Americans have become very familiar with Jose Antonio Ibarra, the man accused of killing nursing student Lakin Riley on the University of Georgia campus. The disturbing details of this young woman's death are truly the stuff of nightmares. As mothers with children of or near college age, our hearts resonated with her family's grief as we learned of this tragedy. For one of us, a faculty member at the University of Georgia, there was some solace in mourning alongside the rest of the campus community.
As researchers who study crime, we were also struck by the dramatic turn that occurred just 24 hours after Reilly's death, when the public learned that Ibarra was a Venezuelan immigrant who had entered the country illegally. At the local and national levels, collective grief turned to mass shaming, as politicians, pundits and others asserted that illegal immigration was driving the “crime wave” embodied by Riley's murder.
This crime actually represents a broader epidemic of violence – an epidemic characterized not by its perpetrators but by its victims: women. Alarmingly, more than half of women in the United States have experienced sexual violence in their lifetime. The World Health Organization has identified violence against women as a “major public health problem.”
Unfortunately, this is not the problem that policymakers rushed to address in the wake of Riley's death. For example, Republican lawmakers in Georgia are pushing legislation to require police and sheriff's departments to help identify, detain and deport immigrants who are in the country illegally, while the US House of Representatives has passed a bill requiring federal detention of illegal immigrants accused of theft. Public perception follows suit: Trump's proposed border wall has never been more popular, and online threats against immigrants and Latino students at the University of Georgia are creating a climate of fear.
Are fears of the spread of “immigrant crimes” justified? no.
One of us has been studying the relationship between immigration and crime for 15 years, and is co-author of a comprehensive survey of systematic research on this topic, which concluded that “immigrants have lower participation than natives on a range of crime measures.” “Our review of the small but growing body of research on undocumented immigrants came to precisely the same conclusion. We need immigration reform for countless reasons, but crime is not one of them.
Despite this well-established fact, news stories about Riley's killing — bearing headlines such as “Suspect in killing of Georgia nursing student entered U.S. illegally, ICE says” — continue to highlight the immigration situation in Ibarra, reinforcing the belief that immigration and crime go hand in hand. in hand. This is consistent with the long-standing trend of making immigrants scapegoats for a variety of social problems, including alcoholism and disease.
Concern about the relationship between immigration and crime serves to obscure the more legitimate and insidious problem of violence against women. While men have historically been more likely to be victims of serious violence, this gap has narrowed in recent years. One-third of female murder victims, Reilly claimed, were killed by strangers, but most were killed by intimate partners or other people they knew. Worldwide, 47,000 women were killed by intimate partners or family members in 2020 alone.
Shockingly, 41% of American women have experienced physical or sexual violence or stalking by an intimate partner. One in three reported experiencing severe violence or stalking. Even more horrifying is that homicide is the leading cause of death among pregnant and postpartum women, exceeding obstetric-related causes of death by at least two times. Poor women and minorities suffer disproportionately from violent victimization.
The social and economic consequences of violence against women are staggering, with lifetime costs of more than $3 trillion among the U.S. population. Long-term effects of intimate partner violence include physical and mental health problems, addiction, and increased risk of arrest and imprisonment.
Although there are more men in US prisons than women, female incarceration has increased at twice the rate of male incarceration since 1980. Conservative estimates indicate that about half of women incarcerated were physically or sexually assaulted before imprisonment, while studies have found that 77 % of women in prisons were subjected to physical or sexual assault before imprisonment. 98% suffered from intimate partner violence.
The policy response was not equal to the problem. The Violence Against Women Act was reauthorized in 2022, but only after it lapsed for four years due to partisan disagreements over expanding gun provisions. Most women victims of serious violence do not have access to support services, and the availability of service providers across the country is very low – only 3.7 per 100,000 residents. A 2022 congressional report noted that as many as 400,000 rape kits remain untested nationwide. Despite increased attention and funding to address the backlog, many states are lagging woefully behind, and thousands of kits remain untested.
New abortion restrictions and increasingly lax gun regulation are likely to fuel more violence against women in many states. Firearms are involved in more than half of intimate partner homicides, while research shows that implementing stricter gun laws reduces these homicides. However, the Supreme Court is considering whether or not to uphold a federal law prohibiting people subjected to domestic violence from having gun possession restraining orders.
The murder of Laken Riley should remind us of the ways in which violence against women is downplayed, tolerated, and even facilitated in America. Misusing this crime to demonize immigrants, capitalize on misguided fears, advocate regressive policies based on false beliefs and gain votes in an election year, is another way to minimize and distract from the problem it actually represents.
Charisse E. Kobrin is a professor of criminology, law and society at the University of California, Irvine, a member of the Council on Criminal Justice and co-author of Immigration and Crime: Taking Stock of the Situation. Sarah Shannon is Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of the Criminal Justice Studies Program at the University of Georgia.
