Anna Kollár was Gender Equality Officer of TCDSU 2023/24.
On Tuesday, April 1, a protest outside Trinity’s Arts Block featured a hanging effigy and a banner that read, “Support survivors, not rapists.” Students were encouraged to strike the effigy with metal bats, and a confession box was set up for them to anonymously express their thoughts on rapists. A nearly identical protest took place the following day outside the Hamilton Building, reinforcing the campaign’s message: “Protect each other, not rapists.”
The sheer brutality of this display cannot be ignored. When Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union (TCDSU) Welfare and Equality Officer Hamza Bana explained to Trinity News, “we have a body dummy of a rapist, and [people] can do whatever they want with the body,” it was a chilling endorsement of mob violence rather than a call for justice. The optics of students beating an effigy while others cheered may feel cathartic for some, but it does nothing to dismantle the structures that enable sexual violence in the first place. Instead, it mirrors the very authoritarian and punitive impulses that we, as feminists, should seek to dismantle.
Carceral feminism, the belief that women’s liberation can be achieved through mass incarceration and retribution, is a dead-end approach to gendered violence. I (hopefully) do not need to educate anyone on how widespread sexual misconduct is. According to the Central Statistics Office’s (CSO) Sexual Violence Survey in 2022, 65% of women aged 18-24 reported experiencing sexual violence in their lifetime. One in five (21%) adult women have experienced non-consensual sexual intercourse, meaning they were coerced, threatened, or forced into sex—i.e. raped. This is a mass societal issue, and with every such issue, the solution must be systematic and liberatory. The solution cannot simply be punitive.
Carceral feminism rests on the flawed belief that punitive measures can save women—that harsher laws, more policing, or even extrajudicial revenge can dismantle the patriarchy and deliver justice to the victims and society at large. It is no accident that this brand of feminism has become dominant in the West, where post-welfare states have embraced increasingly punitive policies. Similar to femonationalism or civilisational feminism, carceral feminism contributes, even if unintentionally, to right-wing demands for increased securitisation.
As I see it, the concept of justice, after decades of right-wing agitation, has become nearly indistinguishable from punishment. What results has this yielded? Have sexual offender notification schemes, electronic tagging, mass incarceration, or judicial punitiveness made rape less prevalent in America, for instance? Prisons are often seen as necessary institutions, but this belief is rarely scrutinised. Punitive impulses are inadequately theorised, with little critical examination of whether punishment achieves its purported aims of reducing crime or ensuring societal safety. Have prisons made society safer? Has retribution deterred crime? The evidence suggests otherwise.
But even if one clings to punitivity or carcerality, the reality is that we simply cannot imprison or lynch every individual guilty of sexual misconduct because it is so widespread. Almost as if it is one violent aspect of a patriarchal society rather than an issue of individual criminality. Just as we cannot end colonialism by killing all colonisers or abolish capitalism by executing all capitalists, mass retribution is neither feasible nor a solution.
So what then is the solution? Well, addressing the roots of offending. Addressing the causes of violence against women.
We must strive to embody the ideals of the liberated society we aim to create rather than blindly replicating existing structures of hierarchy, class, and authority. There must be coherence between the means and the anticipated end. Liberation from oppression—be it from the coloniser, the market, or the patriarchy—cannot be achieved through means that negate that end. Authoritarianism cannot bring about freedom. This principle is clear in theory and evidenced throughout history.
It is, however, essential not to fall into the fallacy of believing that the oppressor suffers oppression to the same extent as the oppressed. The patriarchy harms everyone, regardless of gender, but when we discuss rape, the perpetrator is usually a man, and the victim is usually a woman or a child.
That said, men are not biologically driven to commit rape, nor inherently violent or predatory in nature. Instead, the socio-economic realities of our society create the hierarchies that fuel violent crimes, almost always against those lower in the hierarchy: children, women, and the marginalised. Thus, the response cannot be simply inverting the hierarchy, where the formerly oppressed now seek to exact mass retribution against their oppressors. True justice demands subversion of hierarchy, not its reinforcement.
Abolitionist feminism has long argued that carcerality is not confined to laws and policies; it is also internalised—the cop in our heads, the prison warden in our minds. It is understandable that a victim of sexual violence would see their perpetrator as a monster deserving of immediate and severe punishment. But we know, empirically, that violent crime is not committed by a handful of morally bankrupt individuals. Instead, it is a macro-sociological phenomenon shaped by marginalisation. For the most part, the poorest, the most vulnerable, and the most excluded are both the primary victims and perpetrators of violence. Recognising this does not absolve individuals of responsibility, but it shifts the focus toward systemic solutions rather than individualised vengeance.
Retributive impulses may be understandable, but they do not bring about meaningful change. On a personal level, one may sympathise with a victim who takes revenge on their perpetrator. Abolitionist frameworks would argue that such individuals—such as the Scissor Sisters—should not be subjected to a punitive regime such as prisons either. But on a societal level, vengeance is not a solution or even part of the solution.
This is why the recent “protest” was not just misguided but actively harmful. It was a PR stunt masquerading as activism. If we are serious about eradicating sexual violence, we must move beyond empty gestures and punitive fantasies. We must dismantle the very structures that sustain violence rather than replicating them in the name of “justice”.
Judith Butler’s concept of “grievability” offers a powerful lens through which to interpret the broader issues when discussing perpetrators of violent crime and crimes against women specifically. Butler reminds us that the value of life is politically constructed—that some lives are deemed valuable and worth preserving while others are rendered disposable and ungrievable. In contemporary discourse, sexual offenders are often framed as inhuman, monstrous figures, individuals only worthy of being lynched, isolated forever, and so on. This dehumanisation does not just serve as an emotional response; it reinforces a system where punitive measures replace any real effort to understand or prevent gendered violence. If we insist on casting perpetrators as irredeemable, we foreclose any possibility of rehabilitation, accountability, or structural transformation.
As a leftist with integrity, I would argue that constructing sexual offenders as a monster “other”, someone as an ungrievable individual, is an obstacle to women’s emancipation. This framing allows us to evade the uncomfortable truth that sexual violence is not committed by some external evil force but by people who are not qualitatively different from us. By refusing to acknowledge their humanity, we implicitly reject the possibility of transformative justice, thereby ensuring that cycles of violence and harm persist. Until we confront this awkward reality, we will remain trapped in a cycle of punishment and suffering.
The task is not simply to reform the criminal justice system but to imagine a different kind of justice—one that prioritises care over punishment, rehabilitation over discipline, and human dignity over state control. Without this radical shift in political and moral imagination, we will remain complicit in reproducing gendered social harm and inequality.
