Why Carceral Feminism Gets Consent Wrong (Again).

Spoiler: If your feminism relies on police and prisons, it’s not protecting us—it’s punishing us.

Click Here For Audio Version!

For a movement that claims to be rooted in liberation, carceral feminism sure loves a cage.

At its core, carceral feminism is the belief that the best—or only—way to address gender-based violence is through criminalization, policing, and punishment. It rose to prominence in the 1990s alongside tough-on-crime policies and second-wave calls for legal reform. And on the surface, it sounds reasonable: violence against women is bad, so let’s punish the people who commit it. Simple, right?

Except it’s not. Because when we scratch beneath the surface, we see that this approach doesn’t serve all women—just the ones who fit a very narrow idea of victimhood. And when it comes to understanding consent? Carceral feminism gets it wrong. Over and over and over again.

Consent Doesn’t Fit in a Courtroom Box

Carceral feminism treats consent like a courtroom formality. Did she say yes or no? Was there a struggle? Was there bruising? Was she sober? These are the questions that matter to prosecutors—not the ones that matter to survivors.

But consent is rarely that clean. For many of us, especially sex workers, queer folks, trans women, and survivors of long-term abuse, consent is a layered, ongoing negotiation shaped by trauma, power, fear, and survival. It’s not just about one moment—it’s about the conditions surrounding it. The context. The coercion. The consequences of saying no.

And carceral systems aren’t built to handle that complexity. They demand a perfect victim: one who is white, cisgender, sober, monogamous, virginal, and devastatingly polite. If you deviate from that model—even slightly—you risk being blamed, dismissed, or punished.

Carceral Feminism Pretends the State Is a Safe Space

Here’s the bitter irony: carceral feminism relies on the very systems that have harmed the most marginalized women the most.

Police don’t keep sex workers safe—they harass us, arrest us, and profile us. Prisons don’t rehabilitate—they retraumatize. Mandatory minimums, surveillance, and registry laws often do more to control bodies than to protect them.

When a sex worker says “yes” under pressure—because she’s broke, scared, or managing a high-risk client—carceral feminists are quick to label her a victim. But instead of giving her agency, resources, or support, they hand her over to the cops.

And when she doesn’t cooperate with law enforcement? Suddenly, she’s not a victim anymore—she’s complicit.

That’s not feminism. That’s patriarchy in a pink pantsuit.

Who Does Your Feminism Protect?

Carceral feminism loves the language of empowerment but uses the tools of oppression. It offers handcuffs where there should be harm reduction. It offers jail time where there should be trauma care. It offers “rescue” where there should be resources.

And perhaps most damningly, it decides that some women are worth protecting—and some are worth punishing. Women who are poor, Black, brown, trans, disabled, drug-using, or sex working are too often labeled as either helpless victims or criminal deviants. There’s no room in the middle for survival, complexity, or autonomy.

That’s not a failure of the legal system—it’s exactly how the legal system was designed. And carceral feminism, whether it admits it or not, plays right into it.

Sex Workers Know What Consent Looks Like—And What It Doesn’t

We know what coerced consent feels like. We know what it means to say yes to avoid harm, to say yes because saying no costs too much. We know the difference between a consensual client interaction and one where power was weaponized. And we know when the system isn’t on our side—because it rarely is.

Sex workers are forced to become experts in consent because our labor depends on it. We develop finely tuned radar for danger, manipulation, and pressure. We know how to negotiate boundaries. We know when a yes is ours, and when it’s one we had to give to survive.

And yet, when we speak up, carceral feminism silences us. It either infantilizes us (“you can’t really consent”) or criminalizes us (“you deserve what happens to you”). Either way, it denies us the autonomy we fight for every day.

We Deserve Better

Feminism that centers criminal punishment is not feminism rooted in liberation. It’s feminism built for the powerful, designed to uphold respectability, and too often deployed as a weapon against the very people it claims to protect.

If your feminism calls the cops before it calls a community meeting, it’s not working.

If your feminism can’t tell the difference between harm and hustling, it’s not listening.

If your feminism only recognizes consent when it’s spoken in soft, unpressured tones—without context, without poverty, without trauma—it’s not feminism. It’s fiction.

We deserve a feminism that understands consent as layered, lived, and sometimes complicated. A feminism that trusts survivors—even messy ones. A feminism that asks, “What do you need?” instead of “Who can we punish?”

Because if your feminism doesn’t include sex workers, survivors, and people who’ve had to make hard choices under pressure?

It’s not feminist at all.