Written by Yu Yue Cheng
Taiwan had just experienced the #MeToo movement in 2023 – surprising considering that the global movement is over a decade old. The movement was long overdue: as a Taiwanese woman, I was happy to see so many people (mostly women but also other genders) stand up to share their experiences, raise public awareness on gender violence, and see legal reform finally being taken to address such a serious issue.
But taking a closer look at “The 3 Gender Equality Laws”, the main reform following #MeToo, something didn’t sit right with me: under the new legislation, some of the penalties were aggravated. More precisely, the range of sentencing and fines was revised to have a higher upper limit for certain crimes and circumstances, and the scope of application of the laws was widened.
What is the problem with that?” you may ask. “Shouldn’t heavier penalties be an effective way to achieve justice, or gender equality?”
While heavier penalties may sound intuitive, it is ultimately not a solution to gender violence. For one, this tendency of using criminal penalties as a tool to solve gender inequality and violence goes against the “ultima ratio” principle in Taiwanese law; in other words, criminal penalties should be the last resort for solving a problem. Additionally, as pointed out by Professor Leigh Goodmark’s article, the effects of carceral policies on gender violence is not well-supported by empirical evidence and therefore remains inconclusive. Moreover, even well-intentioned state intervention often proves simplistic and counterproductive: as Amia Srinivasan argues in The Right to Sex, a more carceral policy on gender violence, particularly domestic violence, neglects the complexity of factors such as poverty and discrimination. She refers to a study in Brazil, where the more carceral “Maria da Penha Law” against domestic violence was ineffective, as poor Brazilian women relied on their partners for income. For them, their partners’ incarceration meant losing their livelihoods, which led many to leave domestic violence cases unreported. Cases like this reflect gender violence as a wider issue of structural inequality, which a more carceral policy is unable to address.
Likewise, the root reason behind gender violence issues in Taiwan is the unequal power relations in social interactions that subordinates women. Sexual assault, sexual harassment, and digital gender violence are all intertwined with a culture that objectifies women and downplays the importance of true consent in sexual activities. Similar to the Maria da Penha Law, a more punitive policy does punish criminals on an individual, surface level but does not address the deeper problem at hand.
In 2024, the Constitutional court in Taiwan made a polarising judgement on the death penalty: it did not abolish, but only restricted the application of this capital punishment. There was public outcry against the decision, notably from one of the anti-gender violence movements: on December 3rd that year, the “White Rose Memorial Service” was held in memory of a sexually assaulted and murdered female teacher in 2014, protesting for the continued necessity of a harsher death penalty.
Although the indignance of the protesters is understandable, the reason for their protest is on shaky grounds since a more carceral/punitive policy is unable to address the structural inequality behind gender violence.
The ideas of ending gender violence and the abolishment of the death penalty should not clash. After all, our ultimate goal is to reach a more equal society. The emphasis on a more punitive/carceral policy may only shift our focus away from what’s genuinely important – fundamentally changing the social structure in which women are unproportionately subject to gender violence. Similarly, the abolishment of the death penalty also aims to shift our focus back to addressing the fundamental issues of crime, such as the shortcomings of social welfare and the lack of mental health care support. The emphasis on the use of the death penalty on violent crimes and the unpredictable execution of death row inmates only allows the Taiwanese government to avoid addressing the root causes of crimes. More intuitively, abolishing the death penalty leads us to a less carceral policy, which will force the government to direct meaningful efforts toward solving the structural issues behind crime. Since both movements have similar aims to address fundamental structural inequalities in society, there is a powerful potential for the anti-gender violence activists to collaborate with the abolitionists of capital punishment.
Yet the anti-gender violence movement’s stance on a more punitive policy is unclear, and even divided. Throughout their decades-long advocacy for legal reforms, activists protesting for harsher carceral policies have made notable contributions to the anti-gender violence movement’s successes – such can be seen through the White Rose movements in the 2010s (different from the 2024 White Rose) in Taiwan. However, this does not mean that all their advocacy is about raising the penalties – some of them also pursue other aspects such as victim support or risk management.
Despite this, the idea of Abolition Feminism (AF) shows that a clear alliance between the two groups remains feasible: AF is a series of social movements that combine the abolition movement and feminist perspectives, and calls for radical change in criminal justice systems – even the abolition of prisons in some cases – whilst centering the experiences of the most marginalised groups. The movement engages in vital community work that supports victims and offers interventions to gender violence, which have so far been absent in Taiwan. Despite the fact that the abolishment of prisons might be too radical for Taiwan, we can still adapt AF’s core idea into Taiwan’s legal context to create an approach of “Anti-Carceral Feminism”— an idea that recognises the danger of, and rejects the way of relying on punishment to solve gender violence issues while focusing on the most marginalised groups. Given the existing influence of the anti-gender violence movement, this idea holds powerful potential for change: As pointed out in a study by Professor Chia-Wen Lee, there has been a strong relationship between the changes in criminal policies and the advocacy of the anti-gender violence movements throughout modern Taiwanese history. What we need to do is simply turn our focus away from the desire to punish back to addressing the root causes of violence, and be open to possibilities of new solutions.
How can we put this into practice? Taking AF’s focus on the most marginalised groups, we could also make the unheard voices in Taiwanese society heard, such as the (often overlooked) migrant homecare workers currently facing sexual harassment. This presents a perfect opportunity to follow AF’s strategy of community work and advocacy, namely through forming alliances between NGOs or supporting victims.
In sum, the relationship between these two movements in Taiwan are still ambiguous. While this obscurity could develop into conflict, there is also a promising potential for collaboration. Hence the idea of “Anti-Carceral Feminism” is needed in our movements. What we need now is a narrative that recognizes the problems of carceral/punitive policies in our anti-gender violence development. And only when the conflict is replaced by an alliance through “Anti-Carceral Feminism” can we make meaningful change to the violence we want to end.
