[…]

A focus on managing risk rather than enforcing moral norms has transformed police practices in recent years (Ericson and Haggerty 1997, 1999; O’Malley 1999a:138-139).  This approach seeks to produce security rather than to prevent crime – to reduce the risk of crime rather than to eliminate it.  Order is defined by actuarial calculations of tolerable risk rather than by consensus and conformity to norms (Simon 1988).  New policing strategies seek to diminish risks through the production of knowledge about potential offenders (Ericson and Haggerty 1997).  In general, modern democratic countries have experienced a pluralizing of policing, which joins private and community-based strategies that focus on protection of space with public strategies that detect and punish offenders (Bayley and Shearing 1996).

                New mechanisms of social ordering based on spatial regulation have been labelled spatial governmentality (Perry 2000; Perry and Sanchez 1998).  They differ substantially from disciplinary forms of regulation in logic and techniques of punishment.  Disciplinary regulation focuses on the regulation of persons through incarceration or treatment, while spatial mechanisms concentrate on the regulation of space through excluding offensive behaviour.  Spatial forms of regulation focus on concealing or displaying offensive activities rather than eliminating them.  Their target is a population rather than individuals.  […]

                Spatialized regulation is always temporal as well.  Regulations excluding offensive behaviour usually specify time as well as place.  Systems such as curfews designate both when and where persons can appear.  Spatial regulations may interdict particular kinds of persons from an area only during certain times, such as business hours, or prohibit behaviour, such as drinking, only after a certain time at night (see Valverde 1998).  […]

                Although spatial governmentality is generally described as a system that provides safety for those who can afford it while abandoning the poor to unregulated public spaces, in this article I describe a different use of spatial governance: the spatial exclusion of batterers from the life space of their victims.  This is not an instance of creating a collective safe space but, instead, of protecting a person by prohibiting access to her home or workplace.  This approach emphasizes the safety of the victim rather than the punishment or reform of the offender.  Unlike the more recognized uses of spatial governance, this initiative endeavours to protect poor women as well as rich women.  It represents the use of spatial systems of governance that benefit more than the wealthy and privileged.  Like other forms of spatial governmentality, however, this regime typically controls the disadvantaged rather than the privileged.  People subject to restraining orders for gender violence are typically poor men very similar to, and often identical with, those generally controlled by the forms of spatial governmentality developed by the wealthy.  It is not that these are the only men who batter, but these are usually the only ones that end up in the restraining order process.

                The use of spatial control in gender violence situations is relatively new.  It took a powerful social movement many years to develop this legal protection for battered women.  Punishing batterers for the crime of assault is on old practice; providing legal restrictions on their movements to create a safe space for victims is much newer (Pleck 1987).  A concerted social movement of feminist activists beginning in the late 1960s argued for the applicability of protective orders for such situations.  Commonly referred to as temporary restraining orders (TROs), these orders supplement more conventional strategies for punishing batterers.  TROs are court orders that require the person who batters (usually but not always male) to stay away form his victim (usually but not always female) under penalty of criminal prosecution.  In the United States, protective orders were used for domestic abuse situations beginning in the 1970s, about the same time as refuges and shelters were being promoted by the battered-women’s movement (Schechter 1982).  Both provide a safe space for the victim rather than seeking to reform or punish the offender.  It was not until the late 1980s that activists succeeded in persuading courts and police to use these protective orders widely.  Requests for civil protective orders for battering grew dramatically in the 1990s.  […]

THEORIZING SPATIAL GOVERNMENTALITY

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The contemporary use of therapy to acquire self-governance, to learn to manage feelings, to rethink the costs and benefits of violence against intimates, and to focus on choice represents a new technology of governance characteristic of postindustrial society (Rose 1990, 1996; Simon 1993a).  Therapies of various kinds seek to gain the subject’s compliance in a regime of change.  Instead of inducing change through discipline and habit, these approaches focus on insight and choice.  The subject is encouraged to understand why she feels and acts as she does and brought to see that she could make different choices that would be better for her.  And important  facet of therapeutic interventions is, therefore, an emphasis on self-governance, on establishing control over feelings, and on making choices about actions.  These systems focus not on regimes of punishment and correction but on inducing consent through coercion – in forcing people to participate in remaking themselves, taking responsibility for themselves, and developing their capacity to control their emotional lives and actions. 

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