Survivor Injustice

State-Sanctioned Abuse, Domestic Violence, and the Fight for Bodily Autonomy

By: Kylie Cheung

Narrated by: Dana Wing Lau

Length: 10 hrs and 25 mins

Publisher's summary

Journalist and Jezebel staff writer Kylie Cheung exposes the insidious—and often unseen—connections among domestic abuse, state-based violence, political disenfranchisement, and the carceral state.

For fans of The Revolution Starts at Home, Feminism for the 99%, and Good and Mad.

Incisive, urgent, and written exactly for our post-Roe times, Survivor Injustice is the feminist frame-changing book we need now—for each of us, and for all that’s at stake.

With an abolitionist lens, journalist and Jezebel staff writer Kylie Cheung shows how domestic abuse and state violence are systemic and interconnected. She shatters the harmful and convenient narrative that abuse is a “private matter” perpetrated by individual bad actors—and situates popular understandings of domestic abuse in an indictment of the racism, misogyny, and carcerality baked into U.S. culture and politics. Cheung explores:

• The links between capitalism and domestic abuse: how late-stage capitalism colludes with the state to incentivize forced birth and reproductive coercion
• Intimate partner violence as a tool of political silence and social control
• America’s tacit acceptance of sexual assault, from the home to the White House
• The interplay of race, power, gender, and sexuality in state-based violence
• How the United States runs on carcerality, and what that means for victims
• The way we view survival crimes, and our complicity in defining which acts are “violent” and whose actions are “criminal”
• How white feminism and carceral feminism fail us all

Cheung plainly names all that goes unsaid when we, as a culture, talk about abuse: How state and society criminalize women, girls, and gender-oppressed people of color. That what happens behind closed doors affects whose voices we hear at the ballot box. What it means when we put predators—from every party—up for vote. That sex workers are more likely to be victimized by law enforcement than “saved” by them. That this is all by design. And that ultimately—with organizing, abolition, and beyond-the-ballot action—we can change it all for good.

From TI 9781623179083 TR.

©2023 Kylie Cheung (P)2023 North Atlantic Books

Critic reviews

“By identifying rape culture’s political, systemic roots—omnipresent regardless of political affiliation—Cheung provides the anticapitalist analysis lost when the mainstreaming of #MeToo led to a whitewashed movement.” —Lexi McMenamin, news and politics editor at Teen Vogue

“Cheung exposes how domestic abuse and sexual violence targeting women of Asian descent is frequently overlooked, downplayed, and rendered invisible. A compelling and important book for these times.” —Michele Goodwin, author of Policing the Womb, host of Ms. magazine’s On the Issues podcast, and Chancellor’s Professor at UC Irvine School of Law

“Survivor Injustice connects the dots between gender violence—both inter-personal and structural—and urgent threats to American democracy. Drawing on her years of reporting and her personal experiences, Cheung is an expert yet accessible and engaging guide through complex terrain.” –Alexandra Brodsky, cofounder of Know Your IX and author of Sexual Justice: Supporting Victims, Ensuring Due Process, and Resisting the Conservative Backlash

Domestic violence is a public issue

No one really believes that what goes on behind closed doors never impacts the larger sphere of the world we live in. Take child abuse, for example. What happens in the home spills over into the child’s relationships, and as they grow up, into that same now-adult’s familial, social, professional, medical, political, and economic life, costing society greatly. Domestic abuse has the same negative power to impact not only the life of the abused but that of those around them. Ample data in this book will have you thinking about the survivors you know and have heard of. It will lay out a case for abortion as a pro-life fundamental human right. It will challenge your understanding of what policing in your community means for all—and especially for those most vulnerable. It will ask you to consider whether retribution is the best way to pave a road for a just, safe, and equitable society.

At times redundant with its anecdotes and statistics, the book is still powerful and incisive and it doesn’t play both sides. It is unapologetically abolitionist - but that doesn’t mean what you probably think it means. You’ll have to give it a read to find out why.