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This post is based on my conference paper presented at SLSA 2022 as part of their Feminism + Abolition Stream. Some minor edits have been done for the purposes of formatting, and corresponding slides are not included (but are available). Huge thanks to Molly and Nic for organising the stream, and to everyone else for their feedback and comments.
What this blog is about:
Using research from my PhD, which is heavily influenced by Black abolitionist feminism, I will show how conceptualisations of what violence is in VAWG strategy is problematic, affecting every aspect of support: focusing especially on sex workers and those who experience domestic abuse.
Using an abolitionist framework I will use Black feminist abolitionist arguments, to explore issues that sex workers are facing, especially sex workers who live with familial and domestic abuse. Abolitionist arguments are for everyone, after all. What could the role of VAWG be, and how could it help end violence rather than respond to it?
What do we mean by VAWG?
VAWG is a subsect of gender-based violence, referring specifically to violence by men against women. VAWG as a term is used both as an issue, and to refer to a movement.
VAWG refers to domestic + familial abuse; sexual assault (which includes upskirting and sharing images without consent); FGM, forced marriage and honour killing; sex work, prostitution and pornography; slavery and human trafficking. As Sedef Arat-Koç (2001) notes, VAWG is specifically about embodied interpersonal violence, and not structural violence.
There are two things I want to say about this concept of VAWG:
1. When the VAWG movement emerged during the 1970s it was about highlighting the dichotomy of public/private life: the personal is political.
bell hooks (1984) argues that violence acted upon black bodies— through discrimination, harassment, exploitation, threats of violence, and actual violence experienced in places of work, schools, and the streets—is inextricably linked to violence in the home and when the public/private divide is assumed as a social reality, that relationship is concealed. To assume a public/private divide regarding experiences of violence is an inherent white conception. We see this conception by the VAWG movement again, in a different way, with sex workers and their hypervisibility. To them, sex workers experience violence only as public as because their workplace is de facto violence. This understanding conceals violence in their homes, families and relationships.
2. Violence against women and girls has always existed, but it emerged as a concept during the women’s movement in 1970s. ‘Abused women’ ‘battered women’ ‘prostituted women’ became then, an identifiable class of persons to be known, and thus constructed and regulated through politics, policy, intervention and theory.
We see these constructions still, because in the VAWG arena, we know exactly what they mean by women, and exactly who they mean by victim. As I have argued elsewhere, refferring to women as ‘prostituted women’ is not the same as referring to them as ‘sex workers’. ‘Prostituted woman’ undermines agency and capacity; ‘sex worker’ respects it.
From the 1970s until today, the VAWG movement remains concerned with legal reform and criminal responses to gender-based crimes: both as symbolic and actual space for justice. Ultimately the VAWG movement sets itself in opposition to and resistant against, the patriarchal state. Interestingly, however, whenever pressed about why the police are part of the solution, the response is often “The police aren’t great, but it’s all we’ve got” instead of considering that it’s not all we could have. Their argument is no longer good enough, which is why abolitionism is so vital.
What violence is, who violence affects and how to respond to violence that always been a divisive issue in feminism, but radical feminism has usually been the dominant voice. It was then and it is now, especially in frontline VAWG services. Radical feminism can be understood through four main defining features:
Ø Women’s inequality and oppression is due to the patriarchy
Ø Women-only spaces are paramount for safety and for collective organising
Ø The sex industry is the pinnacle of gendered objectification
Ø Women’s gender is unifier of oppression
Their lack of class or economic analysis is really telling, and this is especially relevant when we think of who sells sex and why.
In many VAWG strategies and policy papers, and in a lot of research, sex work is considered a form of violence against women, much like domestic abuse is. But I’ve read many of these strategies and policies, and APPG reports on the sex trade, and words like ‘poverty’ and ‘austerity’ or ‘need to earn to have a decent standard of living’ are notable only by their absence. Take two examples:
1. In the Home Office commissioned research undertaken by the University of Bristol (2020), researchers explored “The Nature and Prevalence of Prostitution in England and Wales”. In the whole document ‘austerity’ was mentioned once (as a participant quote); ‘poverty’ was mentioned twice (both participant quotes), and police/policing was mentioned 77 times.
2. The government’s own policy paper (2021), “Tackling violence against women and girls strategy” was similar. ‘Racism’ and ‘austerity’ were not mentioned at all; ‘poverty’ and ‘housing’ mentioned once each; police/policing mentioned 155 times.
It seems both wilfully ignorant, as well as dangerous, to not consider poverty as much a driving factor in violence against women as say, men’s entitlement. Men’s entitlement by the way, is also driven by capitalism because it’s built on the backs of women’s reproductive labour.
Evidence shows that women are less likely to sell sex when they have other economic options, and access to other options means that if they continue to sell sex they are not forced to work in vulnerable or exploitative ways. Working class people disproportionally suffer extreme domestic abuse – not because being poor is a risk factor – but access to money means you can leave, even if it’s just for a night. Poverty traps you in an abusive home.
(I do also think it’s worth mentioning the issue of attrition. Poor and working-class women are over-represented in the literature partly because researchers often go through gatekeepers or service providers to find participants. Middle class women are less likely to be engaged in these services (which is a whole other issue around state intervention, poverty and the classism of social services). Overall, poor women are more visible, easier for researchers to engage with and therefore easier to conduct research on/with.)
I’m not disputing that violence against women is carried out by family members or intimate partners, and I’m not blaming radical feminists for violence carried out by men (a ridiculous strawman argumen); but the absence of austerity or capital in any critique or analysis allow violence to be attributed to pathology and patriarchy rather than vulnerability or limited options.
Governments uphold and maintain sexual labour and domestic abuse through poverty and scarcity of resources. No VAWG strategy, policy or advocacy group can be said to have the interests of women at heart if they don’t acknowledge this. Talking about the police so much, but poverty so little, means that there can be no real desire to get rid of VAWG. Instead, there is only a desire to encourage police and carceral solutions to issues which evidence shows time and again can’t be solved by police but can be solved by economic and financial empowerment. That sex workers are at risk of arrest from the police and yet expected to call the police is not some accident of legislation: it’s deliberate and strategic.
Yet VAWG strategies, and advocacy services themselves, rarely mention this. Instead, VAWG strategy and advocacy is now inextricably bound up with what we might name or understand as ‘carceral feminism’
Carceral feminism
The term ‘carceral feminism’ was coined by Elizabeth Bernstein as a referent to the radical feminists who have been an integral part of the legislative shift toward centralising criminality in their strive for gender equality. Carceral feminists advocate eroding the rights of people in the sex industry, a move which expands the neoliberal agenda by individualising the problem of violence against women on the actions of bad men, not the state for rending them vulnerable in the first place. Referring to someone as a carceral feminist is an inherent critique – few, if any, would describe themselves as a carceral feminist – with the implication being that a carceral feminist is one who has contributed to reproducing biased power relations within the state, rather than working toward eradicating them. As mentioned earlier, by locating interpersonal violence in individual acts, and those acts within the wider system of patriarchy, carceral feminists neatly sidestep the need for class or financial analysis in their feminist praxis.
Instead, I argue, we as feminists ought to call on the state, not to arrest or criminalise persons retroactively, but to use that money to support women economically so they do not feel a need to sell sex; so they can afford somewhere to live; so they are not vulnerable to human traffickers; so they can pay for childcare and not do not have to rely on an abusive partner or parent; so they are not trapped in poverty. Carceral feminism’s myopic focus on criminalisation contrasts with grassroots concern about women’s empowerment away from abuse.
What do people need?
As long as sex work is an option for income, and drug use is a strategy of emotion or trauma management, people are not safe while these are criminalised. While I strive for a world where people have enough money to not need to sex work, until then, it must be decriminalised for the safety and interests of women everywhere. There is too much evidence to be ignored.
In my research not a single participant wished to call on the punitive power of the state to keep them safe. Not only do the police have no business intervening in sex work, I argue that they have no place in strategies of violence against women. There is little evidence that more police powers keep anyone safer, but plenty to suggest they exacerbate harm and trauma. Perhaps we ought to move money away from VAWG agencies and policing and invest in community support, grassroots organising and public funds for those who need a new place to live. If lack of money is a key reason why women don’t leave abusive environments, no amount of policing will help. Quite simply: money will, housing will, childcare will.
What can we do?
It is possible to critique the current state of the VAWG movement without having all the answers, and a critique of abolition is often just that. In the absence of an immediate alternative, it can seem easy to fall back onto well-worn strategies of more policing and more law, and insist that with the right training, the right guidance, perhaps these institutions will respond as we want them to.
When we remove policing from the issue of VAWG, there is little more than a police-shaped hole to fill with something that looks like, or acts like the police. Instead, abolition asks us to imagine a complete eradication of what we think justice looks like, and the space and time to rebuild it. While little can match police power in their ability to offer immediate response to victims during or after dangerous incidents, and with increasing funding cuts to services, many don’t have a choice but to call the police. But replacing police with violent and punishing Social Services, or liberty-restricting mental health responses may offer little respite; as Steffan Blayney argues, “…we should be under no illusions that a better-funded, though otherwise unreformed, mental health system would not be subject to the same systemic issues which currently characterise policing.” It is not just policing, but the whole system which needs to change.
Until it does, the VAWG movement needs to respond to the immediate needs of the women it seeks to serve. Decriminalise sex work. Decriminalise drug use. And give women the money they need to keep safe.