We Got Women’s Safety All Wrong

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There is no denying that a patriarchal society is dangerous for women, but the rhetoric of women’s safety has historically been used to justify state violence, incarceration, and the social exclusion of some of the most marginalized people. While abolitionist feminists note that the weaponization of violence against women to increase police powers and racialized incarceration isn’t a new phenomenon, the divisions sowed by a politically empty feminist analysis of gender-based violence are accelerating as authoritarianism is on the rise globally, making scapegoats out of whole populations and, importantly, not actually solving the issue of women’s safety. 

Patriarchy is everywhere, including right next to you, and the challenge that abolitionist feminism poses is that to actually protect women, to really hold perpetrators to account, society has to change completely. Radical change is required to keep people in our communities safe, both internally—in how we see ourselves, in how we understand our desires, and each other, and externally—how power and work are organized in society, how we deal with harm, and how we distribute resources. While there are many kinds of feminism, this is what I personally and politically understand as a feminist movement: The world needs a complete overhaul to finally destroy patriarchy.

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