Scholars generally agree that rape law reform has not been successful because of the sex and race biases of the criminal justice system and the persistence of societal myths that blame victims for sexual assault. In an Abusive State offers a deeper critique of the feminist antiviolence movement's focus on criminal justice solutions to violence. Kristin Bumiller argues that this focus has contributed to the explosive growth of the state's crime control apparatus and social service bureaucracies, which have in fact disempowered women by reinforcing stereotypes of women as victims and dependents. According to Bumiller, early feminists defined the problem of violence against women as rooted in the state's failure to protect women and, therefore, focused on legal reform strategies to increase prosecution and imprisonment of male offenders. Early feminist framing of sexual violence as a gender war and as a significant threat to all women “unleashed larger cultural anxieties about security and crime as well as race and class” (p. 19), which fueled a moral panic and placed pressure on governments to respond to and contain the threat. This gendered framing obscured race and contributed to cultural narratives that violence results from the “sadistic impulses of unruly racial minorities” (p. 35). Criminal justice responses place the blame for violence on individual bad men, justifying a coercive and punitive state reaction to violence and obscuring the neoliberal state's role in maintaining the economic and social subordination that makes women vulnerable to violence.

Bumiller supports her argument by conducting a close analysis of three types of discourse—high-profile criminal trials, specialized medical and social work journals, and the words of victims themselves. She first focuses on two-high profile gang-rape trials—the 1984 New Bedford, Massachusetts, case and the 1991 Central Park Jogger case. As forms of “expressive justice,” these cases allowed the state to express the anger and outrage that the crime provoked and symbolically to reassert state power to protect citizens and control crime. Bumiller argues that prosecutors constructed a narrative about passive women victimized by sadistic strangers, which not only served to legitimize a “culture of control” and justify coercive state practices but also reinforced debilitating gender and racial stereotypes. She then turns to an analysis of how the development of a “therapeutic state” has also had coercive effects on women by imposing a medical-legal model on women's experiences of violence. Analyzing articles in specialized medical and social work journals, Bumiller argues that this universalizing discourse takes women out of their gender, class, and racial situation, turning their experiences of violence into treatable symptoms of illness. Violence becomes a public health problem and service providers become neutral and distanced professionals diagnosing and treating the symptoms of a narrowly defined disease of violence. As a result, “any effort among women to redefine their problems in their own terms often competes with or is suppressed by professional assessments of these problems” (p. 66). Women are increasingly subject to surveillance, extending state control over their lives and influencing how they can exercise agency.

Bumiller's third form of evidence is the victims' testimony in the New Bedford and Central Park cases, as well as intensive interviews with six women from battered women's shelters. The author argues that this evidence shows how the state exercises coercive control over female victims, making them dependent subjects. In the New Bedford and Central Park trials, the victims had to describe their experiences in ways that fit prosecutors' narratives of innocent victims subject to the sexual brutality of dangerous persons. For the women from shelters, interactions with the state were often a reenactment of the loss of dignity that comes from being battered. They were judged and controlled by the state acting as a symbolic husband/father and had to assume the role of victim in order to get services. Subject to the constant threat of having their children taken away, the battered women had to agree to mandatory provisions and subject themselves to discipline for infractions. Prosecutors and social service agencies control women with a gendered medical-legal discourse.

In the final chapter, Bumiller considers the effectiveness of using universal human rights principles to address violence against women. She warns that the human rights paradigm continues to view the problem of violence against women as the state's failure to protect women from individual bad men, supporting the expansion of the state powers of surveillance and punishment. She suggests a reconceptualization of human rights to be based on ideas of dignity and autonomy, locally generated rather than universal, and contingent, fluid, and grounded in the deliberation of diverse individuals and groups. Grounding the power to protect human dignity in the sovereignty of individual citizens avoids enforcing the state's monopoly on violence and can potentially address the deeper roots of violence in state-supported systemic subordination of women that makes them vulnerable to violence. Rather than criminal justice solutions to violence, Bumiller calls on the antiviolence movement to prioritize the social and economic empowerment of women through civic engagement and participatory democracy.

In An Abusive State provides an important and provocative critique of feminist antiviolence work, rooted in an analysis of multiple primary sources. Aimed at a scholarly audience, this dense and challenging text powerfully demonstrates how legal and medical discourses on violence disempower women. Bumiller's empirically based critique of criminal justice solutions to violence against women serves as an important warning against reproducing these failed strategies under a human rights framework. Her text provides strong evidence of the danger of trusting the state to address violence against women in ways that empower women and gives good reason to consider seriously alternative grassroots strategies that function apart from state institutions.