On a warm June evening in 1978, Lynn Moncrief left her West Philadelphia apartment and headed to the Center City headquarters of Philadelphia Women Organized Against Rape (WOAR). Two years prior, WOAR hired the self-described “Black radical feminist” to serve as Outreach Coordinator and tasked her with forging connections between the City of Brotherly Love's premier rape crisis center and its Black neighborhoods.Footnote 1 Moncrief took pride in “the connection … being made with thousands of Black people” through her outreach efforts.Footnote 2 But she still had to explain to her disappointed white colleagues why her relentless outreach did not yield higher numbers of Black volunteers. Moncrief elaborated that WOAR's meager returns on its diversity campaign should not be interpreted as disinterest on the part of Black women. “Black women are still primarily concerned with police brutality against their men and boys, with economic issues, and with raising their children,” she explained. As a result, “they are extremely reluctant to cause Black men or boys to become involved with the police, courts, or jails. This holds true even if Black women are raped or brutalized by Black men.” She concluded that “while this denial of personal self-interest may be difficult for many white women to understand, it is a fact and WOAR must work amid this reality.”Footnote 3
WOAR had begun five years earlier with a hotline and a small desk within the emergency room of Philadelphia General Hospital (PGH). WOAR “founding mother” Jody Pinto was appalled by the callous and humiliating treatment rape victims regularly received from male doctors and police officers at PGH. She resolved to create a network of women who were regularly on-call to intercept survivors of sexual assault who sought cost-free care at PGH and shepherd them through the city's medical and criminal justice systems.Footnote 4 Over the next decade, WOAR blossomed into a nationally recognized, full-service, feminist rape crisis center. From their new Center City headquarters at 1220 Sansom Street, a handful of paid staff members coordinated dozens of unpaid volunteers who offered emergency room counseling and court accompaniment to victims who arrived at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. In its 1984 retrospective on the feminist movement against sexual violence, the radical feminist periodical off our backs celebrated WOAR as “the first rape crisis center to gain access to a large city hospital emergency room” and obtain “an enormous amount of funding.”Footnote 5 This glowing appraisal of WOAR's growth masked a complicated internal struggle over the meaning of feminism, race, and policing in anti-rape advocacy. Moncrief had made clear to the white feminist leadership of WOAR that close cooperation with law enforcement officials undermined the goal of recruiting more Black women to volunteer with WOAR. This was an inconvenient truth considering WOAR's financial dependence upon grants issued by the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), the key agency orchestrating the federal “war on crime.”Footnote 6 Between 1975 and 1980, the LEAA subsidized up to 90 percent of WOAR's operating costs through block grants disbursed by the Governor's Justice Commission of Pennsylvania (GJC).Footnote 7 WOAR's political connections to Mayor Frank Rizzo, the self-proclaimed “toughest cop in America,” further complicated these designs.Footnote 8
This article reevaluates the impact of LEAA funding on feminist rape crisis centers of the 1970s and offers a more precise measurement of the intertwining of the feminist movement against sexual violence and the American carceral state by examining one of its central ironies. The LEAA subsidized rape crisis centers in the expectation that their feminist operators would encourage victims to report their assaults to law enforcement officials. In doing so, the agency tethered the feminist movement against sexual violence to the profound anti-Blackness of the federal “war on crime.” Yet, Philadelphia WOAR utilized a portion of its LEAA monies to hire its first paid Black staff member, Lynn Moncrief, with the intention of improving its racial diversity. Throughout her tenure as WOAR's Outreach Coordinator, the “Black radical feminist” did not adhere to the reporting-centric model of rape prevention advanced by WOAR's state benefactors. Instead, she challenged her white feminist colleagues on the primacy of police reporting within WOAR's “empowerment model” for the victims they served, the majority of whom were African American. Moncrief would not fully reverse the police-friendly bent of Philadelphia WOAR, nor the carceral cooptation of the broader feminist movement against sexual violence that culminated with the Violence Against Women Act of 1994 (VAWA).Footnote 9 But her presence within the longstanding feminist rape crisis center held off a completely uncritical partnership between Philadelphia WOAR and the city's criminal justice system, contrary to the designs of the LEAA. The latitude she exercised, from framing the community education programs delivered by WOAR to the “target communities” of North and West Philadelphia to instituting a robust Third World Caucus for nonwhite WOAR volunteers, indicates that the LEAA's control over the feminist rape crisis centers it funded was never total.
Rape crisis centers like Philadelphia WOAR were among the most visible and concrete nodes of the feminist movement against sexual violence of the 1970s. The earliest feminist rape crisis centers opened within months of each other in Berkeley, California, and Washington, DC, in 1972.Footnote 10 By the decade's end, more than 500 feminist-run rape crisis centers were in operation across the country.Footnote 11 All were united by the conviction that rape was not a private shame or personal misfortune, but an act of political violence that was essentially sanctioned within a patriarchal society.Footnote 12 This brand of activism was not without precedent. Historians have extensively documented African American women publicly testifying about their vulnerability to sexual assault and organizing to demand protection a full century before women's liberationists purported to “break the silence.”Footnote 13 Although second-wave feminists by no means discovered the problem of sexual violence, they did offer new methods to respond to the pervasiveness of gender-based violence in women's lives. One such method was the rape crisis center. Described as the “backbone of the anti-rape movement,” these institutions were geographically and politically separate from patriarchal law enforcement.Footnote 14 As a woman-controlled “alternative to the police,” these spaces provided assaulted women with the sympathetic ears of women volunteers, counseling to counteract feelings of powerlessness and shame, and—if they wished—support as they sought redress through the criminal justice system.Footnote 15 Many centers also conducted educational outreach to the local community and offered training to medical and law enforcement professionals who regularly came in contact with rape survivors to disabuse them of insidious “rape myths.”Footnote 16 Their ultimate (and admittedly utopian) goal was to eradicate rape altogether by uprooting patriarchy. In the short term, anti-rape feminists demanded that society recognize rape as a serious and unacceptably common crime that merited action.
The earliest feminist rape crisis centers operated out of rented apartments with little more than a shared telephone line and a devoted cadre of women volunteers. As the demand for comprehensive services mushroomed, feminist activists hunted for funding to hire full-time staff and secure permanent space. They located a reliable flow of federal funds in a relatively new federal agency: the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration.Footnote 17 Established by the Omnibus Safe Streets and Crime Control Act of 1968, the LEAA's chief purpose was extending technical and financial support to local law enforcement to “crack down” on illicit drug trade and street violence. But it also subsidized ancillary civilian organizations that supported urban crime control missions, including feminist rape crisis centers like Philadelphia WOAR.Footnote 18 As stated in its 1974 publication Rape and Its Victims, LEAA officials invested in feminist rape crisis centers to improve the performance of local police departments in the capture and prosecution of rapists, who they imagined as hardened recidivist criminals.Footnote 19 But they showed little understanding of the patriarchal dynamics that enabled sexual violence and even less interest in disrupting America's “rape culture.”Footnote 20 Neglecting the avenues of rape prevention through community education and self-defense training, LEAA officials determined that rape could only be prevented by facilitating police reporting and prosecuting offenders. They premised the funding of rape crisis centers on fulfilling these objectives. Consequently, the terms and conditions of LEAA funding contracted the previously capacious terrain of feminist anti-rape activism in the 1970s.Footnote 21 This contraction was especially pronounced for women of color, who, as Black feminist scholars Kimberlè Crenshaw and Treva B. Lindsey have argued, frequently saw the police contributing to the violence in their lives, not controlling it.Footnote 22
Although a small contingent of the feminist movement against sexual violence joined its Black colleagues in opposing partnership with agents of the carceral state, others had no such qualms. Anti-rape feminists pointed to abysmally low rates of reporting and conviction for sexual assault as a major hurdle for women's equality.Footnote 23 As early as 1973, groups like the National Organization for Women's Rape Task Force and the Michigan Women's Task Force on Rape dedicated their energies to reforming rape laws and court procedures to counteract the learned disbelief of rape victims and make convictions easier to sustain.Footnote 24 At the agitation of feminist groups, many states adopted piecemeal legal reforms during the 1970s, such as graduating sexual offenses, easing the evidentiary burdens of “utmost resistance” and third-party corroboration, and “shielding” victims by declaring their sexual histories inadmissible as evidence.Footnote 25 Many feminists, including members of Philadelphia WOAR, demanded that rape be regarded as a serious crime and earnestly hoped that more rapists would be duly convicted and lengthily incarcerated. More cautious organizers viewed the reorientation of anti-rape advocacy around police reporting as a necessary compromise to remain financially solvent and operational. In either case, they acquiesced to the political ethos of “getting tough” on crime that birthed the LEAA in the first place.Footnote 26
Historians of the late-twentieth-century American carceral state have correctly scrutinized the signature narcotics and anti-gang enforcement programs of the “war on crime” for incarcerating Black urban youth at wildly disproportionate rates. A growing subset of these scholars has looked to the synergy between the feminist “war on rape” and the federal “war on crime” of the 1970s and highlighted the former's contribution to what scholar Kristen Bumiller has called “the unforeseen growth of a criminalized society.”Footnote 27 Moreover, the funding of feminist counseling, court accompaniment, research, educational outreach, and victim compensation delivered outsized rhetorical benefits for the state. By allocating a portion of its vast resources to securing women's safety, politicians could frame the unprecedented expansion of the carceral state as unambiguously just.Footnote 28 Applying a gender lens to a literature that has been dominated by perspectives of race and class complicates narratives of the rise of the American carceral state. It expands the cast of historical actors beyond policy makers and politicians that mobilized racialized assumptions about violent crime to include activists committed to protecting vulnerable categories of women.Footnote 29
By the same token, feminists were not merely complicit carceral cheerleaders, indifferent to the violence that the state visited upon people of color. This article heeds the call of scholars like Maria Bevacqua, Carrie M. Baker, Beth E. Richie, Nancy Whittier, Catherine O. Jacquet, Emily Thuma, and Aya Gruber to attend to marginal anti-rape feminists, both white and Black, who maintained a radical praxis despite the pressures of carceral funding sources.Footnote 30 While the federal agencies that orchestrated the “war on crime” made their mandates, individual activists and organizations could and did subvert them. Philadelphia WOAR's “LEAA years” represent a unique moment of fluidity within the feminist movement against sexual violence in which state actors began to wield funding as a cudgel to reshape the movement's priorities toward carceral ends. The “die-off” of feminist rape crisis centers starved of state funding during the Reagan administration had not yet begun, and the Violence against Women Act (VAWA) of 1994 had yet to crystallize the “carceral, non-carceral, and intersectional feminist elements” floating within the feminist anti-violence movement.Footnote 31 VAWA, which provided $1.6 billion in support for feminist anti-rape activities through the Department of Justice's newly minted Office on Violence Against Women, was couched within the landmark Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, the single largest crime bill in the history of the United States.Footnote 32 The pressure that the LEAA exerted on feminist rape crisis centers like Philadelphia WOAR presaged what scholar Nancy Whittier has termed the “gendered crime frame that facilitated conservative support for VAWA” two decades later.Footnote 33 In this relatively brief window, Black women's critiques of the carceral and anti-Black allegiances of the feminist movement against sexual violence could take root, adding a historic forerunner to explicitly abolitionist groups like Critical Resistance and INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence in the new millennium.Footnote 34 Likewise, this article builds on the decades of scholarship that has uncovered a robust tradition of African American women publicly organizing against rape, though not always under the banner of women's liberation.Footnote 35
“Essential Partners in the Response to Rape”: The LEAA Funds Feminist Rape Crisis Centers
Philadelphia WOAR's use of LEAA monies to hire a Black staff member was not a unique maneuver. The report summarizing the proceedings of the First National Conference on Third World Women and Violence, which drew over one hundred Black, Latina, Asian American, and Native American anti-rape organizers to Washington, DC, noted that the “Law Enforcement Assistance Administration … provided a chance for Third World Women to become involved in a conscious anti-rape effort … through programs and centers receiving grants or contracts to sponsor projects or outreach utilizing a Black or Third World woman hired for that purpose.”Footnote 36 These Black or Third World women like Lynn Moncrief drew salaries that were subsidized by the LEAA. Despite this, they implemented Black-centered, anti-rape praxes that contradicted the agency's stated vision for controlling rape.
In 1975, the LEAA compiled research findings into Rape and Its Victims, a “Prescriptive Package” intended for distribution to police, prosecutors, hospitals, rape crisis centers, and other groups interested in controlling the crime of rape. Decades later, INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence described Rape and Its Victims as the opening salvo of the state's campaign to “align the anti-violence movement with its criminalization project.”Footnote 37 The “Prescriptive Package” outlined a comprehensive battle plan for reducing the rate of rape by 25 percent by 1983, a goal set by the LEAA-supported National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice.Footnote 38 Interpreting increased rates of reported rape in the nation's cities as symptomatic of the lawlessness that plagued post-1960s urban America, the LEAA proclaimed that “rape has emerged as a problem of national dimensions.”Footnote 39 Rape and Its Victims did not attribute this newfound concern about rape to the emergence of women's liberation but to “the growing anxiety about all forms of violence in our society, which has reached segments of the population heretofore untroubled by the threat of crime.” From the view of the LEAA, the surge in reported rapes signaled that a crime long thought to be committed almost exclusively by Black men was migrating out of the ghetto and into white suburban enclaves, following the flow of illicit drugs.Footnote 40 As such, Rape and Its Victims was the first federal-level articulation of a “single-issue … gendered crime frame” that would largely overtake the multifaceted feminist frame in the late twentieth century.Footnote 41 Rape and Its Victims announced the LEAA's motivation and intention to “crackdown” on rape using many of the same methods it had employed for drugs and gang violence, but with a twist: the agency would be partnering feminist groups with local law enforcement to achieve this crackdown.
According to Rape and Its Victims, rape was primarily a “crime of opportunity,” committed with little or no premeditation by “career criminals” who repeatedly flouted the law in the expectation of not being caught or, if caught, only receiving a trivial sentence. The accepted wisdom of the LEAA in the mid-1970s held that increased police presence and regular patrolling in crime-stricken areas could serve as effective prevention.Footnote 42 Yet the authors of Rape and Its Victims admitted that “patrol is largely incapable of preventing rape, which is primarily an indoor crime without witnesses.”Footnote 43 This led LEAA officials to conclude that the key to controlling rape was incentivizing victims to report their assaults to the authorities. LEAA officials had gleaned the feminist axiom that rape was a chronically underreported crime.Footnote 44 Their own in-house research affirmed that incidences of rape in American cities were at least three times higher than the number of reported rapes.Footnote 45 They extrapolated that encouraging victims to entrust themselves to the criminal justice system would lead to an increase in the rate of reporting for sexual assault. This would gradually lead to more convictions, effectively preventing rapes by confining rapists in prison. A greater likelihood of conviction would also serve as a strong deterrent to potential rapists by convincing them capture was certain.Footnote 46
Previously, law enforcement officials had dismissed rape crisis centers and the feminist volunteers who ran them as overzealous, polemical, and even obstructionist in their criticisms of the criminal justice system's treatment of rape victims.Footnote 47 In Rape and Its Victims, the LEAA reversed this stance. It insisted that “although many police departments have had quite strained relations with rape crisis centers and similar organizations that have pressed for change in the treatment of rape victims, such groups should be treated as allies in the department's efforts to improve its performance and that of other involved public agencies.”Footnote 48 This alliance was motivated by an acknowledgment that victims treated by feminist rape crisis centers were far more likely to file a police report and follow through with an investigation and court proceedings than those who lacked such support. “One need only consider the influence rape crisis centers may have on a victim's decision to report the crime to the police,” Rape and Its Victims explained.Footnote 49
The LEAA encouraged such partnerships by offering financial support to feminist rape crisis centers. In 1974, rape crisis centers became eligible for funding under the “comprehensive plan for the reduction of crime” submitted annually by State Planning Agencies to the national office of the LEAA.Footnote 50 Under these conditions, the LEAA offered to subsidize feminist anti-rape activity in the expectation that recipient organizations would fulfill the agency's crime control agenda. Specifically, the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration expected client feminist rape crisis centers to enthusiastically endorse the criminal justice system for the women it served. Rape and Its Victims urged its feminist readers that “arguments for cooperation with the government should be made” when counseling survivors, from “the altruistic view that a victim's cooperation may save another woman or child from attack” to the “self-serving” rationale that “it may be therapeutic to use the law enforcement system against the offender as a conduit for the anger that a person who is injured naturally feels.”Footnote 51 Though couched in the language of empowering women, the LEAA's interest in improving the plight of victims had little to do with challenging patriarchy and leveling the sexual playing field for women. Victim support was a mechanism to improve the performance of the police.
The LEAA reinforced the message that consistent reporting was the crux of effective rape prevention by designating some anti-rape projects as “exemplary” if they were measurably successful in “reducing crime or improving criminal justice.”Footnote 52 In 1980, the LEAA bestowed the “exemplary” honor on the Stop Rape Crisis Center (SRCC) of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. SRCC earned the favor of the LEAA by providing continuous services to victims of sexual violence “as a subtle incentive to cooperate” with law enforcement officials.Footnote 53 The “exemplary” label obscured a contentious power struggle between the original feminist leadership of SRCC and Baton Rouge District Attorney Ossie Davis in 1976. SRCC derived its LEAA funding jointly with the Baton Rouge district attorney's office. When the original director of SRCC disobeyed Davis's order to discontinue supportive services to rape victims who refused to report their assaults to the police, Davis fired her and replaced her with a director more amenable to a law-and-order approach.Footnote 54 The debacle in Baton Rouge, which the Feminist Alliance Against Rape Newsletter publicized nationally in its Fall 1976 issue, sent a clear message to feminist rape crisis centers: the LEAA expected the anti-rape projects it financed to encourage victims to report their rapes to the police.Footnote 55 Rape crisis centers that did not meet this expectation risked losing their staff and funding. Conversely, those who collaborated with local law enforcement would be rewarded. By 1980, the LEAA's Deborah M. Carrow commented that rape crisis centers like SRCC “have matured over the last few years” and “no longer represent the radical alternative” to the criminal justice system.Footnote 56 The financial support of the LEAA had disciplined them into “essential partners in the response to rape.”
The intentions behind the LEAA's overtures were painstakingly debated within the feminist movement against sexual violence. A faction of the white leadership reacted to the LEAA's overtures with a mixture of suspicion and curiosity.Footnote 57 Pauline Bart, a feminist sociologist at the University of Illinois–Chicago and active member of Chicago Women Against Rape, wrote a scathing review of Rape and Its Victims. According to Bart, “In order to understand this report, we have to understand why rape has emerged as an important issue, publicized through the media, responded to by the public, and funded by funding agencies. The presence of the Women's movement is not enough to explain the emergence…. But there was another movement emerging in our society—the movement for law and order.”Footnote 58 Bart criticized Rape and Its Victims—and by extension, the LEAA's interest in supporting anti-rape activity—as a cooptation of the issue by a state agency that was myopically concerned with cracking down on crime without addressing the cultural misogyny that allowed men to rape with virtual impunity. Bart objected to the law-and-order mission of the LEAA, but she also realized that cash-strapped rape crisis centers were hardly able to turn down funding. She uneasily concluded that “whether feminists can or should work or cooperate with agencies of social control and under what conditions is another issue which should be discussed within the women's movement.”Footnote 59
The discussions Bart called for were already unfolding across the pages of the Feminist Alliance Against Rape Newsletter, a quarterly publication of the Feminist Alliance Against Rape (FAAR) that functioned as a national clearinghouse on anti-rape activism.Footnote 60 One of its earliest issues reprinted the comments of Barbara Allen, a member of the Los Angeles Commission on Assaults Against Women, who questioned the motivation behind the LEAA's interest in rape. She asked: “Are anti-rape groups being used by the government to further strengthen its law and order program?”Footnote 61 Allen rejected the LEAA's logic that increased apprehension, prosecution, and conviction of rapists would eliminate sexual violence. She also acknowledged the particular danger that law-and-order regimes posed to people of color. She wondered: “Is the government using the issue of rape to justify building the power of the police? Will this lead to further oppression of all people, and Third World people in particular?”Footnote 62 Allen, like much of the anti-rape movement, had no easy answers to these vexed issues. In the September 1974 newsletter, Mary Ann Largen, head of the National Organization for Women's Rape Task Force, revisited the discussion of the LEAA. Largen recognized that the LEAA's “emphasis on law enforcement is contrary to the goals and/or policies of many women's groups” and was distressed to discover that the criteria for funding were binding anti-rape groups to law enforcement operations.Footnote 63 She noted that “several women's groups have applied for LEAA funding and have found that they cannot obtain it as an autonomous group. Proposals must be submitted jointly with the local police department.”Footnote 64 In such partnerships, the crime control vision of the LEAA and the police overwhelmed the feminist viewpoint and constricted possibilities for anti-rape activism that did not pivot upon reporting. Because the LEAA remained “the only major source of funding at this time,” earlier staples of feminist anti-rape activism, such as speak-outs that challenged rape culture and woman-led self-defense trainings, fell by the wayside.Footnote 65
Feminist criticisms of the narrow crime control vision of the LEAA and its enervating effect on the rape crisis centers it funded even reached the ears of Congress. During a Congressional hearing on “Research on Violent Behavior” in January 1978, Nancy McDonald, a white member of the Washington, DC, Rape Crisis Center, complained that “the main thrust of LEAA funding in rape has been … to increase the efficiency of the criminal justice system by making it ‘easier’ for women to prosecute a rape.”Footnote 66 This focus was “severely limiting options for women who chose not to prosecute their rapes.” McDonald specifically noted that “many Black women have little to gain and much to lose in prosecuting a rape.” Their distaste for reporting was twofold. As individuals, Black women hesitated to report their assaults to the police out of fear that police officers, who held fast to stereotypes about Black women's promiscuity and untrustworthiness, would simply dismiss their complaints out of hand. Frequently, law enforcement would overlook the assault committed against a Black woman and arrest her instead for outstanding crimes such as drug offenses, theft, or prostitution.Footnote 67 Worse still, some police officers followed up their dismissal with physical and sexual assaults upon Black women.Footnote 68 At the level of the community, Black women feared that inviting a hostile police force to intervene in situations of gender violence would reinforce the assumption that Black communities were anarchic and violence-ridden. This would all but ensure the infliction of greater state violence upon their communities through aggressive policing and disproportionate incarceration.Footnote 69
As President Ronald Reagan's fiscal conservatism loomed on the political horizon, even the most radical organizers found themselves indisposed to criticize any federal agency that was willing to subsidize rape crisis centers. In an article written in 1980 for No More Cages, a radical feminist women's prison publication that condemned racist state violence and repudiated police as a protector of women, Janet Howard declared that the government agencies that fund anti-violence projects “exist primarily to strengthen the state.”Footnote 70 She took special umbrage with “the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, which mostly provides weapons for law enforcement.” Still, Howard conceded that without these funds rape crisis centers might disappear altogether. Howard also entertained the possibility that state funding would not automatically compel all rape crisis centers to conform to the law-and-order mold. She explained that “all money is dirty; whether the dirt creeps into the work or not depends to a great extent on the politics of the people using the money.” Philadelphia WOAR, with its avowedly feminist “empowerment model” for victims and access to LEAA monies, was vulnerable to this “creep.” It also positioned individuals hired with this “dirty” money to limit the “creep.”
The “Law-and-Order” Entanglements of Philadelphia WOAR
Between 1975 and 1980, the Governor's Justice Commission (GJC), the designated State Planning Agency of Pennsylvania, awarded WOAR over half a million dollars that subsidized the salaries of directors, administrators, coordinators, and secretaries.Footnote 71 Before the first check arrived from the Governor's Justice Commission of Pennsylvania, WOAR “founding mother” Jody Pinto had already signaled WOAR's support for the Rizzo Administration's “tough on crime” policies and affirmed WOAR's commitment to encouraging victims of rape to report their assaults to the police. In January 1974, Pinto wrote to the mayor praising “the concern over crime and compassion for its victims that you have always demonstrated.”Footnote 72 She promised that WOAR's continued existence “will encourage more women to report and prosecute this crime while at the same time making it easier for the police to investigate and apprehend the offender.” Pinto continued, “Mr. Mayor, this is your city and its potential as a leader in the fight against crime has barely been tapped…. We want to work with you Mr. Mayor to develop a completely humane system for the prosecution of rape cases because without such a system, women will continue to not report the crime of rape.” The following year, a funding stream directly from the LEAA reinforced these ties.
In March 1975, Philadelphia WOAR first applied to the GJC seeking financial support for its “Crisis Center Project.” This project encompassed all of the daily functions of the feminist rape crisis center. It fell under Section 4A of the Comprehensive Plan of the Governor's Justice Commission of Pennsylvania, which earmarked LEAA monies for “community organization to reduce victimization, to increase citizen involvement and improve cooperation with criminal justice agencies, [and] to provide services to victims.”Footnote 73 The funding of the Crisis Center Project allowed WOAR to retain full-time staff who would recruit, train, and coordinate volunteers. This would ensure complete twenty-four-hour coverage of the rape hotline and more consistent coverage of the emergency room counseling and court accompaniment programs.Footnote 74 On paper, the grant applications submitted by Philadelphia WOAR to the GJC affirmed the LEAA's view that increased reporting and vigorous prosecution would curb the rate of sexual violence. In their first application to fund the Crisis Center Project in March 1975, Philadelphia WOAR warned that “according to FBI projections, there may be nearly 10,000 rapes occurring in Philadelphia each year, yet this crime goes unreported nine times out of ten.”Footnote 75 WOAR forecasted that “if victims of rape receive legal information, are encouraged to cooperate with police, and are offered court accompaniment, an increase in the number of women who prosecute is likely.”Footnote 76 WOAR's inaugural application to the GJC secured $56,750 in LEAA funds that would partially or fully cover the salaries of eight full-time staff members from July 1975 to July 1976.Footnote 77 Grateful for the support, WOAR reassured the GJC that the Crisis Center Project was a sound investment. At the tail end of the first year of funding, WOAR staff member Paula Weiss wrote directly to the GJC to remind it that “the Commission has set as a priority the apprehension and prosecution of rapists” and “this cannot happen without encouragement and assistance to victims” provided by WOAR.Footnote 78
WOAR subsequently secured LEAA funds to continue the Crisis Center Project annually, from 1976 through 1979, with payouts peaking at $98,964 for 1976 to 1977. Each application also reaffirmed the place of police reporting in WOAR's philosophy. Each year, WOAR's narratives lamented the rising rate of sexual violence in Philadelphia while promising that its services, made possible by the generous support of the LEAA, would convince more women to trust the criminal justice system to adjudicate their assaults. The 1977 application opened with the distressing FBI statistic that while the overall incidence of “serious crime” in Philadelphia had dropped by 8.5 percent in 1976, the rate of rape in the city had increased by 7 percent.Footnote 79 In response, WOAR clarified that the rape crisis center “encourages women to report rapes and other crimes of sexual abuse and expects to make in the future an even greater impact upon the City of Philadelphia as it deals with all aspects of the crime of rape.” The following year, WOAR assured the GJC that its direct services would “ultimately result in an increase in the reporting of rape and decrease in the crime of rape.”Footnote 80 WOAR's Crisis Center Project fit so snugly with the principles of the LEAA that in 1977 the GJC nominated it to be an “exemplary project.” The LEAA declined to award it the coveted “exemplary” label because the project had not resulted in a measurable reduction in the crime of rape in Philadelphia.Footnote 81
The enthusiastic carceral cheerleading by Philadelphia WOAR in its LEAA grant applications could be dismissed as empty posturing meant only to secure funding. But the white feminist leadership of WOAR sincerely upheld police reporting as an effective and even feminist response to rape. Letty Thall, a policewoman-turned-social worker who penned the original LEAA grants, served as WOAR's Executive Director between 1976 and 1977.Footnote 82 She maintained that police reporting was a vital component of WOAR's feminist “empowerment model” for victims. Because rape was “a crime taking away your control,” Thall felt that prosecuting their attack placed victims “in the driver's seat” and on the path to reclaiming control over their lives.Footnote 83 Thall, like most leaders of feminist rape crisis centers in the 1970s, was not blind to the sexist and racist besiegement of victims within the criminal justice system. But she also believed that through sustained contact with WOAR, the Philadelphia Police Department would gradually relinquish its racist and sexist assumptions about rape victims and become an effective tool of women's empowerment. At least in the short term, negotiating with law enforcement entities did not appear to unduly dictate their methods of advocacy. Philadelphia WOAR did not withhold services if a woman desired not to report, and the Governor's Justice Commission did not press the issue, avoiding the fate of SRCC in Baton Rouge.Footnote 84 WOAR's conditional alliance with law enforcement, forged with Mayor Rizzo since early 1974, primed it to accept LEAA funding as a net positive, and continued LEAA funding would forestall any criticisms of the alliance going forward.
Throughout the life of the GJC grants, WOAR's leadership embraced carceral solutions to rape that reflected the platform of the LEAA. These solutions included the expansion of the Philadelphia Police Department and harsher sentences for those convicted of the crime. During his 1977 campaign for District Attorney, future Philadelphia Mayor and Pennsylvania Governor Edward G. Rendell promised WOAR that if elected he would establish a Rape Unit within the Philadelphia Police Department committed solely to assisting victims and prosecuting rapists. District Attorney Rendell made good on this promise four years later with the sixty-member Sex Crimes Unit.Footnote 85 The creation of a special Sex Crimes Unit tracked with both the feminist goal of securing more sensitive treatment for rape victims and the state's interest in raising rates of victim reporting. Berit Lakey, who had replaced Letty Thall as WOAR's Executive Director, explained that the introduction of specialized police units would reinvigorate the ongoing “war on rape” and greatly “improve victim cooperation,” leading to greater numbers of reports and more consistent arrests. Lieutenant John Lyons announced that the Philadelphia Police Department fully expected “an increase in reported crimes once people know there's a centralized place that's handling the cases.”Footnote 86 The addition of the specialized unit also relieved the remainder of the Philadelphia police force of this duty, freeing up more officers to participate in the ongoing occupation of North and West Philadelphia. That same year, WOAR Legal Coordinator Lynn Marks wrote approvingly to John H. Kramer, the Pennsylvania Commission on Sentencing's Executive Director. Marks was “pleased that the Commission raised the severity rank, and thus the guideline sanction, for rape” and “increased the guideline sentences for repeat sex offenders, because sex offenders have the highest rate of recidivism and thus must be sentenced to long periods of incarceration in order to protect society.”Footnote 87 Marks voiced some misgivings over carceral solutions to rape. “WOAR realizes that incarceration in itself will not cure someone from raping again upon release,” she said. Nonetheless, Marks maintained that “not to give harsh sentences because effective rehabilitation is lacking is to further penalize the victim.”
The LEAA rejected WOAR's application to fund the Crisis Center Project past 1980. The LEAA itself would cease operations the following year. Though a relatively brief chapter in the center's organizational history, the infusion of LEAA monies through the Governor's Justice Commission catalyzed the growth of Philadelphia's lone rape crisis center. Through its grant making practices, the LEAA concentrated the diffuse “tough on crime” ethos that was already percolating in Philadelphia under Mayor Rizzo. By pursuing and accepting those grants, Philadelphia WOAR formalized its commitment to carceral tactics of rape prevention that was already manifest in the “empowerment model.” This deferral to law enforcement as women's best line of defense against violence would be replicated by the national feminist anti-rape movement in the decades to come.Footnote 88
Lynn Moncrief: A “Black Radical Feminist” Approach to Anti-Rape Advocacy
Ironically, WOAR utilized the same funding stream that nudged it toward placing greater emphasis on police reporting to begin addressing the issue of racial representation within the rape crisis center. In 1976, WOAR designated a portion of its GJC Crisis Center Project grant to hire an Outreach Coordinator. The job went to Lynn Moncrief. Moncrief cut her political teeth in North Philadelphia as both a community organizer in the busing controversy and an administrator within the Model Cities program of the war on poverty.Footnote 89 She also publicly identified herself with feminism. “I detest labels,” she wrote, “but if we must use labels … I would say that I am a Black radical feminist.”Footnote 90 Moncrief's background in community organizing and service provision, combined with her Black radical feminist convictions, prepared her for the role of outreach coordinator at WOAR, which, as stated within the Crisis Center Project application, required her to “establish and expand [WOAR's] volunteer network and support system with increased minority participation” and oversee “an intensive public information and recruitment campaign in the target community.”Footnote 91 Though hardly intended for this purpose, the hiring of Lynn Moncrief would interrupt the law enforcement model of rape prevention that the LEAA was attempting to impose.
By early 1976, WOAR's leadership was seriously concerned over the near-uniform whiteness of its staff and volunteer pool. The city of Philadelphia remained racially segregated during the 1970s with virtually all Black residents confined to its North and West corners.Footnote 92 Philadelphia WOAR's respective headquarters in Philadelphia General Hospital in West Philadelphia and Jefferson Hospital in Center City were two of the few genuinely integrated spaces in the city. As of February 1976, only twenty-one of WOAR's 153 trained volunteers were Black women, and there were no women of color on the paid staff.Footnote 93 Yet most of the women who received WOAR's services were women of color, specifically Black women. Of the nearly 1,500 rape victims WOAR assisted between March 1974 and April 1976, 72 percent were Black.Footnote 94 Executive director Letty Thall was “very conscious to make sure we had equal numbers of people of color on staff.”Footnote 95 Thall and her colleagues hired Moncrief to militate against “the community skepticism toward WOAR as primarily a white middle class women's group centered around one issue.”Footnote 96 They correctly gauged that the white face of WOAR could dissuade Black victims from trusting the feminist rape crisis center. However, the leadership's reckoning with the representational diversity of the rape crisis center did not extend to the center's praxis and how its “empowerment model” disavowed Black victims. Former WOAR volunteer Wadiyah Nelson recalled “that was one of the issues that came up all the time, about Black women's reluctance to press charges and engage the criminal justice system.”Footnote 97 Internal statistics substantiate Nelson's claim. Between April and June 1976, 63 percent of victim contacts did not proceed to the court accompaniment stage; 65 percent of those victims were Black women.Footnote 98 The data indicate that organizing Philadelphia WOAR's services around police reporting could lead Black victims to regard rape crisis centers as extensions of the police rather than an alternative to them.Footnote 99 WOAR's financial dependence upon the LEAA, which buttressed the police reporting provision of the “empowerment model,” exacerbated the disconnect between the Black victims it served and its roster of services.
Though the LEAA directly subsidized her salary, Moncrief did not hem closely to the agency's guidelines for “exemplary” anti-rape advocacy. Her refusal to prioritize raising rates of reporting and convictions for sexual violence was consistent with her professed Black radical feminist politics, which historically attended to the simultaneity of interpersonal and state violence in the lives of Black women and regarded law enforcement skeptically at best.Footnote 100 But Moncrief's connection to Black feminism exceeded her reluctantly applied label. Her work as an administrator within the War on Poverty's Model Cities program and an outreach coordinator within WOAR evinced the hallmarks of Black feminism, namely an ethic of community uplift and an intersectional perspective that insisted upon the inseparability of racism and sexism.Footnote 101 Moncrief's Black radical feminist politics compelled her to grasp issues “at the root” and refuse to sideline her race-based criticisms in favor of gender solidarity.Footnote 102 This grounding led her to escape both the representational role intended for her by WOAR and the carceral response to rape expected by the LEAA. Moncrief was brought on board for the purposes of improving WOAR's racial profile and conducting outreach and education. The second task required her to build trust between the Black community and feminist rape crisis centers.Footnote 103 Building trust meant adjusting WOAR's model of advocacy to reflect the needs of Black women, including preserving what little space separated Philadelphia WOAR from the Philadelphia Police Department. In this respect, the Black radical feminist disposition claimed by Moncrief primarily took the form of redirecting resources from police reporting toward community transformation in favor of Black women's safety.
Moncrief wasted no time seeking recruits among the congregants of North and West Philadelphia's Black churches, such as Pinn Memorial Baptist Church, Mount Olive, Mount Carmel, and Whiterock, as well as the members of community organizations like the Coalition of 1,000 Black Women and the Tioga Welfare Rights Organization (WRO).Footnote 104 This was a sharp departure from WOAR's traditional recruitment grounds in the student unions of Philadelphia's universities. Moncrief introduced herself to Mattie McDaniels of Tioga WRO “as a Black woman” with “a commitment to seeing that Black women are made aware of the full scope of the services provided by WOAR.”Footnote 105 She identified “common ground” with McDaniels based on their shared commitment to “the advocacy of oppressed women,” broadcasting an understanding of the interconnectedness of the racial, sexual, and economic oppression acutely felt by Black women in Philadelphia. By her own calculation, during her first year at WOAR, Moncrief wrote 73 letters and made 174 phone contacts to community groups regarding outreach activities, represented WOAR at 47 community meetings, fielded 157 phone calls requesting a speaking engagement, personally conducted 34 speaking engagements, gave 35 print and electronic interviews, and wrote 13 press releases and letters to the editors of Philadelphia newspapers.Footnote 106 When she was not conducting outreach to Black Philadelphia, Moncrief busied herself forging connections with other Black anti-rape organizers around the country, including Ruth Hall of the Boston-based Community Programs Against Sexual Assault (C-PASA) and Nkenge Tourè of the Washington, DC Rape Crisis Center (DCRCC).Footnote 107 She even sent a letter to Deb Friedman applauding her article in the nationally circulated Feminist Alliance Against Rape Newsletter titled “Rape, Racism and Reality.” The article connected the interrelated histories of Black women's sexual exploitation under slavery and Jim Crow and the weaponization of false rape charges in the lynching of Black men, while foregrounding how these histories allowed the contemporary feminist movement against sexual violence to feed into anti-Black racism. Moncrief was thrilled to see the “development of a perspective on race and rape” that “not only included race and economics, but had the courage to take it beyond that.”Footnote 108
Throughout her tenure as outreach coordinator, Moncrief communicated that preventative education about sexual violence was a necessary alternative to referring Black victims to the criminal justice system. In her April 1977 piece for Philadelphia WOAR's internal newsletter, HOTLINE, entitled “Before the Fact of the Crime,” Moncrief reminded her colleagues that “if we carry our concern about rape to its logical conclusion, we should find ourselves deeply involved in rape prevention.”Footnote 109 Moncrief's rape prevention programs stood in contrast to the LEAA's vision of rape prevention, in which consistent reporting by victims and lengthy incarceration of offenders was the only feasible method for preventing rape. According to Moncrief, public education programs that taught the concepts of rape culture, consent, and self-defense were preferable to facilitating the prosecution of rapists. While this was not a new argument within the feminist movement against sexual violence, Moncrief tied it to the needs of Philadelphia's Black community. She asked rhetorically, “Does the [Black] community want a rape prevention program from WOAR? Without reservation, I can say YES!!” She reported that the requests for programming she received as outreach coordinator “invariably” called for rape prevention. “If we are to be responsive to the needs of the community, to the terrified women living in Fairhill and Cambridge housing projects, anywhere in Philadelphia,” she concluded, “it is IMPERATIVE that we give rape prevention equal import with our direct service.” A poster Moncrief created advertising a seminar she planned to give at the Wilson Park Housing Project Community Center in September 1977 hinted at the content of her rape prevention education. She titled the talk “RAPE: CAN IT BE PREVENTED?” and answered the titular question with an illustration of a woman's fist assertively clutching a set of keys.Footnote 110 The poster declared Moncrief's preference that women (and Black women in particular) learn to defend themselves from assault rather than appeal to fickle law enforcement as the chief arbiter of their safety.
Moncrief did not reject the criminal justice system wholesale as a perpetrator of violence against women of color that could not be trusted to protect them from interpersonal violence. In November 1977, one of Moncrief's letters to the editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer confirmed that “Women Organized Against Rape has worked to encourage rape victims to report the crime to the police.”Footnote 111 At the same time, she argued that this encouragement was contingent upon “creating a climate favorable to this by attempting to sensitize all of the institutions and agencies that would become involved with the rape victim.” As a Black woman used to working within broken systems, Moncrief was willing to accept police reporting as an option for victims seeking to reassert control over their lives. But she did not enthusiastically embrace the criminal justice system as the sole answer, as the LEAA would have her do. In March 1978, Moncrief sat for an interview with Drummer, an underground leftist Philadelphia newspaper. During her interview, Moncrief showcased her “Black radical feminist” insights by attacking the same persistent racialized rape myths that Ida B. Wells had debunked eight decades prior, namely that “Black women enjoy sex so much they're available for anything” and that “Black men are superstuds who have overwhelming sexual impulses.”Footnote 112 When asked if WOAR cooperated with law enforcement entities in the city, she answered that they were actively “trying to work closer with police,” thanks to the infusion of crime-fighting monies from the GJC. But for Moncrief, the cornerstone of her anti-rape advocacy was the prevention of rape through education, not the deterrence of rapists through punishment. “I don't think rape can be eliminated unless sexism is eliminated,” she opined. She defined success in community outreach as “preventing men from becoming rapists in the first place,” not raising rates of reporting, prosecution, and conviction for rape.
Moreover, Moncrief did not share the LEAA's certainty that prisons served as effective deterrents to rape. In the same month that she spoke with Drummer, she gave a second interview to a local gay newspaper discussing the unchecked sexual violence within the American prison system that afflicted incarcerated men and women alike.Footnote 113 She also corresponded approvingly with William Fuller, the incarcerated founder of Prisoners Against Rape (PAR) at Lorton Correctional Complex in Virginia.Footnote 114 Pointing to his own experience as a repeated rapist who raped other men while in prison, Fuller argued that the environment of the prison itself promoted sexual violence and left men's societally engrained desire to rape intact. In a position statement circulated by the Feminist Alliance Against Rape Newsletter, Fuller explained that Prisoners Against Rape “consider it an epidemic which must be constrained as every man is a potential RAPIST. Incarceration may checkmate it, but not necessarily prevent the symptoms.”Footnote 115
From Representation to Praxis: The Third World Caucus
On one hand, Lynn Moncrief took pride in “the connection … being made with thousands of Black people” through her outreach efforts at WOAR.Footnote 116 On the other, she still had to explain to her disappointed white colleagues why her relentless outreach did not yield higher numbers of Black volunteers. Moncrief realized that the long-term survival of her interventions to make WOAR's anti-rape advocacy more relevant to the experiences of Black women and less beholden to crime control entities depended upon empowering Black women within WOAR itself. In June 1977, she brought twenty-three nonwhite members of WOAR together to form the Third World Caucus (TWC).Footnote 117 In fact, the Third World Caucus was a supportive network for nonwhite volunteers and staff members in Philadelphia WOAR united in criticism of the racism that permeated the rape crisis center. Moncrief oversaw the birth of the TWC and served as its first chair. The stated objectives of the Third World Caucus defined its members as “active, concerned members of WOAR” united “in an effort to provide for the needs of the victims, minority members and staff of WOAR” because they “question the ability of volunteers to effectively counsel third world rape victims.”Footnote 118
Black women who volunteered for WOAR formed the core of the Third World Caucus. Many of WOAR's Black volunteers were former clients.Footnote 119 All reported feelings of isolation as Black women volunteers in an overwhelmingly white rape crisis center.Footnote 120 One month prior to the formation of the TWC, WOAR's staff had completed an “introspective look at our volunteers” and confirmed that Black women comprised only 16 percent of the volunteer pool.Footnote 121 Wadiyah Nelson recalled that when she joined in 1977, only two out of thirteen of WOAR's staff members were nonwhite women: one was Lynn Moncrief, the other was an administrative assistant.Footnote 122 Johnetta Miller, a Black volunteer and Third World Caucus member, complained about well-meaning white volunteers who would “speak condescendingly to Black victims, but speak to white victims as equals.”Footnote 123 She also witnessed white court accompaniment volunteers “seek out white victims to give support to but not Black ones,” ostensibly because they related more easily to white women than Black women. Black women in Philadelphia arguably required WOAR's supportive services more than any other population. Yet white volunteers’ unease serving Black women, combined with the dearth of Black volunteers, seriously compromised the services WOAR offered to Black victims. In these scenarios, the services offered to Black victims frequently defaulted to police referral.
Black volunteers also detected a pernicious cultural racism in WOAR. In August 1979, Lynn Moncrief resigned from her position as outreach coordinator. Over three years of full-time anti-rape work made her “see the world solely in terms of aggressor–victim” to the detriment of her physical and mental health. She would continue to serve Philadelphia WOAR as a volunteer and regularly offered her apartment as a meeting space.Footnote 124 In a speech before the Third World Caucus, which was printed in the October 1979 edition of HOTLINE and circulated to the general membership, Moncrief accused WOAR of “fraudulent advertising and mislabeling” itself as a feminist organization because a “so-called radical feminist” on WOAR's paid staff regularly called her by the name of another Black member.Footnote 125 After a Black trainee received negative evaluations from the staff for failing to “open up” emotionally during training sessions, she took to the pages of HOTLINE again to explain that “being Black is a daily lesson in emotional control if one is to stay alive, out of jail, and employed. Therefore, it is a severe cultural shock for many of us to walk into WOAR after 20 or 30 years of this selectivity and suddenly be expected to lay bare our very innards to a group of mostly white strangers.”Footnote 126
The Third World Caucus advanced the Black-centered approach to anti-rape advocacy that Lynn Moncrief introduced while she was an LEAA-funded staff member. TWC agreed with Moncrief that WOAR's programs did not incorporate the lived realities of Black women and that this impeded Black women from joining the organization and rising within its ranks. The caucus pressed further that WOAR would continue to marginalize Black victims and alienate Black volunteers until white women within the rape crisis center grappled with their own racism. This meant that the Third World Caucus would need to attack the interlocking issues of interpersonal, cultural, and institutional racism within WOAR. During its first year, the caucus composed an Attitude Exploration Questionnaire designed to root out “hidden prejudices or misunderstandings concerning third world people” among prospective volunteers, hosted internal workshops on such topics as “Race Relations” and “Rape and Racism,” and parlayed with the Training Committee to incorporate nonwhite women's perspectives and experiences into training materials.Footnote 127 Additionally, the TWC held public-facing community workshops intended to “emphasize the role of WOAR in Black and Hispanic communities, provide pertinent information to those who attend, and encourage community members to join and participate in the Caucus,” furthering the outreach initiated by Moncrief.Footnote 128
The Third World Caucus's critique of institutional racism within WOAR intersected with the rape crisis center's ongoing financial relationship with the LEAA. In 1979, Philadelphia WOAR allotted GJC grant money to hire a new volunteer training coordinator. After some deliberation, the Hiring Committee settled upon a white woman. The Third World Caucus had demanded that the Hiring Committee allocate paid positions to nonwhite women, believing that the placement of Black women in positions of power would impart an approach to anti-rape advocacy that better matched the experiences of Black survivors.Footnote 129 Anticipating the backlash, the Hiring Committee circulated an internal memorandum defending its decision. Claiming “a great deal of concern about the overwhelmingly white ‘face’ of WOAR,” the committee approached more than twenty organizations for minority recruiting. Nevertheless, its search did not yield any nonwhite women “qualified” to be trainers.Footnote 130 WOAR's failure to find qualified nonwhite trainers stemmed from the funding criteria imposed by the LEAA. The criteria for a “qualified” trainer, which included a master's degree in social work or a related field, advantaged white middle-class women and excluded nonwhite women who lacked such credentials. Lynn Moncrief, obviously dissatisfied with this explanation, rebuked the Hiring Committee on behalf of the Third World Caucus. “Too often,” she wrote, “Third World people have been told that, ‘we'd be willing to hire a (fill in the appropriate minority) but we haven't been able to find one that was ‘qualified.’”Footnote 131 By pointing to the ways in which employers leveraged “qualification” against nonwhite people, the TWC alerted its white colleagues that WOAR was replicating institutional racism. The representational diversity that LEAA monies had facilitated with Lynn Moncrief's hire had hard limits, making anti-Black policies and practices more difficult to challenge.
In 1980, the Governor's Justice Commission of Pennsylvania suspended its financial support, permanently eliminating the LEAA as a major source of funding for Philadelphia WOAR and sending the rape crisis center into a financial tailspin. When LEAA funds dried up in 1980, WOAR seriously considered laying off its staff and suspending hospital service.Footnote 132 However, losing LEAA monies did not mean an end to partnering with the police to control rape. When it fell into dire straits, WOAR turned to its law-and-order partnerships for financial support. Berit Lakey (who had recently been promoted to executive director) appealed directly to Mayor Frank Rizzo—in his eighth consecutive year as mayor—to secure municipal funding for WOAR. In a private meeting with Mayor Rizzo and Police Commissioner Joseph O'Neill, Lakey recycled the language of WOAR's LEAA applications and projected the victims of rape who would be lost to the criminal justice system entirely if WOAR ceased to exist due to lack of funds.Footnote 133 Convinced, Mayor Rizzo pledged $50,000 of the city budget to subsidize WOAR. Like Jody Pinto years prior, Lakey presented WOAR's law-and-order credentials to Mayor Rizzo out of political expediency more so than genuine friendship. Still, when the LEAA failed, WOAR could count on Mayor Rizzo, the personification of “tough on crime” thought in American politics, to weather the financial storm. By 1984, with Rizzo out of office and the City of Philadelphia still keeping WOAR afloat, District Attorney Edward G. Rendell remained a faithful disciple of the LEAA's approach to rape control and counted Philadelphia WOAR as a fellow adherent.Footnote 134 According to Rendell, the “very existence” of Philadelphia WOAR held “tremendous symbolic value in helping to correct the psychological climate that makes victims of the crime of rape more likely to report the offense to law enforcement authorities.”Footnote 135 Rendell validated his reputation as a “tough-on-crime” Democrat by presiding over the controversial prosecution of Mumia Abu-Jamal in 1982 and the police's bombing of the Black religious community MOVE in 1985.Footnote 136 Even in the absence of the LEAA, WOAR's “empowerment model” proved an attractive hook for carceral-adjacent funding. Whether or not police reporting was a desirable course of action for victims was immaterial.
Just as WOAR remained tethered to Philadelphia's “tough on crime” political scene well after the LEAA fizzled out, its Third World Caucus continued to challenge anti-Black practices from within. In the wake of the hiring incident, the Board of Directors heeded the demands of the Third World Caucus and installed a Task Force on Racism to investigate WOAR's racial dynamics.Footnote 137 After the results of an internal survey of volunteers confirmed the Third World Caucus's original objections, the Task Force on Racism recommended that WOAR redouble its recruitment efforts within Philadelphia's Black community and “address Third World Women's fears and concerns during training and integrate their experiences into the training program.”Footnote 138 The Training Team agreed to adopt supervisory double-staffing to ensure Black counselors and victims would make contact, and overhaul the volunteer training manual to incorporate materials written by Black feminists by March 1981.Footnote 139 The new manual included an article by Audre Lorde that addressed the simultaneity of racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia in women's lives. The Task Force also called for WOAR's white members to form anti-racist study groups and for all standing WOAR committees to actively seek the advice and input of Third World Caucus members.
The Task Force on Racism did not resolve all WOAR's racial conflicts. Third World Caucus member Johnetta Miller submitted “An Open Letter to All My Black Sisters in WOAR” to the Spring 1981 edition of WOARpath, the center's quarterly newsletter, in which she lamented the persistence of “the unbalanced racial make-up of the organization” and “training techniques which assume a common white experience.” These techniques included encouraging police reports.Footnote 140 Considering these stubborn issues, Miller lauded the Third World Caucus as an indispensable locus for Black feminist organizing against rape in Philadelphia. “The women of the Third World Caucus have given me support without which I could not continue to struggle at WOAR.” She steeled herself and her Black sisters against the stubborn cultural racism of WOAR with her sense of humor. “Do not get upset if a white person calls you by another Black volunteer's name,” Miller said. “They have trouble remembering their own names. They are always wearing those little white tags that say ‘Hello My Name Is …’”
The TWC continued Lynn Moncrief's campaign to improve WOAR's racial diversity through the 1980s. In April 1981, the Third World Caucus hosted an open house at WOAR's offices on Sansom Street on the theme of “Rape in the Black Community.” The event educated political, social, and medical professionals who worked in Philadelphia's Black community while facilitating the recruitment of Black volunteers.Footnote 141 That June, an editorial by Black journalist Sandra Long in the Philadelphia Bulletin indicated that “Rape in the Black Community” hit its mark. Long decried the fact that “only 20 of 100 WOAR volunteers are Black women” and endorsed the Third World Caucus's recruitment efforts, urging her Black women readers to consider volunteering with Philadelphia WOAR.Footnote 142 By 1983, Third World Caucus chair Valerie Oulds confidently asserted that the Caucus had grown steadily from twenty-three members in 1977 to nearly fifty.Footnote 143 Oulds credited the continued existence of the Caucus with allowing WOAR's Black members “to support and strengthen each other as Women of Color, and to bring that strong sense of ourselves, without fear of confrontation, to WOAR as a whole.”
As the Third World Caucus grew, the group updated its title—the Women of Color Caucus—but retained Lynn Moncrief's original intervention that preventative education served Black communities far better than simple police reporting. In 1989, Meloney J. Sallie, the new chair of the Women of Color Caucus, published a short essay in WOARpath pointing out the potential of anti-rape advocacy to fuel the state's crime control agenda. Although she felt “very strongly that any man who rapes any woman should be held accountable,” she also realized that “men of color are drastically overrepresented in prison.”Footnote 144 She reminded her colleagues within the movement who might be tempted to focus on police reporting that “if you train one woman not to become a victim of sexual assault, you have prevented one woman from becoming a victim. If you train one man not to be a perpetrator, you have prevented approximately fifteen women from being victims. And if that man is a man of color, you have kept one man of color out of prison.” The fact that Sallie felt the need to announce this intervention in 1989 indicated that the victory was only partial for the Third World or Women of Color Caucus. It had succeeded in drawing greater numbers of Black women into the organization and lodging them in positions of power, as evidenced by Vanessa Grant Jackson, a Black woman, rising to the executive director's seat in 1990.Footnote 145 Yet the “empowerment model” that presented police reporting as a feminist reckoning continued to be a cornerstone of WOAR's praxis. The friendliness toward the Philadelphia Police Department that had been codified during the “LEAA years” proved too lucrative to dispense with in the conservative 1980s. Still, the survival of the Third World or Women of Color Caucus kept this friendliness in check and ensured that seeds of Black-centered praxis originally planted by Lynn Moncrief had a chance to germinate.
Conclusion
Philadelphia WOAR's “LEAA years” illustrate both the extent and the limit of the carceral cooptation of the feminist movement against sexual violence. Officials within the LEAA constructed the problem of controlling rape primarily as a problem of underreporting by victims. The LEAA mobilized grant money to compel the feminist rape crisis centers it supported to direct the victims they served to the police. This satisfied the feminist demand that wider society regard rape as a serious, violent crime. But such an approach left sexist rape myths and patriarchal attitudes intact while narrowing the scope of anti-rape advocacy to actions that deferred to law enforcement. The knitting together of law enforcement entities and feminist rape crisis centers by the LEAA especially alienated African American victims, who were highly vulnerable to gender violence but frequently experienced the police as aggressors rather than protectors.
At the same time, LEAA funding did not foreclose all opportunities for dissidence within the feminist movement against sexual violence. By prioritizing preventative education ahead of police cooperation and forcing the white feminist leadership to incorporate Black women's experience into its anti-rape praxis, Moncrief and her colleagues in the Third World Caucus (later the Women of Color Caucus) did not abide the LEAA's mission of controlling rape through extended police power. Attending to this relationship corrects top-down historical narratives of the federal “war on crime” as an irresistible flood of government policy that extinguished all embers of grassroots radicalism in the 1970s. Lynn Moncrief and the Third World Caucus demonstrate that even within the carceral constraints imposed by the LEAA, a “Black radical feminist” praxis could and did survive.
At the dawn of the twenty-first century, INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence built upon the foundation laid by Black anti-rape organizers within Philadelphia WOAR and across the nation by pushing back against the reduction of anti-rape advocacy to police reporting, which had been conditioned by the receipt of state funds. INCITE! co-founder Ana Clarissa Rojas Durazzo declared that
VAWA … merged in policy the interests of the state—to criminalize society, populate the cheap labor force of the [prison-industrial complex], manage the nation's shifting racial demographics (specifically, the declining white population) by quarantining more people of color in prison, and deflect attention from its role in the production and reproduction of domestic violence—with the interests of the anti-violence movement.Footnote 146
Organizations beholden to federal VAWA funds perpetuated “the ideology of the criminalization of violence against women” that actively harmed victims who were not middle-class white women. To adequately protect nonwhite women from the interpersonal violence of rape and abuse as well as the state violence of criminalization, INCITE! aimed to disrupt this confluence of interests. INCITE!'s influence can be detected more recently in Harlem-based anti-violence organizer Tarana Burke's reclamation of the #MeToo Movement, which had been unintentionally co-opted by white actress Alyssa Milano as a rallying cry for survivors of sexual violence in 2017. Burke feared that that the online mutation of #MeToo was uncritically championing the criminal justice system as a heroic entity that offered safety and comfort to survivors. Echoing Lynn Moncrief and INCITE!'s critique of the criminalization of gender violence, Burke announced that in order to re-center women of color within the #MeToo movement, “we have to start talking about nontraditional methods of pursuing justice … restorative justice and transformative justice … if we're ever going to heal in our community, we have to heal the perpetrators and heal the survivors, or else it's just a continuous cycle.”Footnote 147
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