Perhaps It’s Time to Think Beyond the ‘Violence Against Women Act’
The much-touted bill relies on prisons and policing to help abuse survivors. The authors of Abolition. Feminism. Now. see a better way.
JusticePolitics

A bipartisan group of US Senators that includes Senators Lisa Murkowski (R-Ala.), Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), and Dick Durban (D-Ill.) is determined to renew the Violence Against Women Act this year, nearly three years after Republican Senators blocked the reauthorization of the bill in 2019. And they have strong support from nearly every leading women’s rights and anti-sexual violence organization in the nation.
But the bill faces opposition, not just from Republicans, who oppose its gun safety measures and language that includes trans and non-binary people; some of its key components also face opposition from feminist activists, and particularly abolitionist feminist activists like Beth Richie, Gina Dent, Angela Davis, and Erica Meiners, who wrote the recently published book Abolition. Feminism. Now. As abolitionists organizing against the prison industrial complex, they argue that we should be addressing the root causes of interpersonal harm by investing in our communities rather than in prisons and policing, as VAWA does.
“VAWA ultimately relies on carceral strategies, in that a huge percent of the funding that’s authorized in that bill goes to prosecution, to training police officers, to criminalization, surveillance, and providing mostly criminal legal solutions for survivors,” Richie told Jezebel. “This is rather than what we would call more abolition solutions, like addressing the power imbalances that breed gendered violence through guaranteeing housing, employment training, childcare, food services, health care.”
VAWA has a number of important features that include funding and resources for survivor hotlines, legal aid, shelters, and rape kit funding to serve the significant swaths of women and people of all genders and sexualities who have experienced sexual violence. But the bill, which was originally introduced as a part of then-Sen. Joe Biden’s 1994 crime bill, does allocate most of its funding to police departments to respond to domestic violence, despite their long histories of disbelieving, mistreating, and retraumatizing survivors.
These features of VAWA are part of why the law has historically been criticized for primarily serving a narrow sliver of mostly white, middle-class or wealthy, straight, cis women who are more likely to be seen as “good” victims. In contrast, women, immigrants, and queer people of color are more likely to be harmed by VAWA’s mandatory arrest program, which compels police who are called to domestic violence disputes to arrest at least one person involved. In many cases, victims of sexual violence may be arrested themselves for self-defense against abusers, or if there’s any ambiguity in who is the primary abuser in an abusive relationship, which is common in same-sex relationships. One 2020 survey found 24% of women who have called the police to report intimate partner violence say that they were consequently arrested or threatened with arrest, contributing to what’s known as the sexual assault-to-prison pipeline, and a prison system in which 90% of incarcerated women have survived sexual violence.
Contrary to ever-present copaganda like Law and Order, police have proven either inept or actively harmful to most victims who turn to them for help, and we shouldn’t be particularly surprised by this. Despite how abuse victims are frequently invoked as the most common argument for why we need police, many report being failed or retraumatized by law enforcement. Other research has shown at least 40% of police officers are domestic abusers.
In Abolition. Feminism. Now., Richie and Dent present the case for why abolition and feminism are inextricably linked, noting how women and particularly women and trans people of color have historically been leaders of the movement for abolition. A key reason they were compelled to write the book is that false messaging has increasingly framed the feminist and abolitionist movements as being at odds with one another, because of the popular assumption that police always help rather than harm victims.
Richie says VAWA has unfortunately contributed to this narrative. “There are many well-meaning advocates who are deeply committed to the work of liberation and freedom. But we’ve been limited in our imagination, and we have to think and build beyond the current system that’s more likely to criminalize than help survivors,” she said.
In the summer of 2020, amid a nationwide uprising for racial justice, nearly 50 anti-sexual violence organizations and direct service groups signed onto the “Moment of Truth” letter, highlighting the harms of police and prisons on victims of abuse, and calling for divestment from them. After sharing the letter, some of the groups who signed, including local shelters and community anti-violence programs, have since lost public funding, while others say police departments have stopped referring abuse victims to their services.