Resisting Carceral Feminism

Carceral feminism is the reliance of the state’s apparatus as an avenue for protection, and thus, equality. It is outraged by the number of rape convictions, and demands more severe prosecutions, greater numbers of police, and believes imprisonment can achieve feminist aims. At its most sinister, carceral feminism witnesses the death of George Floyd, and demands bigger budgets for the police for reform. It watches the calls of Joe Biden to ‘aim for the leg not the heart’, and the officers kneeling with protesters, and feels reassured. It accepts the notion that the lives of black women can be sacrificed for white women to feel safer. Carceral feminism is the enemy of intersectional feminism. It ignores the ways in which race, class, gender identity, and immigration status leave certain women more vulnerable to violence and that criminalisation and imprisonment places these same women at risk of violence from the state.

Abolitionist feminism calls for liberation of all women and marginalised people. It is not interested in centering the white woman’s experience, but rather the countless marginalised women who fall victim to the state’s sexism and racism every day. It understands that police and prisons exist to disappear people and maintain violent and oppressive social problems. Abolitionist feminism rejects the idea that prisons and police protect the social order. Was order re-asserted when Sean Rigg was arrested during a mental health crisis, and later killed in police custody? Was order re-asserted when Jimmy Mubenga was killed as he cried out “I can’t breathe” on a deportation flight? Is order re-asserted every time a person guilty of sexual violence is disappeared into a prison? Are the police going to assert order as they raid houses and workplaces enforcing Priti Patel’s racist immigration laws? Abolitionist feminism understands that community-based methods for safety, protection, and a new world order, are the only way that liberation can be fought for collectively. When the social order is entirely defined by white supremacy, and disordered forms of domination, we must seek to disrupt this order by any means necessary.

So, why are so many feminists drawn to carceral methods? We internalise an acceptance of the state’s violence from childhood. Games like ‘cops and robbers’ are encouraged, doughnut-loving police-officers are all over our T.V. screens. Perhaps at the youngest, ‘Police Officer Squirrel’ appears in Peppa Pig, PC Plod is the bumbling officer in the fantasy world of Noddy, and though we’re perhaps too old to have seen it on our own screens, you may be familiar with the cop propaganda of ‘Paw Patrol’. Then, we grow up, and Brooklyn 99 starts to take our fancy, Sex Education portrays the kind police officer that even offers two young girls a lift home. These characters emphasise the imaginary figure of the friendly bobby on the beat, if a little cheeky, or in some cases, a little slow. These are all just for our entertainment though, right? What this actually is, is a sinister attempt to internalise the logic of prisons and police as natural and beneficial to society. This goes so far as to discourage even those with feminist logic on their minds, from seeking other responses, such as care-based, transformative community interventions and long-term organising.

We reach teenage years, and as women, if we have not already, we realise that our lives are not safe in the way we thought they were. For me, understanding that my body was not my own in the way I once believed it was, radicalised me. I discovered feminism, and yes, it was the pink-tainted neoliberal selling point that so many young girls are drawn to. I discovered that one in three teenage girls has experienced some form of sexual violence from a partner, and one in five women above the age of 16 will experience sexual violence. It taught me to use the anger at these statistics to demand that street harassment be made a hate crime, or to demand tougher prison sentences for rapists, or more police intervention in schools.

What mainstream feminism did not tell me was that the UK detains women migrants (often survivors of rape and abuse) indefinitely, placing them in detention centres in which sexual abuse is rife. It did not tell me that 70% of women in prison are survivors of domestic violence, and 50% have suffered childhood abuse. It did not tell me that austerity was causing the decimation of domestic violence services, with one in two women being turned away from refuge. One of the main failures of mainstream feminism today is the refusal to recognise that the state itself is deeply sexist and founded upon violent racism. I was encouraged to believe that to be a woman is to be oppressed, but never the violent ways in which the state can be most effective at this.

When we move towards abolitionist feminism, the idea that the police exist to protect us quickly becomes farcical. ‘Protect and serve’ is certainly correct, only it is the ruling elite that carry this protection, and white supremacy at the heart of it. It is often said that officers that use excessive force, murder, and maim, are simply bad apples. You only have to look through the endless videos of police violence across all 50 states of America since the killing of George Floyd to see that it is much more than the actions of a few individuals. Should we be surprised to see such blatant and arrogant displays of violence, when the very roots of this institution are planted in white supremacy and colonialism? The US police force was formed from the slave patrols in the South, in order to stop revolt. The London Metropolitan police (the ‘original police force’, from which the police forces of North of America were borne) were created with the purpose “to protect property, quell riots, put down strikes and other industrial actions, and produce a disciplined industrial work force.” Across the globe, police forces exist as agents of white supremacist capitalism, and the countless deaths that continue at their hands reveal that defunding and abolishing are the only way out of these systems.

Britain boasts a unique brand of racism in the sense that it is simultaneously responsible for its creation across the globe, and in complete denial that it exists within the country today. In the wake of Black Lives Matter protests across the US, and spreading to the UK, Emily Maitliss of Newsnight told George the Poet incredulously, but our legacy is not the same, our police cannot be the same as the U.S.!

In 2016, a deportation flight left the UK carrying victims of ‘Operation Nexus’. It was a joint initiative between the Home Office and the Metropolitan Police which deported foreign nationals, many with no criminal convictions, or found not guilty. After Dominic Cummings was investigated for being in breach of lockdown rules, Michael Gove tweeted, “It is not a crime to look after your family”. Meanwhile, the victims of ‘Operation Nexus’ and the countless other inhumane deportations as a result of the ‘hostile environment’ were told to parent over Skype. Similarly, there is a reason that Desmond Ziggy Mombeyarara, a black man, was tasered by Greater Manchester Police, in front of his child, as he shouted out “Daddy”, whilst Dominic Cummings was allowed to tell the country he drove with his child in the car, to test his eyesight and keep them safe. The rich construct the boundaries of legality, flouting them at will, whilst the behaviours of black populations, ethnic minorities and the working class are criminalised.

The state under which we live in Britain deported members of the Windrush generation to their deaths, or caused their children to live for years with the threat of deportation, traumatised, pushed into poverty, or deported themselves by racist immigration laws. In 2017, racist and classist laws led to (at least) 72 people burned alive in their homes, many of whom have still not been rehoused, all of whom are still waiting for justice. The head of this state recited a colonial-era poem whilst visiting a Myanmar temple as foreign secretary, and called black people “picaninnies” with “watermelon smiles”. In early 2020, the government hired an advisor whose past writing revealed a belief (that Johnson shares) that black people have lower IQs, and other eugenicist claims. Since becoming Home Secretary Priti Patel has expanded police powers for Stop and Search, despite the fact that it is proven to be unsuccessful, and blatantly racist, with black people in England and Wales being almost nine times more likely than whites to be stopped and searched for drugs. In this country, black people are more than four times more likely to die from Covid-19 than white people. We are living in a country that is built upon colonialism, and to this day, requires the death of black populations in order to exist.

When it comes down to it, resisting policing everywhere is simple. The police exist and have always existed to defend the state. We live in a white supremacist world. We are governed by white supremacist states. How long are we going to let the list of murdered black people get before we seek radical change? You cannot reform a white supremacist world. We must build anew.

Angela Davis said, “knowledge is built through struggle”. There is a reason that white feminists find abolition so hard to grapple with. Unless your lived experience is one of police and brutality, the state leering over you to surveil and intimidate. Unless you have experienced first-hand the way prisons disappear people, the idea of a world without them is neither urgent nor necessary. For far too many, the PC Plod figure maintains a stronghold over their imagination. For white women, their lives are made to feel unsafe, and so turn to the system that they genuinely believe exists to ‘protect’ them. Protect remains in quotation marks, because whilst white women are certainly safer than black women, the police are not keeping us safe. As I have noted, 70% of women in prisons are survivors of domestic violence, further criminalisation of domestic abuse in the U.S. has led to numerous victims being arrested, and sometimes killed, instead of the perpetrator. For sex workers, criminalisation only leads to isolation and abuse, making them more vulnerable. 1,500 accusations of sexual misconduct, including sexual harassment, exploitation of crime victims and child abuse, have been made against police officers in England and Wales over six years. Even amongst rape specialists within the police, there is a “culture of mistrust”. It was also found that police officers believe that false accusations are much higher than they are. The carceral state fails all women, daily, because it was never intended to keep us safe.

There are those whose reliance on the state’s mechanisms are, by intention, innocent, but whilst its colonial institution exist, their violently racist functions will be utilised in the ways they were always meant to be.

In 1955, at the age of 14, Emmett Till was kidnapped, tortured, and lynched after being accused of wolf-whistling at Carolyn Bryant Donham, a 21-year-old white woman. Those accused of Emmet Till’s murder, later admitted it, however, were acquitted in 1955 by an all-white, all-male jury, and so could not be retried. Bryant Donham repeatedly changed her story, from claiming Till wolf-whistled, to that he grabbed her waist, then to only that he touched her hands. Then finally, in an interview, she admitted that her claims were false.

On May 25^th, 2020, a white woman in New York’s Central Park was filmed calling the police on a black man who asked her to put her dog on a leash. Speaking on the phone, she tells them of the “African American man” who is “threatening” her. It is a clear display of constructing victimhood by invoking deep-rooted racism. Author of ‘White Fragility’, Robin DiAngelo, observed the incident as such: “When a white woman says, ‘I’m going to call the police,’ she’s basically saying, ‘You might die.’”

What separates these incidents is that what was once an organised lynch mob, is now the government’s law enforcement.

The 2019 Reclaim the Night march ended at the University of Manchester Students’ Union. The crowd was then encouraged to join chants calling on Greater Manchester Police to make misogyny a hate crime. The type of misogyny that might manifest itself say in a wolf-whistle. Let us reflect on the fact that Greater Manchester Police were responsible for tasering Desmond Ziggy Mombeyarara in front of his own son. In 2017, the number of officers trained with stun guns was doubled. Earlier in lockdown, in Fallowfield, Manchester, a black man was filmed being threatened with pepper spray by an officer, whilst attempting to deliver food for vulnerable members of his family. When a woman intervened in defence of the man, she was told, “You’ll be next”. Reports by the Observer found that officers within this force (and many others across the UK) were using their power to develop sexual relationships with vulnerable people and victims of crime. An investigation found that the rape claims of vulnerable women were being ignored by GMP. One woman reported being raped, and after being placed in a mental health facility was told that it would not be reported as a crime. I refuse to accept a world in which the safety of my life is dependent on the imperilled lives of others. I for one, do not want to be a recipient of the protection the police have to offer.

Fighting racism is the job of any person who claims the title ‘feminist’, and we must dismantle the authority that the carceral state has upon our imagination. Becoming an abolitionist is not the end of our anti-racism, it is just the start. We must understand the entrenchment of a carceral state in the feminist imagination as an entrenchment of white supremacy. When we understand race and gender as inseparable, it becomes clear that law enforcement provides no avenue for liberation.

Feminism asks us to interrogate power dynamics and hierarchies. More than ever, we are tasked with anchoring the anti-racist struggles of today in the colonial and white supremacist legacies of this world and demanding that enough is enough. Where white feminism has taught us to be joyful and willing recipients of state protection, we must liberate our minds, and encourage others to do so too. The tragedy of George Floyd’s death, the subsequent death of David McAtee, and the terrorising of protesters show us that history will continue to repeat itself until we render all tools of white supremacy obsolete. The thousands out on the streets in the midst of a pandemic, attacked with pepper sprays, tear gas, rubber bullets and more, are showing a bravery that I have never before witnessed in my lifetime. The very least we can do is join them in calls for a better world. Abolitionist feminism gives us a way of seeing a world without violence as necessary, urgent, and possible. Abolitionist feminism demands that we use the greatest tools in our arsenal, empathy, and care, in order to create a world built upon collective liberation.

Tallulah Brennan

she/her