“You just feel re-violated”: coercive sexual control in juvenile detention

Abstract

Despite political calls on the state to “protect the children” from sexual violence, feminist scholars argue the state itself reproduces routine gender-based violence toward incarcerated communities, including youth. Building upon this work, I draw from twenty-three life history interviews with formerly incarcerated cis- and transgender men and women survivors to show how carceral norms facilitate a system of coercive sexual control. I define coercive sexual control as the policies, practices, and social relations that create the context for routine sexual violence and institutional harm toward youth. Coercive sexual control includes the sexual degradation of youth bodies, the underground economy of sexual favors, and the institutional denial of sexual harm. A theory of coercive sexual control shifts attention from sexual violence as solely interpersonal and episodic to the broader institutional mechanisms of power and social control that produce sexual exploitation against youth under the carceral state. Centering carceral institutions as sites of endemic sexual violence further unearths crucial discrepancies between institutional claims of prioritizing children’s sexual safety “on the books” and gaslighting youth claims of sexual misconduct in everyday practice.