The neoliberal slide into a carceral gender-based violence sector

by Leah Cowan

Green square with the words Leah on feminism and neoliberalism in light green text with some graphic in light pink.

Implement tougher prison sentences. Invest in policing. Make misogyny a hate crime. Create new criminal offences for some forms of gender-based violence. These are not (only) the talking points of your average MP or media commentator. These are some of the key messages and campaigning issues that are currently prioritised by Britain’s gender-based violence (GBV) sector. The GBV sector is for the most part ‘carceral’ in its approach to addressing violence; it understands police and prisons (‘incarceration’) to be the primary solution to (some) issues of gendered harm in society. However, while GBV support services have, from their inception, contained voices and approaches which were welcoming of, and felt entitled to criminal legal interventions at any cost, this reactionary position has unfolded as the dominant perspective in anti-violence work. 

The formalised web of support organisations and services which became the GBV sector began as scrappy, radical, experimental collectives of feminists who channeled their rage against the systems and institutions that perpetuate violence into creating spaces of sanctuary for survivors. Within these organising spaces, there were political fractures and contestations. Primarily, the difficulties of sustaining and funding this work, as we will explore, meant that some organisations either were always inclined towards, or acquiesced to a more carceral standpoint, in order to be compensated (meagrely) for their labour.

In order to understand the heavy lean towards carcerality among (the majority of) GBV support services in Britain in the present day, it helps to situate this ‘sector’ of work in its particular social and political context. A thread we must pull on to tell this story leads us to the foundational roots of feminism in Britain; roots that are nourished in a manure of white supremacy and race ‘science’. In the early 20th Century, big-name suffragettes such as Millicent Fawcett, who would go on to found the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, were simultaneously involved in colonial members clubs such as the Victoria League. This organisation was set up to promote the “cause of empire”—an objective which was noted and praised during a parliamentary debate on women’s suffrage. These clubs celebrated and promoted the role of the British empire. When campaigning for the vote in the decades that followed, arguments were made by pro-empire suffragists that women in Britain were the ‘mothers of the race’ and it was therefore essential that they were involved in parliamentary matters, particularly in matters of health and social care, in order to assist in upholding this supremacy. 

Mainstream feminism in Britain is commonly preoccupied with the desire for a seat at the table of power; for a stake in the empire, for legislative wins and more women in board rooms and on parliamentary benches. Yet multiple, competing feminisms exist—arguably, feminist work has always been characterised by fragmentation and internal dissent. The halcyon years of the women’s liberation movement (WLM) in the 1970’s is also wrought with dissent and disagreement. The WLM plays a crucial part in the histories of carceral feminism in Britain: it’s generally acknowledged that the GBV sector that exists today was formed out of some significant chunks of the WLM. That the GBV sector grew out of the WLM does not mean that this sector is necessarily unified on their goals, tactics, politics or values. Back in the 1970s and 80s, disputes and fractures were already emerging in the WLM on a range of issues including sexuality, reproductive justice, racism, class and labour—with sex work a particular focus. Crucially, this fragmentation within anti-violence work often fell along political lines, directly informing what organisers, practitioners, and activists recognised as knowledge, why they prioritised one harm reduction method over another, and how they envisioned safety and liberation.

These disputes were and continue to be demonstrative of the fact that, despite what the state might want us to believe, there is no convenient, single strategy for solving issues of harm in society: more police, more criminal offences, harsher prison sentences and more jail cells do not keep us safe or move us towards liberated futures. Police and prisons are not a silver bullet solution, and in fact, these ‘carceral’ approaches do more harm than good across the board. From an abolitionist standpoint, we recognise that there is a whole vibrant tapestry of skills, knowledge, methodologies, roles and relationships that can and do move us towards harm reduction. These approaches involve preventing harm, and focusing on centring the needs of those who are harmed and who do harm (groups that are not mutually exclusive), in order that we can heal the ways in which we wrong each other, and also attempt to stop the same harms from recurring. 

A question of resources in a neoliberal landscape

Back to the ‘70s and ‘80s: a diverse range of groups, organisations and support services were formed—some firmly rooted in a radical, socialist and Black feminist politic which was overtly anti-state, and others over time working ever more closely with the state and its agents such as the police in order to encourage survivors to seek remedies in the criminal legal system. In the golden era of funding for support services in the early 1980s the Greater London Council (GLC) and Women’s Committees across the country not only resourced feminist anti-violence work, but went as far as funding groups to build their own premises—something which feels like a fever dream from our standpoint at the tail-end of 15 years of devastating public funding cuts. This shower of funding came to an end when Thatcher shut down the GLC in the late ‘80s. GBV organisations had to decide whether to get on board with the new Conservative, neoliberal world order, or close their doors. 

The dawn of neoliberalism in the 1980s signalled the rise of a socio-economic and political philosophy that would heavily steer global economic systems in the direction of prioritising profit over people. It meant that the role of the individual was exalted over the vitality of community networks, public services were privatised, public infrastructure such as social housing was sold off, and states ‘stepped out’ of providing welfare support a moral responsibility was placed on charities and voluntary organisations (through a shallow and obfuscatory Conservative austerity policy termed ‘Big Society’) to step in and plug the gaps. Some governments adopted these neoliberal economic policies with open arms, however for many countries in the Global South, neoliberalism was implemented by force by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank—institutions whose agendas and interventionist powers are rooted in projects of white supremacy and colonisation. 

For those GBV organisations in Britain who managed to dance in step with the agenda of the Thatcher government, they leapt head-first into a world of competitive tendering and demonstrating ‘value for money’ over delivering meaningful and impactful support services; a world of competing with and pushing out sister organisations rather than collaborating with them; perhaps most critically it was to be a world where violent criminal legal responses to harm were prioritised over more transformative forms of justice and healing. This lean towards a carceral response to GBV—a response which sought to somehow liberate survivors through co-signing and fuelling the inherent harms of the criminal legal system—reveals the varied motivations of feminist activity; some liberatory, and others reactionary. 

A hostile environment of harm

As the millennium dawned, neoliberalism in Britain developed new and untold fangs. Writing from the early years of David Cameron’s prime ministership, the cultural theorist Stuart Hall asks in an essay: “what sort of crisis is this?”. Hall is looking back on and forwards to a ghoulish period of socio-economic history that would come to encompass a whole host of crises. This era included ‘austerity’ public funding cuts that would push swathes of people into poverty and to their deaths, while the government attempted to justify cuts to the benefits system by driving a violent narrative that claimants were fraudulent and ‘undeserving’. Relatedly, the humanitarian crisis in the mediterranean sea would see tens of thousands of people attempting to seek sanctuary on boats, and drowning as European powers watched on and devised policies to make these routes more treacherous, claiming that they were protecting the public purse. These same powers would at the same time fuel narratives that newcomers (and other ‘low-hanging fruit’ such as elders of the Windrush generation) were somehow the cause of an inadequate welfare system and a dearth of basic infrastructure such as housing and health and social care. In 2012 the ‘hostile environment’ (the seeds of which were germinated by the previous Labour government) and its concurrent ‘everyday borders’ was ramped up and rolled out in order to make life untenable for migrant communities, while meting out harassment and punishment for racialised groups across the board. Meanwhile, another folk devil was devised (joining its collaborators the ‘fraudulent benefit claimant’, the ‘smuggler’, the ‘trafficker’ and the ‘gangmaster’)—that of the nascent terrorist. An accompanying raft of anti-terror legislations and Islamophobic surveillance regimes such as Prevent were set up, seeking to turn everyday people in our communities into border guards, and informants for the Home Office.

The current iteration of the GBV sector was not immune to this wave of hostile, draconian and violent policy-making; funding for GBV work was made available through Prevent, and services run by and for racialised communities were drawn into this Islamophobic agenda in order to keep paying their office rent and staff’s wages. Years of energy and labour across GBV organisations were poured into consulting on a Home Office sponsored bill which came into force as the Domestic Abuse Act 2021. The Act primarily focused on creating new criminal offences and expanding ones that already existed; an early draft also encouraged the ‘return’ of survivors to another country, in order to extract them from an abusive relationship in Britain. Such a suggestion illuminates the morally bereft, violently racist and nauseatingly paternalistic calibre of government policy on GBV—this low bar is where sector organisations have to pitch themselves in order to court favour with the government and its funding pots.

When prisons and police are posed as the solution to harm, we must recognise that those presenting these symbolic ‘solutions’ are, materially, less invested in safety for all, and have become preoccupied with embarking on ‘winnable’ campaigns and abiding by government agendas that come with half-hearted promises of organisational funding. When it comes to mainstream British feminism and its crusade to ‘protect women from violence’ via carceral methods, we must always question: what is the cost of these symbolic forms of ‘protection’? In the absence of these forms offering real, tangible protection, and the presence of an inherently violent criminal legal system, whose safety is truly being protected? I would argue that these symbolic forms of safety end up inviting more harm for marginalised, racialised, migrant, Black, Muslim, traveller, care-leaving, and disabled survivors, among others who are actively targeted by the criminal legal system and make up a significant portion of the women’s prison population who are being protected. They fail to protect trans women, who are routinely persecuted, vilified, and abandoned by a cadre of powerful voices and forces in the GBV sector–the very same voices that lobby to prevent people self-identifying in their own gender and to block survivors of all genders from accessing domestic violence refuges. They do not prioritise the safety of both sex workers, who have been expected to ‘exit’ their forms of income generation in order to access GBV support, and also undocumented women more broadly who also face high levels of violence and exploitation due to the precarity produced by the illegalisation of the work they do. 

As abolitionists and feminists we must constantly question: what are we doing all of this for? In one sense, the GBV sector has suffered such an incredible mission drift, pivoting from its early, imperfect origins as a sanctuary-building project to (in many cases) providing complicit pieces of apparatus to bolster the carceral state—as a GBV sector worker told me in an interview, “In order to legitimise itself, neoliberalism does need carceral feminism”. At the same time, there are seeds and strains of carcerality in mainstream feminism in Britain from its inception. We must ask ourselves: are we doing anti-violence work so that a few transphobic, sex-worker phobic, Islamophobic, racist GBV sector CEOs can sit around the Home Office board room table and chip in on whatever consultation is the state’s latest obsession? Or are we doing anti-violence work as a necessary step in realising a world where we build a bonfire of boardroom tables, and focus our energies on structuring society around genuine harm reduction, care and compassion for all of us?