Why would feminists trust the police – review

We do our movements no favours by presenting them as homogenous forms for the sake of convenient political narratives and expedient analysis. Leah Cowan’s Why Would Feminists Trust the Police? makes a critical intervention at a critical point in time for British feminism – challenging its tendency to erase, mask and overlook the tangled history of both resistance and complicity between feminists and the police.

Her tapestry of interviews and research makes visible the roots of this alliance between segments of British feminism and agents of state violence, exposing how this supposed ‘anti-violence strategy’ continues to dominate our daily lives despite its proven ineffectiveness. In short, what Cowan offers is a constellation of provocations and answers to the questions many of us organisers have been asking ourselves for years in feminist spaces that feel at times to be carceral hellscapes. How did we get here and how do we get out of here?

We owe it to ourselves and each other to be radically honest about the state of our movements if we are serious about transforming them, beginning by examining the series of decisions and fractures that brought us to this point. With a thorough mapping of this past in hand, readers of this book come out with a more accurate understanding of how to navigate and transform the political landscape of the present and what it really takes for us to build an abolitionist future.

Fragmentation and the seeds of carceral feminism

As Cowan thoroughly but swiftly excavates the historical trajectories of British feminism in the early chapters of the book, we come to find that to know this true history is to know a series of reversals, repetitions, and contradictions and fragmentations.

The roots of both carceral feminist logic and abolitionist feminist resistance trace back to imperial and colonial origins. The former is intertwined with the criminal-legal systems’ foundational aims of protecting private poverty, capital and imperial expansion. The latter has grown from lineages of resistance to colonial counterinsurgency projects.

A clear critique is made from the outset of Eurocentric feminist ‘wave’ analogies, which overlook the importation of knowledge and experience by women of colour and racialised communities from formerly colonised countries. Just as there were exchanges of repression and colonial policing tactics between British forces in Palestine, Ireland, India and ‘Malaya’, resistance to these counter-insurgency projects has also been exchanged between women of colour and racialised communities in Britain. These would go on to inform and radicalise tactics of British feminist resistance against state violence.

Cowan provides countless examples of these histories – making a strong case that the real ‘first wave’ of feminist organising could be considered to be the revolts by enslaved women in their resistance against British empire, rather than the actions of white women on British soil in the 19th century, as is so often told. Already, very early on, these anti-colonial liberation struggles were miles ahead of the 19th-century white British feminist analysis of why ‘property’ was central to liberation from patriarchy, with working-class power being central to their resistance. Women of colour already understood ‘freedom’ was not located purely in one’s right to acquire and inherit land and assets, but in having freedom from being the property of empire, patriarchy and capital.

Carceral feminism has masked its inability to address root and structural causes of harm, by pushing an individualised ‘criminal justice’ approach to justice

From the outset, dissidents in the colonies have experienced that their struggles for liberation and survival bring them into direct confrontation with police, coming to recognise the futility of appeals to morality or constitutional demands of their oppressors. This radical tradition became the grounding of the abolitionist black British feminism we know today – which makes clear that the police and state are a violent threat to women’s safety, not our ‘protectors’ as they may like us to believe.

On the other hand, Cowan points out, the white British feminist movement from the outset located its ‘first-wave’ demands for ‘acceptance and integration into the state for an elite group, through the ability to vote for leaders and governments, achieved by a commitment to maintaining strict social hierarchies’.

At the same time, however, we know the white British feminist contingent varied significantly in its relationship with the state. Radical suffragettes engaged in fierce militant confrontations with the state, challenging labour relations and social hierarchies, and organising in the 1960s transcended mere spectacle. Within the broad umbrella of the ‘women’s liberation movement’, a diverse array of groups actively collaborated on newsletters, conferences and other efforts together developing feminist theory and praxis.

But overall, the growing mainstream feminist tendency of the 19th and 20th centuries was to view the state as a vehicle for liberation and embrace authoritarian rule. This erasure of anti-colonial struggles for justice against British imperial patriarchy contributes to continued fragmentations in the feminist movement today when it comes to people’s attitudes towards the police.

Beyond ‘hate crime’, towards abolition feminism

The genealogical tracing of carceral feminism’s logics and its ruptures with other feminist segments offers readers an orienting force in navigating an increasingly complex landscape full of co-option and counter-insurgency in the present. Carceral feminism has masked its inability to address root and structural causes of harm, by pushing an individualised ‘criminal justice’ approach to justice. In chapters on the ‘sectorification’ of radical struggle and feminisms in the new millennium, Cowan explains how the politics of austerity and neoliberal late-stage capitalism have forced grassroots groups and services further away from their original feminist principles towards interfacing with the state in return for material resources and a right to exist.

This analysis particularly resonated with me as a mixed Japanese woman. I have witnessed first-hand how the ‘Stop Asian Hate’ movement of 2021 was hijacked by the state, which suggested ‘hate crime’ frameworks would save us – and I have been enraged by how carceral feminism has attempted to demobilise and depoliticise our community organising efforts by offering us a glorified ‘seat at the table’. Many have taken the bait.

It has been difficult to know where to begin with breaking our communities free of this stranglehold of carceral feminism, as it infiltrates well-intentioned domains, such as support services for victims of anti-Asian violence labelled as ‘hate crimes’, often reliant on government funding and police collaboration. Similar trends have emerged elsewhere, exemplified by the growing partnerships between gender-based violence services and government bodies. This collaboration has led to the establishment of women’s prisons, transgender prison wings, and women-only immigration detention centres, all purportedly in the name of ‘gender equality’ and as a one-size-fits-all solution to gender-based harm and violence.

One of the things I most appreciate about Cowan’s book is that, in response to carceral discourse, it refuses to be dragged into the reactionary exercise of listing a thousand reasons or examples of why the police or prisons don’t keep us safe. Instead, Why Would Feminists Trust the Police? offers a crucial examination of the complex relationship between British feminism and the state, and presents a roadmap for understanding and dismantling the entanglements between feminism, patriarchy, and state violence. This is what our movements have needed for so long: a clear view of what we are up against, carceral feminism’s ‘bases’, hiding places and perpetuating logics.

In providing this much-needed clarity into the past, Cowan’s work serves as a guide for feminists of today to confront the underlying structures of carceral feminism that infiltrate our movements in the present – paving the way for an eventual abolitionist future.

This article first appeared in Issue #244 30 Years of Red Pepper. Subscribe today to support independent socialist media and get your copy hot off the press!