Racialized Women, the Law and the Violence of White Settler Colonialism
Abstract
In 2001, Rie Fujii, a 23-year-old Japanese national living without legal status in Calgary, Alberta, Canada left her two infant children alone in her apartment for 10 days while visiting her out-of-town boyfriend. The children, Domenic and Gemini, died of dehydration and starvation. Charged with two counts of second-degree homicide, Fujii plead guilty to manslaughter and received an 8-year sentence. Through an analysis of the publicly available judicial documents relating to the crimes of Rie Fujii, this paper explores how the law’s individualization and medicalization of crime and violence may obscure the multiple forms of everyday and structural violence that racialized women in white settler states such as Canada experience and may perpetrate. I argue that the law’s conceptualization of crime and violence conceals and thus advances the violence endemic to white settler colonialism.
Notes
Location
Calgary, Alberta
Key recommendations
NA
Key populations
Migrant women
Key findings
Conditions for violence against and by racialized women in Canada are facilitated by white settler colonial and neoliberal discourses and practices that justify the criminalization of indigenous and racialized Others; the dismantling of the welfare state, and gendered and racialized processes of pathologization
Gaps identified
NA
Community organizations
NA
Integration timeline
At what point during the integration process the study was conducted?
NA
Open-access – No