The Architecture of Impunity: A Forensic Audit of Modern Predation (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781997737117)

The Architecture of Impunity is a forensic audit of the systems that normalize violence against women and girls. Moving from language through culture and into law, medicine, media, and the highest courts, Mary Simmerling examines how predation is softened, disguised, administratively absorbed, and made to appear ordinary.

Blending case files, cultural criticism, poetry, and visual documentation, this book traces the structures that protect perpetrators and the institutions that enable them: the grammar of objectification, the laundering power of prestige, the politics of disbelief, governmental immunity, and the systems of silencing and erasure that make violence harder to name and easier to excuse.

This is not a book about isolated incidents or individual bad actors. It is about architecture. It is about how harm is normalized before it is recognized, how credibility is dismantled before accountability begins, and how women and girls are too often left to carry both the original violence and the punishment of not being believed.

Drawing on her work as a philosopher, poet, curator of survivor-centred public installations, and survivor, Mary Simmerling pioneers what she calls investigative moral philosophy: a hybrid method that brings together documentary record, cultural analysis, poetic witness, and curated visual evidence to examine how impunity is built and sustained in plain sight.

At once literary, philosophical, and investigative, The Architecture of Impunity offers a new lexicon for understanding modern predation and the mechanisms that scaffold, normalize, and sustain it.