it all to go away. The second my head hit the steel
door, I remember having a choice to go down, so I took that path. I
was unsure of where it would lead, but I knew that’s what I had to
do. My eyes rolled back, body crumbled before me and everything
turned dark. I couldn’t take the light of day where the failure of
love cuts deeply into already festering wounds. It’s like when you’re
naked in the daylight, it’s different, you know? You can’t hide any-
thing. This is where the real monsters stand at your feet ready to
devour. Monsters don’t hide in the light of day.
So I went with it, took to the floor like I was meant for it. It
was quiet. All the yelling stopped; the still darkness was like a soft
warm blanket. It was a fleeting moment, it passed by quickly, like
the flick of hummingbird wings. But you know when something
seems to pass in real slow motion and real quick at the same time?
I guess that’s when fear takes over, or is it wisdom, being so deeply
present. I liked it quiet. But slowly the sounds of life came back
kind of like at a feria or an arcade, intense, loud. I couldn’t hear
her but I began to make out her head and then the side of her. She
stood over me crying, surprised at what she had done. As I held on
tightly to the feeling of calm, of quiet and dark, I knew it was time
for me to go.
And then she took me to the hospital, found someone with a car
and I remember the silence returning. The longest car ride ever.
Nobody spoke. Next thing I remember I’m laying on the hospital
bed. It’s really cold, hospital cold, you know—when they give you
those paper thin batas to wear? And she was still standing over me,
unsure, watching everything. The bright white ominous lights of
hospitals glared at me and the ice-cold hospital air ate at my skin.
That’s when the cop approached and said “Do you wanna press
charges?”
I didn’t even know what he meant at first, I literally didn’t un-
derstand him. I don’t know if that was because I had no idea what
he was talking about, or if my preoccupation with holding onto the
quiet helped me erase everything around me. Or maybe the quiet
180 Color of Violence

doesn’t want me to get all caught up in those English words. It just

didn’t register, but somehow, after a moment of silence, I said “no.”
And then I understood, and I couldn’t believe I was supposed to
make that kind of a decision. It was as if my “no” followed the cop
until he was out of my sight, and I suddenly understood what he
was asking, as well as the consequences of saying “no.” And every-
body knew. The doctors, the nurses, the patients all around, the tall
white cop, and she knew. She knew I hadn’t pressed charges.
What kind of position is that to put someone in? Like the world
needs another reason to hate lesbians? Like I need another reason
not to feel welcomed since I came to this country? How did they
even know? Who told them? I didn’t say anything. And I’m sup-
posed to just say “yes” or “no?” I didn’t even wanna come to the
hospital. I was just trying to hold on to the quiet, and I didn’t think
the choice to press charges would help me do that—what kind of
choice is that? I was just trying to hold on to the quiet.
February, 2006

Starting in the late 1970s and increasingly thereafter, state funding encouraged a
strong, system-based response to domestic violence. This funding brought together
the criminal justice system, hospitals, and social service agencies to intervene in
domestic violence. Prior to this, some antiviolence laws were on the books, but
there was minimal prosecution and limited law enforcement involvement. As the
state moved in, the real need for survivor safety came increasingly to be translated
into a “need” for prisons and for social services. This logic supported the strate-
gic expansion of the prison industrial complex (PIC), and domestic violence came
to be seen as a crime. It also supported the development of the nonprofit indus-
trial complex, as nonprofit agencies were set up and funded by the state to pro-
vide counseling and shelter services, with scant funding for social change work. As
the criminalization and non-profitization of domestic violence were underway, the
medicalization of domestic violence also ensued.

On Medicalization
When institutionalized, “mainstream” or western medicine reconstitutes social
problems as “diseases” or individual pathologies in need of medical intervention,
we can call this medicalization.1 Medical intervention is increasingly deemed
indispensable in eliminating the epidemic of domestic violence, and the “medical
industrial complex” (MIC) is beginning to shape how we think about domestic
violence, as well as how we prevent—or intervene and treat—the “disease.”2 Like
criminalization, medicalization represents a deep threat to the movement, because
it uproots the conceptualization of domestic violence as a social problem. Instead,
it replaces the ideology and structures of social movements with the ideology and
structures of (western) medicine, subsuming grassroots to state and capital inter-
ests.
This is particularly dangerous to women of color and our communities
because we have suffered a long and continuing history of (western) medical vio-
 The Medicalization of Domestic Violence 181

lence. In fact, the institution of (western) medicine has served the interests of
colonial, slavery, capitalist and racist systems by excluding us from needed care,
and has administered death, disease, and injury. The medicalization of domestic
violence is also structured to be interdependent with the criminalization and non-
profitization of domestic violence. For example, as in the opening story, a stop at
the hospital can lead to criminal charges—sometimes without survivor consent—
which potentially enlists processes of incarceration, detention, and deportation.
The object of medical inquiry (disease/illness) is “not necessarily inherent in
any behavior or condition, but [it is] constructed.”3 Just as we call into question
what, when, and why something is considered a crime, we can also question what,
when, and why something becomes a medical issue. Thus, when we reflect and
interrogate medicalization, we can critically consider the ways medicine, as a tool
of social control, has been extended to more and more aspects of our lives. This
extension bears the interests of the MIC—the relationship between medicine,
capital, and the state.4 The structured goals of the medical industrial complex
are to heighten profits, legitimate the state, and maintain the dominance of the
western medical model, which, in turn, perpetuates racism, classism, and het-
erosexism. The institution of medicine is organized and structured to reflect and
reproduce society’s class, racial, and gendered hierarchies, and as it mirrors and
purports injustice, it also produces ideology that legitimates it.
For example, the racist and capitalist class structures in medicine are trans-
parent in the maintenance of an elite corporate/upper class which makes health
policies and reaps the financial benefits of the “business,” while an exploited class
is made responsible for low-wage dirty work, including janitorial, nursing assis-
tance, and administrative work. Not surprisingly, class lines in medicine are also
racial lines, and people of color are overrepresented in the exploited groups. When
we examine the phenomena of medicalization, we see systemic legitimation, or
hegemony maintenance, and the efforts of a particular institution (medicine) to
maintaining inequality.5
Furthermore, the medical gaze transposes a disease model that sets out to
deflect attention away from social injustices, while highlighting individual pathol-
ogy.6 Social phenomena come to be understood as problems that western medi-
cine can solve; some call this the MIC’s habit of turning “badness into sickness.”7
Not coincidentally, medicalization expands during times of social protest. For
example, state expenditures on public health usually rise during periods of social
protest (as they did in the late 1960s and 1970s), while cutbacks in public health
services were instituted in the early 1980’s, following a decline in social protest by
low-income communities.8
Understanding medicalization can help us map out—or prevent—the coop-
tation of a social movement. So as women of color working against violence, it is
imperative that we recognize that reliance on the medical industrial complex is
deeply problematic, as its unjust institutional structure, as well as its racist, clas-
sist, and sexist interests, always come along with the package. What, then, does the
medicalization of domestic violence mean for our safety as women of color, and
what does it imply for the movement’s goal of eliminating domestic violence?
182 Color of Violence

The Medicalization of Domestic Violence

In the latter part of the twentieth century, increased federal funding was allocated
for a strong, system-based domestic violence response in the US. Initially, this
funding was geared toward increasing law enforcement response to domestic vio-
lence.9 Criminal justice agencies, medical institutions and social service agencies
were enlisted to respond to domestic violence. In 1978, officials from these agen-
cies, along with activists and academics, were invited to participate in the United
States Commission on Civil Rights’ “Consultation on Battered Women: Issues
of Public Policy.” This marked a historic first: a state-coordinated assessment of
domestic violence. Although mainstream medicine had given some attention to
domestic violence before this, and there were laws on the books which deemed it a
crime, this new funding—combined with new policies and criminal legislation—
jump-started the criminalization, non-profitization and medicalization of domes-
tic violence. Shortly thereafter, the categories “battered spouse” and “battered
woman” were added to the international classification of diseases.10 In the 1980s,
the Center for Disease Control (CDC) began funding research on domestic vio-
lence, while the American Association of Obstetrics and Gynecology instituted an
initiative to educate physicians on domestic violence screening and referral.
In 1992, during his tenure as president of the American Medical Association
(AMA), Robert McAfee started the AMA’s initiative against family violence. Later
that year, the AMA released its “Guidelines for the Screening of Domestic Vio-
lence.” That same year, the US Surgeon General ranked abuse as the leading cause
of injury for women aged 15-44, and the Family Violence Prevention Fund in
San Francisco was funded by the Department of Health and Human Services to
create the National Health Resource Center, a national clearinghouse to promote
medical intervention in domestic violence. Since then, the Family Violence Preven-
tion Fund/National Health Resource Center has played a central role in efforts to
medicalize domestic violence within the antiviolence movement. For instance, a
1993 study by the organization found that most battered patients were not identi-
fied as such by hospital emergency room staff, and that these staff lacked training
in identification or referral procedures. This research study ushered in two poli-
cies, enacted first in California then throughout the US, that drastically extended
medicalization. In California, health care providers were required to receive train-
ing in the detection of domestic violence, and hospitals had to adopt written policy
on how to treat battered people. The second law required medical practitioners to
report to the police when a patient sustained an injury that was the “result of assaul-
tive or abusive conduct” and/or “the injury is by means of a firearm.” Any attending
physician who failed to report would face criminal penalties, and the latter policy
buttressed the implementation of the former.11
Other key events which furthered the medicalization campaign included
the annual “Health Cares about Domestic Violence Day,” and the manual Pre-
venting Domestic Violence: Clinical Guidelines on Routine Screening, sponsored by
the American Medical Association (AMA); the American Nursing Association
(ANA); and the American College of Physicians (ACP). The Family Violence Pre-
vention Fund/National Health Resource Center coordinated these efforts. The
FUND/NHRC also issued the “State-by-State Report Card on Health Care Laws
 The Medicalization of Domestic Violence 183

and Domestic Violence,” funded by the US Department of Health and Human

Services, which shamed states for poor performance in enacting laws that “help
doctors and nurses aid victims,” and pressured them into crafting policies that
medicalized domestic violence.
By the late 1990’s, the medical industrial complex had become a crucial site
in responding to the domestic violence “epidemic.” We were often reminded,
in press releases, reports and other propaganda, that “medical practitioners are
often the first, and sometimes the only, professionals to whom an abused woman
turns for help …”12 Interestingly, just as the criminalization of domestic violence
directly supported the growth of the prison industrial complex, the medicalization
of domestic violence heightened as the corporatization and privatization of health
care gained velocity.
Indeed, a shift in the conceptual framework surrounding domestic violence
was occurring, as the problem was being publicly recognized as a medical issue.
This shift had some problematic underpinnings: the historic and dominant medi-
cal understanding of domestic violence had been psychiatric, which maintained
that masochism was an integral aspect of female psychology. Consequently,
women interpreted the suffering of violence as a sexually gratifying experience.
An article in the Archives of General Psychiatry, a journal of the American Med-
ical Association, claimed that women have a masochistic need that is fulfilled
by their husband’s aggression.13 This psychiatric approach revictimized survivors
by asserting that they “provoked” their husband’s abusive behavior through, for
example, nagging, disagreement, and withholding of sex. It also suggested that we
should understand violence as an individual behavior; it was, therefore, decipher-
able and solvable in the individual. This incomplete psychiatric model provided a
logic which bolstered counseling as an essential vaccine against domestic violence,
and buttressed the non-profitization of domestic violence while deterring social
change work.

Medical Violence Against People of Color

Couched in a deceptive framework of benevolence, (western) medicine is a vio-
lent institution that has, in fact, been dangerous to the health and well-being of
women of color and women in the Third World since its imposition. This is med-
icine’s double discourse of care: expressed interest in the provision of care, while
making people of color sick. Historically, medicine has always worked for the
colonial state; for example, institutional practices quelled indigenous resistance
by drawing indigenous communities into colonial structures and relationships.
Medicine arrived in the Americas, and throughout the world, as an integral arm of
European colonial invasion: land grants were given to doctors who settle areas and
develop medical institutions. And medical institutions served as sites where indig-
enous communities were actively subordinated, regulated, tracked, and counted.
As Fanon argues in A Dying Colonialism, medicine makes colonial interests palat-
able so that slowly, over time, we are “reduced to saying yes to the innovations of
the occupier.”14
This “provision of care” subjugates women of color and our communities by
negating indigenous knowledges of the body, health, and healing and by superim-
184 Color of Violence

posing western values and colonial racist epistemologies and figures (e.g., the all-
knowing patriarchal doctor). Thus, the power of healing is displaced from women
and indigenous communities.15 bell hooks reminds us, “conscious of race, sex,
and class issues, I wondered how I would be treated in this white doctor’s office.
Through it all, he talked to me as if I were a child …”16
Medical violence is deployed from etiology (diagnosis, naming of disease and
establishment of cause), to prevention (or lack thereof), treatment (“care” poten-
tially injurious or unavailable), and research (treating people of color as guinea
pigs).17 And as discussed earlier, the MIC buttresses racist and colonial state needs
by surveilling and reporting on communities, regulating human bodies, and by
further dominating the colonized by imposing docility.18
The irony is that colonial invasion and war often create “needs” for medical
intervention, as was the case with one of the most lethal forms of colonial violence
throughout the Americas: the intentional spread of infectious diseases such as
tuberculosis, measles and smallpox to indigenous communities.19 Once this need
is bolstered, additional forms of medical violence—such as active exclusion and
withholding of treatment—emerge, and become tools of social control; the MIC
determines who is treated, who lives, who dies. Even if treatment is provided, vio-
lence persists as the delivery of medical “care” is still rife with racism, classism, and
sexism, as well as state and colonial interests and structures.20
For example, historically the “sick role” has been assigned to marginalized
communities in the US, as it implies “deviance” in need of medical intervention.
Through medicine, colonial racist archetypes of the “diseased and uncivilized”
other were legitimated, and the “other” was created.21 Medicine’s professional and
eurocentric shroud confirms and grants the authority to define sickness, name the
sick, identify the “healthy,” and prescribe what is biologically normal and what is
not, thereby discerning between what should be called “natural,” and what should
be called “unnatural.”22
“Drapetomania” stands among the first medical diagnoses in the United
States. Samuel Cartwright, a physician in New Orleans defined it as “the desire
for a slave to run away.”23 Among the causes listed were laziness and poor intel-
lectual capabilities.24 Only slaves were able to contract this “disease,” much like
only slaves were able to violate the first criminal laws enacted in this country.25
In the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal, Dr. Cartwright argued that
the tendency of slaves to run away was a treatable medical disorder, believing
that with “proper medical advice, strictly followed, the troublesome practice
that many Negroes have of running away could almost entirely be prevented.”
Whipping was prescribed as the most effective treatment of the disorder and
amputation of the toes was prescribed for cases that failed to respond to whip-
ping.26 This is an early example of the violence of western medical thought and
practice. First, an ideological marker of disease is inflicted on a resistant slave’s
plight to recapture his/her liberty and humanity; then, an ideological shift dis-
places consideration of an unjust social order, replacing it with a medical diag-
nosis present in an individual and curable under the jurisdiction of medical
purview. Finally, as a result, slavery is legitimized and buttressed by medicine.
 The Medicalization of Domestic Violence 185

Given this history, it’s not surprising that people of color—especially poor people
of color—often have served as the guinea pigs of the Medical Industrial Complex,
suffering poor health and death as consequences. Among the most flagrant his-
toric examples of the MIC’s use of poor people of color as guinea pigs is the Tuske-
gee syphilis experiment. In 1932 government doctors began a study on the effects
of the illness. Their project deemed “expendable” the bodies of southern Black
sharecroppers by withholding treatment and lying about treatment; for exam-
ple, excruciatingly painful spinal taps were performed under the guise of treat-
ment. While the medical community failed to note any wrongdoing, the research
project continued for many years.27 Well into World War II, the lead scientific
investigators even secured government exceptions from military recruitment for
the research subjects, because the military provided treatment for syphilis. As a
result, nearly one hundred men died and many more lived with chronic and seri-
ous health complications.
Indeed “the burden of scientific investigation has rested on those that are
socially and therefore medically disenfranchised.”28 In Puerto Rico in the 1960’s,
birth control pills three to four times the hormone dosages of today’s birth control
pills were tested on women without their consent. Many were killed and injured
while being used as guinea pigs. Eugenecist Margaret Sanger, the mother of the
(western interventionist) birth control movement and founder of Planned Parent-
hood, went to Puerto Rico to support “administering physicians.”

Sterilization
Attacks on our sexual and reproductive systems are among the most pervasive types
of medical violence against women of color. Medicine furthers colonial attacks
through eugenics and population control. The eugenics movement set out to repro-
duce “the superior stock of the nation.” In the early 20th century, Margaret Sanger
argued that birth control would be an effective way to reduce the size of “unde-
sirable” populations who would become a hindrance to the development of the
idealized white supremacist nation-state.29 In her essay “Better Dead than Preg-
nant,” Andrea Smith notes, “women of color become particularly dangerous to the
world order as they have the ability to reproduce the next generations of commu-
nities of color.”30 In the United States, sterilization has been practiced on Japanese
women while they were detained in internment camps in WWII, Mexican immi-
grants and Chicanas, Native and Puerto Rican women. In her book, Birthing the
Nation: Strategies of Palestinian Women in Israel, Rhoda Ana Khanaaneh argues
that “female, nonwhite and poor bodies are seen as population growth vessels that
must be stopped.”31 In Killing the Black Body, Dorothy Roberts wrote that “regulat-
ing Black women’s reproductive decisions has been a central aspect of racial oppres-
sion in America.”
From the 1930s to the 1960s, close to one half of Puerto Rican women of
childbearing age were sterilized without their informed consent.32 The procedure
came to be called simply “la operación” (“the operation”) because it was so com-
mon. Population control rhetoric claimed that the island population was “explod-
ing” while at the same time multinational corporations had relocated the garment
industry to Puerto Rico, which heightened their need for female “unattached”
186 Color of Violence

(childless) workers. The US Agency for International development later promoted

sterilization and birth control in developing nations to prevent revolutions.33

In 1977, R. T. Ravenholt, from the US Agency for International

Development (AID), announced the plan to sterilize a quarter of
the world’s women because, as he put it, population control is nec-
essary to maintain “the normal operation of US Commercial inter-
ests around the world.”34

Exclusion from Care

Exclusion from medical care is yet another form of medical violence. First, the
medical model is based on the archetype of the white male body; people of color
as recipients of care and healing are an afterthought to the Medical Industrial
Complex. We are also structured as an afterthought in access to care as high costs,
lack of insurance, withholding of referrals to specialists and specialized procedures
often keep care out of our reach. A marker for access to healthcare, though not the
only one, is insurance. Latinos have reported uninsured rates of 33% compared
to 11% of whites, while 84% of all uninsured women are women of color.35 The
current political direction of actively eroding access to insurance—through cuts
to Medicaid to support the unfathomable costs of war, for example—helps us see
whose lives are deemed expendable by each of the MICs’ (Military and Medical
Industrial Complex).
African-Americans, Latinos, and American Indians have the highest rates
of death attributable to preventable diseases that include heart disease, cancer,
strokes, diabetes and AIDS. Medical care is structured for whites to access it ear-
lier, one of the reasons their life expectancy is highest in the US, whereas people
of color often cannot access care until the disease is too advanced for successful
treatment. Multiple variables are responsible for the proliferation of these illnesses
in our communities, including overexposure to toxic environmental conditions,
limited access to healthy foods, and migrant displacement from land and families;
each of these factors is a consequence of racism and social inequalities.
While African-American women are approximately 13% of the population,
they account for 63% of new AIDS cases. African-Americans and Latinos make-
up a third of the US population, yet account for 82% of pediatric AIDS cases,
69% of new HIV and AIDS cases, and 62% of everyone living with AIDS.36
These astronomical rates of AIDS are primarily a result of education, prevention,
and treatment being unequally distributed across racial and socio-economic lines.
There are other factors, rooted in racism and social inequality. For example, immi-
gration policies and the conditions of migrant farm work have also historically cre-
ated conditions where single men are kept away from families and their primary
sexual partners, which can lead to practices which increase exposure to HIV.37
The recent loss of cherished Chicana/Mexicana warrior Gloria Anzaldúa from
diabetes-related complications reminds us that the rate of diabetes among Latinas
is twice that among white women. Furthermore, Latinas and African-American
women are most likely to have undiagnosed diabetes, which can lead to other pre-
ventable but serious complications and death.38 Another important finding is that
 The Medicalization of Domestic Violence 187

a patient’s race negatively affects referral to accessing potentially lifesaving treat-

ments, which translates to higher heart disease mortality rates for women of color,
especially African-American women.39

Dangerous to Our Health

The medicalization of domestic violence embeds domestic violence within a con-
text (the Medical Industrial Complex) that has proven an enduring and powerful
threat against women of color and our communities. Furthermore, to the extent
that the Medical Industrial Complex is organized in a manner that reflects, legiti-
mates and promotes capitalism, racism, colonialism and sexism and to the extent
that domestic violence in our communities emerges out of these violent processes,
the Medical Industrial Complex is invested in maintaining domestic violence.40
So, how can women of color rely on the Medical Industrial Complex for care and
respect? In fact, can’t women of color instead expect revictimization when coming
into contact with the MIC? Can’t we expect our autonomy and self-determination
to be inhibited, and our safety to be threatened?
Almost all interviewees in a recent study of survivors of sexual abuse said they
were re-traumatized by the medical examination procedures.41 First, because there
is an underlying assumption that they are not to be believed, material evidence
must be collected from their bodies as they are objectified and invaded, penetrated
a second time by medical intervention. And like mandatory arrest policies, the
now common medical mandatory reporting policies also deem the survivors inau-
dible and irrelevant by insisting that criminal charges be imposed without their
consent.42 Consequently, bias in reporting is sure to arise in domestic violence
cases, as has been demonstrated in child abuse reporting where medical providers
reported low-income families and people of color at higher rates.43 In addition, a
study of physicians found that emergency care providers were more likely to report
than private physicians. Since uninsured poor communities and communities of
color are more likely to seek care in emergency care facilities, we are also more
likely to be reported.44
Mandatory reporting policies are particularly dangerous to immigrant women
because the immigrant experience is already replete with an incessant and over-
whelming fear of deportation and lack of access to care and services. When ser-
vices are available, the fear of deportation is so pronounced, especially in an era
where violence against immigrants has become increasingly prevalent, that immi-
grants are likely to deter care because of the link to law enforcement.

Because one is an immigrant, as an illegal in this country one be-

lieves that in the moment in which one will ask for help … they
will return you to your country and this is something that perhaps
we the Latina women are obligated to put up with—this type of
(domestic) violence—for fear that we will be deported.45

Immigrant women already face the sociocultural stresses present in expe-

riences of migration and displacement, in addition to struggling to survive an
encounter with a white American hegemonic culture, all factors which exacerbate
188 Color of Violence

the lethality of domestic violence.46 Mandatory reporting policies and the medi-
calization of domestic violence heightens the grave danger immigrant survivors
already face.47

Conclusion
Medicalization transforms the survivor into a patient, presenting with an injury/
medical need which can be addressed by the presiding (and often paternalistic)
physician, law enforcement and the state. The medical response does not address
domestic violence as a consequence of structured inequalities and social processes:
“The narrowing of the analysis of sexual crimes to evidentiary, medical and legal
aspects strips away the context of oppression.” 48 Medical interventions in domestic
violence are constructed as acts of “sensitivity” provided to survivors, and related
to improving service delivery through identification and screening procedures.
The focus is not on injustice and inequality. With medicalization, the oppositional
thinking of social movements is swallowed up and a prescription is rendered as
social change work is quietly sent into oblivion.
Medicalization is a tool used by the MIC to heighten profits, legitimate the
state, maintain medical dominance, reproduce social inequalities, and co-opt
social movements (by expanding at times of social protest.) The lived experiences
of women of color and our communities can dislocate the assumption that medi-
cine will heal.49 Frantz Fanon relates the example of a “non-compliant”Algerian
patient who would not divulge any information about his health.50 He knew
he faced not only a doctor but the colonizer, so he resisted. We all know the
“ordeal” it is to go to the doctor’s. We come to expect racist and classist treat-
ment. Acts of refusal or resistance to medical treatment are acts against medi-
cal violence. Perhaps sister Audre, in her struggle with cancer, was invoking
our survival and resistaince of medical violence when she said that as women of
color, to take care of ourselves and our health is an act of political warfare.
Lastly, let’s challenge the calls for a “system-based” response to domes-
tic violence; it is this very call that gave heed and runway to criminalization
and medicalization. Let’s call out and stop relying on violent institutions to
attempt to solve violence, i.e. the Medical Industrial Complex, Military Indus-
trial Complex, PIC, etc. Isn’t domestic violence an outgrowth of these very
institutions? Instead, let’s build movements for healing that are accountable
to us and our communities and that don’t reproduce oppressive relations. Let’s
call out the medicalization of domestic violence and re-invigorate a grassroots
movement against domestic violence that doesn’t shy away from asking, or isn’t
paid to forget to ask “what’s it really gon’na take to live lives free of violence?”