The Violence of Protection

Policing, Immigration Law, and Asian American Women

By: Lee Ann S. Wang

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Hardcover | 17 February 2026

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Hardcover
152 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
22.9 x 15.2

Hardcover

$271.75

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Celebrated as a feminist victory upon its passage as part of the Clinton Crime Bill, the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) is a landmark piece of legislation that provides protections for survivors of gender and sexual violence. However, as Lee Ann S. Wang shows in The Violence of Protection, VAWA primarily funds law enforcement efforts to rescue women, and in doing so, creates conditions of racial violence against survivors from communities who are already policed, surveilled, and face immigration enforcement. Through ethnographic fieldwork with legal and social advocates serving Asian American survivors of gender and sexual violence in the San Francisco Bay Area, Wang shows how these activists grapple with laws which require survivors to cooperate with policing in order to receive protection. Engaging in methodologies of feminist refusal, theories of racial assemblage, and abolition feminisms, The Violence of Protection theorizes the victim as a legal subject and exposes the racial violence enacted when State-provided legal safeguards are leveraged to expand punishment against survivors, their communities, and others.

Industry Reviews

"A work of demanding precision, one that rewards the reader with insights that shift the foundations upon which so much work on race, immigration, and feminist anti-violence politics continues to rely. With distinctive lucidity and searing analytical prose, Wang brilliantly distills how the 'Asian Immigrant Woman' sutures the state-sanctioned e?ort to end gender-based violence to anti-Black policing in the United States."--Chandan Reddy, author of, Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State "The Violence of Protection could not be timelier, unveiling the violence and policing embedded into the very core of immigration law, reaching beyond the brutality we are currently witnessing in the streets into the intimate lives of racialized survivors of gender-based violence. Not content with critique, Wang draws on legacies of abolition feminisms to invite us into the possibilities that open up when we resist the borders imposed by law and explode the conditioned meanings of 'victim' and 'care' within the logics of criminalization into a constellation of care."--Andrea Ritchie, author of, Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color

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