When I say “abolish the police,” someone often comes along and asks “but who will protect women from abusive and predatory men?” And the answer is that, for many women, the people who will defend them in the absence of police is those women themselves.
“According to statistics compiled by the ACLU, women who kill their partners will spend an average of 15 years behind bars, while men who kill their female partners serve much shorter sentences, on average between 2 to 6 years.”
Many of the public’s intuitions about how interpersonal violence works in our hierarchical society are shaped by the ways in which the state typically intervenes to STOP the victims of abuse from defending themselves.
So people end up thinking “the state is a thin barrier between civilization and the barbaric tendencies of terrible people, which are barely kept in check by the state and would be unleashed upon us in the absence of the state.”
When, in reality, it is often the state that creates that barbarism by empowering favored classes and constraining their victims.
https://www.propublica.org/article/oklahoma-survivors-act-domestic-violence
As you say the cops protect the perpetrators from their victims. Less than 3% of them face legal consequences. It seems very clear rapists would be a lot less likely to attack victims in the absence of state protection. Clearly they'd rather face largely indifferent or supportive police then have to worry about payback from their victims and their family and friends.
https://rainn.org/facts-statistics-the-scope-of-the-problem/statistics-the-criminal-justice-system/
Despite the harm they cause, the vast majority of perpetrators—nearly 98%—are never held fully accountable through the criminal justice system. The Vast Majority of Perpetrators Will Not Go to Jail or Prison Most Survivors of Sexual Violence Never Report to Law Enforcement Why Survivors Chose to Report Survivors who reported sexual violence to law enforcement between 2005 and 2010 cited the following motivations for coming forward: Why Survivors Decide Not to Report Reporting sexual violence…
@HeavenlyPossum The same argument is also used by (mainly) Christians. The counter to this (that if we didn't believe in a moral and just God, we'd just be out raping, pillaging and murdering each other) is to ask the person whether belief in a God is the only thing stopping them from going down that path.
The truth is, atheists don't need an idea of a moral and just god just to be decent people. And that's before we even get into the idea of eternal punishment to "keep us in line"...
@HeavenlyPossum I literally just finished this book today which nicely complements your point:
https://lernerbooks.com/shop/show/23047
The police were beating women to death in the late 1800s and early 1900s for demanding the right to vote, so the women (checks notes) kept demanding the right to vote and taught themselves martial arts so they could fight back against the police.
The combination of continued peaceful marches and protests plus property destruction and the threat of violence (e.g. firebombing the home of a politician who betrayed the movement) worked, in the end.
Self-defense is not a synonym for capital punishment.
@HeavenlyPossum But without the police, who will protect women from the police?!
More seriously, I do kind of worry what the abusers employed as police would do if they were suddenly unemployed en masse. They would no longer have the cover from polite society, but they would have a *LOT* of free time to make it everybody’s problem.
This is disgusting. With law enforcement like this, who needs criminals?
I heard someone in other social platform say "women should be allowed to kill 1 or 2 people a year", and honestly? I'm starting to think unironically THAT would be objectively correct.
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