Anti-Sexual ViolenceBooks

A chilling investigation into the 1990 murder of Keri Sullivan, exploring the cultural obsession with violence against women, the failures of the justice system, and the psychological toll on survivors and investigators.

An electric memoir by the legendary frontwoman of Bikini Kill and Le Tigre. Kathleen Hanna chronicles her journey from a tumultuous childhood through the birth of the Riot Grrrl movement, revealing the raw truths about surviving as a feminist voice in a hostile punk scene while building revolutionary music and community.

Jules Gill-Peterson locates transmisogyny in colonial statecraft, racial ordering, policing, sex work, and global histories of transfeminized people.

Emmy Award-winning journalist Elizabeth Flock's groundbreaking investigative work exploring what few dare to confront: the role and necessity of female-led violence when institutional protections completely fail. Through three immersive narratives of real women who fought back, this book challenges us to rethink what justice, self-defense, and women's safety truly mean.

A decolonial feminist theory of witnessing that follows activist mothers, artists, filmmakers, courts, and communities resisting feminicidal violence in Mexico.

Former AFP Seoul correspondent Hawon Jung provides a firsthand account from the frontlines of South Korea's feminist movement, documenting how tens of thousands of Korean women sparked a MeToo wave, ended abortion bans, fought spycam crimes, and shattered Western stereotypes of 'docile' Asian women. Named one of The Economist's Best Books of 2023.

A lifetime's work from the Tony Award-winning author of The Vagina Monologues. Spanning forty years of journals, V's Reckoning is a powerful collage of poetry, prose, dreams, and letters that chronicles her journey from childhood trauma to global activism, showing how to transform personal pain into collective power and write oneself into freedom.

A record of liberation and transformation by Tarana Burke, the founder of the 'Me Too' movement. With overwhelming honesty, it depicts the deep wounds as a survivor of sexual violence, the reality of silenced Black women, and how the hope of 'empowerment through empathy' was born.

An extraordinary work of memoir and investigative journalism by award-winning Gitxsan journalist Angela Sterritt who survived life on the streets. Combining personal narrative with in-depth investigation into Canada's missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls (MMIWG), this book reveals how colonialism and racism created a society where Indigenous women's lives are ignored and devalued, while proving that Indigenous women's strength and brilliance is unbroken.

Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement connects punishment, gender, race, and community safety, strengthening FemRes coverage of abolition feminism and transformative justice.

In 2015, when Stanford University student Brock Turner sexually assaulted a woman known as 'Emily Doe,' this case became a symbol of unity for women across America. Because of the worst thing that happened to her, Emily Doe became one of the most famous women in the world - yet no one knew her real name. This all changed in 2019 when Chanel Miller revealed herself as 'Emily Doe' and published this memoir, telling her story as an act of reclaiming narrative identity.

Fumbling Towards Repair: A Workbook for Community Accountability Facilitators connects punishment, gender, race, and community safety, strengthening FemRes coverage of abolition feminism and transformative justice.

Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair connects punishment, gender, race, and community safety, strengthening FemRes coverage of abolition feminism and transformative justice.

Emily L. Thuma reconstructs the anticarceral politics developed from the 1970s into the early 1980s by criminalized women and Black, queer, prisoner, and psychiatric-survivor organizers.

Andrea Ritchie documents police violence against Black women, Indigenous women, immigrant women, sex workers, and trans women whose experiences are often erased from public narratives.

A harrowing semi-autobiographical novel by Taiwanese author Lin Yi-han, 'Fang Si-Chi's First Love Paradise' exposes the grooming and sexual abuse of a young girl by her respected literature teacher. Published in 2017 shortly before the author's suicide, the book sparked a massive #MeToo movement across the Chinese-speaking world. It is a powerful, devastating critique of how high culture and social prestige can mask predation.

Laura Sjoberg examines rare but revealing cases of female perpetrators of wartime sexual violence and how law and media make sense of them.

A landmark collection by survivors, organizers, and community workers asking how social justice movements can confront intimate violence and build accountability without relying on police and prisons.

Color of Violence: The INCITE! Anthology connects punishment, gender, race, and community safety, strengthening FemRes coverage of abolition feminism and transformative justice.

A brave and heartbreaking contemporary novel exploring the thin line between love and violence, and the courage required to break the cycle of domestic abuse spanning generations. Based on a true story, it is a tale of difficult choices, resilience, and the power of self-love.

Dara Kay Cohen uses comparative data to explain why some armed groups perpetrate wartime rape at massive scale while others do not.

A raw and unflinching memoir detailing how women are treated as 'sex objects' from a young age and the deep scars this leaves on their self-perception, relationships, and mental health. A leading voice in contemporary feminism, Valenti indicts the essence of misogyny in modern society through her own experiences.

Carol Cohn’s edited volume gathers feminist analyses of women, gender, armed conflict, memory, displacement, and postwar futures.

Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation connects punishment, gender, race, and community safety, strengthening FemRes coverage of abolition feminism and transformative justice.

Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States connects punishment, gender, race, and community safety, strengthening FemRes coverage of abolition feminism and transformative justice.

Based on 500 Dalit women’s narratives across four Indian states, this study shows how gendered violence enforces caste, class, land, and political power - and follows survivors into exclusionary justice institutions.

A foundational interdisciplinary collection defining feminicide as structural gendered violence sustained not only by perpetrators but by state impunity, racial capitalism, and transnational economies.

Virginie Despentes' 'King Kong Theory' is a punk-rock manifesto of modern feminism. Part memoir, part critical theory, it is a raw, angry, and undeniably powerful examination of gender, sexuality, and violence. Despentes writes from the margins - as a former sex worker, a rape survivor, and a punk artist - challenging the sanitized, respectable versions of feminism to embrace the 'ugly', the 'unfuckable', and the dangerous.

Revolutionary feminist theatrical work that breaks gender taboos through direct expression of women's bodily experiences, laying foundations for global anti-sexual violence movements.

Susan Brownmiller's 1975 classic feminist work was the first to define rape as a political tool rather than simply a sexual crime, profoundly revealing the systemic nature of rape as a means of patriarchal control over women, and remains one of the most influential works of second-wave feminism.

A groundbreaking novel by Egyptian feminist pioneer Saadawi that exposes the violence and oppression faced by women in Arab society through the story of a woman sentenced to death.

When discussing feminist poetry, it's impossible not to mention Adrienne Rich, one of the most widely read poets of the 20th century and a renowned intersectional feminist activist. Our recommended best introductory poetry collection: 'Diving into the Wreck,' a particularly lyrical and emotionally charged collection of poems - including 'Rape,' a narrative poem often considered one of Rich's most important works.