“Bad Mothers” and the Threat to Civil Society: Race, Cultural Reasoning, and the Institutionalization of Social Inequality in a Venezuelan Infanticide Trial

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Abstract
A society which penalizes some children because they are not white, others because they are not male, indoctrinating in them a sense of worthlessness, can still lay the blame for the waste of its young on the bad mothers who have somehow failed to be superhuman, who have somehow failed to rear, in a callous and ruthless social order, welladjusted obedient, achieving, nonalienated children. —Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978 Suffering from abdominal pain, a young woman in eastern Venezuela went to a physician. The physician did not examine her but injected her with a sedative and sent her home to the place where she worked as a domestic. Awakening with intense cramps, she went to the bathroom and gave birth to a girl, who fell into the toilet bowl. On the basis of what was construed as a confession, her employer's statement, and medical testimony, the woman was convicted of homicide. The major issue was the legal significance of her racialization as “indigenous.” We suggest that her trial shows how courts construe structural violence directed against poor women of color as criminal conduct; ironically, this transformation was effected through culturally based arguments, presented by the defense, which claimed that the woman was ignorant of “Western culture” and Venezuelan legal norms, including the prohibition against infanticide. In the face of a cholera epidemic, dominant institutions used the case to suggest that “indigenous culture” could explain hundreds of deaths. Comparison with trials in the capital indicates that as globalization forces some 80% of Venezuelans into poverty, these widely publicized trials turn stereotypes of poor citizens as impoverished, immoral, and criminal into arguments that legitimate the repressive functions of the nation-state.