Participants in Irish inquiries have not been silenced or ignored in any simple sense. Instead, they have been drawn into inquiry processes which offer them some public recognition, but carefully restrict their political agency. 

The carceral approach put forward by the ‘modern-day slavery industrial complex’ focuses on punishing the perpetrator rather than being centred on what migrant domestic workers actually want and need for a life of safety and dignity: the right to work and settle in the UK

Sex workers want real, viable economic alternatives, not more policing. Feminists of colour have long criticized radical feminists (and broader anti-violence work) for its focus on interpersonal violence at the cost of institutional violence.

Focusing political attention on the politics of listening helps to avoid an individualist politics that leaves survivors isolated and vulnerable in an ‘economy of believability’ that is stacked against them, and leaves them open to excessive scrutiny, including from feminists.

Last Saturday’s mobilisation in East London showed that real safety and power come not from police or authorities, but from communities organising from within. When neighbors, youth groups, faith networks, and local collectives stand together in solidarity, they create a culture of collective self-defence that builds lasting resilience. The lesson is clear: anti-fascism is most effective when it is proactive, rooted in everyday community life, and linked to political education, solidarity, and shared visions of liberation. True protection comes from strengthening the networks and relationships that bind communities, not relying on the police to keep them safe.

As with contact sexual violence, CLSV is not about sex. It is reflective of, and reinforces, gender inequality, specifically the justification of power imbalances and the normalisation of the subordination of women, girls, and other marginalised genders.

We critique contemporary management of “difficult” mental health, offering a discussion of Community Treatment Orders (CTOs), the limitations of rights advocacy, and offer some alternative avenues for organizing against the neoliberal and carceral management of “difficult” mental health.

Community-based services can be a crucial support system for marginalised young people, particularly when schools fail to meet their needs. Yet these same young people are also among those most frequently targeted or harmed by police or other state services.

In spite of tort law’s ‘architecture of bias’, some feminist scholars and activists have argued that there is potential for tort law to be expanded to encompass and redress harms which more often and more greatly affect women and other marginalised people. While this can be important for some survivors to meet material needs and provide recognition for a wrong and harm, Martha Chamallas argues that it is not only a matter of individual compensation. It is connected to addressing systemic injustices because harm and violence are not equally inflicted and experienced, varying with intersecting forms of oppression. 

the legal and cultural obsession with affirmative consent evidenced in popular feminism, media, and mandatory university trainings cruelly reifies victims of sexual violence as abstract legal subjects, capable of protecting themselves through savvy risk assessment and contractual relations. Indeed, the privileging of consent as a marker of acceptable sexual relations has been thoroughly critiqued by feminist, queer, and liberal legal scholars.

As we republish the final edition of The Abolitionist we reflect on the twenty-two editions and consider what we can learn from the struggles of the 1980s

Read a full digital copy of this edition of Radical Alternative to Prison’s journal “The Abolitionist” (1987) No. 23

We are less likely to intervene, than to report an incident after the fact. This happens across the spectrum, from the most violent rapes, through street harassment, into universities and other institutions: at the ‘everyday’ end, complaints tend to be submitted when difficult conversations would be more effective. Faith (or hope) in authoritarian systems seems unshakeable, even given overwhelming evidence they don’t keep us safe:

Feminism is a political methodology that can help us name the structural, interpersonal and otherwise murky forces which make up a social landscape. It does so by enabling an examination and analysis of the material conditions which underpin social organisation, it helps us understand the ways that capitalism’s operation is specifically gendered and racialised in its arrangement of labour, social relationships, the economy as well as prisons and the police.

abolitionist strategies, if given support, would be able to address some of the complex root causes of sexualised street harassment which include misogyny, patriarchy, economic inequality, and intersecting forms of marginalisation. It is these structures and norms that render some women more vulnerable to harm, particularly since that harm reflects entrenched norms emerging out of histories of “heterosexism, colonialism, and slavery.”