“We Keep us Safe!”: Abolition Feminism as a Challenge to Carceral Feminist Responses to Gendered Violence

Abstract

The well-known movement chant “we keep us safe” disrupts carceral logics that deem policing—and the criminal punishment system more broadly—as sites of public safety and protection from violence and instead situates the source of safety within the community. Nevertheless, activist calls for community-centered alternatives to harm and violence occur alongside increasing backlash from media, legislators, and community members alike, who assert that, while flawed, police remain crucial for public safety—claims grounded in carceral feminist approaches to violent crime. More specifically, supporters of police as the site of safety commonly raise concerns related to victims of gendered intimate partner and sexual violence. In this article, we draw on 131 interviews from two studies with community activists, antiviolence advocates (both within and outside the state), and survivors to examine how they make sense of abolition and transformative justice in relation to their own lives, their work, their communities, and the state. Although participants may not use the actual language, our findings highlight abolition feminism as the framework guiding their critiques of the criminal punishment system, their visions for safety, and the everyday nuances they identify in seeking responses to gendered harm and violence beyond policing.

Plain Language Summary

“We Keep Us Safe!”: Community Safety Responses to Gendered Violence

The well-known movement chant “we keep us safe” challenges the idea that the criminal justice system is a source of safety and protection from violence. Instead, this chant reminds us that true safety is found within the community. Nevertheless, activist calls for community-centered alternatives to harm and violence happen at the same time that media, politicians, and community members claim that, while flawed, police remain crucial for public safety. More specifically, supporters of police as the source of safety commonly raise concerns related to victims of gendered intimate partner and sexual violence. In this article, we draw on 131 interviews from two studies with community activists, antiviolence advocates (both within and outside the state), and survivors to examine how they understand abolition and transformative justice in relation to their own lives, their work, their communities, and the state. While participants may not use the actual language, our findings highlight abolition feminism as the source of ideas guiding their critiques of the criminal justice system, their visions for safety, and the everyday tensions they identify in seeking responses to gendered harm and violence beyond policing.

Keywords

gendered violence abolition anticarceral feminism transformative justice safety

In the summer of 2020, millions of people across the globe called to defund police in response to the state murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd (Kaba and Ritchie 2022). Echoing decades of Black women, trans, nonbinary, and queer activism against anti-Black racism, many protesters proposed an abolitionist praxis of transformative justice and community safety, proclaiming, “Who keeps us safe? We keep us safe!” These chants disrupted carceral logics that deem policing—and the criminal punishment system¹ more broadly—as sites of public safety and protection from violence and instead situate safety within the community. Yet, amid activist calls for community-centered alternatives to harm and violence, increasing backlash from media, legislators, and community members alike asserted that although flawed, policing remained crucial for public safety (Phelps 2024). Most notably, gender-based violence² became the political terrain in which critics dismissed abolitionist ideologies as they asked, “If we abolish policing, what will happen to victims of intimate partner and sexual violence?”

Such critiques mirror early feminist calls to address gendered violence through increased support for criminal justice intervention—an emerging formulation of carceral feminism (Bernstein 2012; Goodmark 2018; Gruber 2021). Under carceral feminism, pluralist coalitions between feminist antiviolence organizers and state agents developed pro-criminalization policies that bolstered the carceral state (Kim 2020). Mainstream feminist antiviolence efforts thus emphasized reforming the criminal legal system while quieting transformative calls for its complete overhaul (Goodmark 2018). Radical Black and critical race feminist activist groups opposed carceral feminism, arguing that criminalization not only failed to reduce gender-based violence, but also exacerbated victims’ experiences by discrediting their testimonies and reproducing the physical and sexual violence it professed to deter (Goodmark 2018; Gruber 2021; Richie 2012; Ritchie 2017). As survivors themselves, Black, women of color, and queer feminists identified the intersectional vulnerabilities to interpersonal, community, and state violence within the race-class–subjugated communities from which they hailed (Combahee River Collective 1977; Lindsey 2022; Richie 2012), offering the foundations of an abolition feminism that is “a politically informed practice—that demands intentional movement and insightful responses to the violence of systemic oppression” (Davis et al. 2022, 4).

Interdisciplinary scholarship has produced an emerging body of work that both challenges the function of the broader criminal punishment system and the diverse sites of the shadow carceral state (Beckett and Murakawa 2012) and calls for the dismantling of all structures of carcerality (Battle 2022; Beardall and Edwards 2021; M. Bell 2021; Byrd 2016; Calathes 2017; Clair and Woog 2022; Karakatsanis 2019; Roberts 2022; Rodriguez 2019; Saleh-Hanna 2017; Tillman 2023). We build upon this research by arguing harm reduction is most effective through abolition feminism, which addresses both interpersonal violence within and state violence against marginalized communities (Davis et al. 2022). Despite the proliferation of academic calls for abolition, few studies empirically examine this intersection between gender-based violence, the carceral state, and abolition feminism since the 2020 Uprising. We contribute to existing feminist sociological analyses on the history of the antiviolence movement (Sweet 2023; Whittier 2016), its consequences for marginalized survivors (Corrigan 2013; Kim 2020), and the need for abolitionist futures (Benjamin 2022; Derr, Hattery, and Smith 2024; Whalley and Hackett 2017) by exploring how contemporary activists and advocates—both within and outside the state—understand criminal justice failures in the fight for community safety from gendered violence. Guided by Black and queer feminist interdisciplinary scholarship that recognizes gendered violence as intrinsic to carcerality³ (Boodman 2018; Davis 2003; Kaba 2021; Lindsey 2022; Richie 2012; Ritchie 2021; Spade 2012), we ask, “How do contemporary antiviolence coalitions across a variety of social positions related to carcerality make sense of safety amid growing calls for alternatives to criminal punishment?”

To answer this question, we draw on 131 interviews from two studies with community activists, community and correctional sexual assault advocates, and sexual assault survivors conducted from 2020 through 2022. We argue that centering perspectives on gendered violence from those adjacent to and within the criminal punishment system highlights the necessity of feminism in reducing harm and cultivating community safety (Davis et al. 2022; Derr, Hattery, and Smith 2024; Saleh-Hanna 2017). First, our findings illustrate how—despite varying political perspectives on abolition—community organizers, survivors, and advocates alike disrupted carceral feminist logics of punitive justice through personal and professional observations of carceral failure. Community activists and survivors, most of whom face oppression by race, gender, and/or sexual orientation, reflect upon experiences of interpersonal and state violence to explicitly espouse a demand for abolition and transformative justice. Although most sexual assault advocates from the community and correctional agencies did not identify as abolitionists, their work in gender-based violence prevention and response led them to challenge the carceral feminist notion that reforms effectively produce long-term sexual and physical safety. This diversity in both social identity (i.e., race and gender) and relationships to gender-based violence (i.e., survivors, advocates, and/or community activists) remains crucial in identifying overlaps across varying political perspectives on public safety. Thus, we argue that the centrality of abolition feminism lies not in individual identification as abolitionists or complete agreement across antiviolence coalitions but rather in collective understandings of the criminal punishment system as ineffective in producing safety and the need for survivor-centered alternatives to criminal punishment (Davis et al. 2022).

Second, by highlighting participants’ everyday efforts to create alternatives to punitive justice through activities such as community and bail fund organizing and transformative justice programs for survivors and harm-doers, we move beyond a legalistic conceptualization of abolition and provide empirical evidence of its real-life implementation in resisting oppression and carcerality. Last, we show how various actors reconciled tensions between state failures to deter violence and interpersonal/communal orientations to harm. These insights provide a nuanced picture of everyday, pragmatic approaches to gendered violence. Participants’ stories around transformative alternatives empirically contribute to developing a theory and praxis of abolition feminism as a direct challenge to carceral feminist responses to gendered violence.

Mapping Activist and Academic Responses to Gendered Violence

Carceral Feminism as a Response to Gendered Violence

Feminist activists and scholars have long contested the treatment of victims in the criminal punishment system. Decades before the 1960s Women’s Liberation Movement, Black women activists such as Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Rosa Parks, and Claudia Jones exposed white supremacist sexual violence against Black communities through the rape and lynching of Black women and men (Davis et al. 2022; McGuire 2010; Wells [1892] 2014). By the 1970s, feminists argued that sexual assault, rape, and intimate partner violence (IPV) stemmed from gendered inequality between men and women (Bumiller 2008; Corrigan 2013). Activists further contended that reporting gender-based violence under a patriarchal criminal legal system exposed women victims to a “second assault” due to hostile police, repeated questions about their credibility, legal expectations of physical corroboration and resistance, and little (if any) accountability for men perpetrators (Corrigan 2013; Martin and Powell 1994).

For many feminist organizers, the failure to arrest, charge, convict, and confine perpetrators signified the devaluing of survivors and, consequently, the illegitimacy of the state as a source of protection (Bumiller 2008; Kim 2020). Thus, distinct from previous revolutionary efforts to center community responses, mainstream feminist organizers emphasized the reformation of the criminal punishment system where new police and prosecutorial training on sexual assault and domestic violence, rape shield laws that barred victims’ sexual histories from testimony, no-drop prosecutions, and mandatory arrest policies reflected an invested criminal legal system that recognized gendered violence as a social (and criminal) problem (Goodmark 2018; Gruber 2021; Kim 2020; Sweet 2023; Whittier 2016). This reformist approach cultivated “carceral feminism” as “a cultural and political formation in which previous generations’ justice and liberation struggles are recast in carceral terms”—as the primary intervention for gender-based violence (Bernstein 2012, 236; Corrigan 2013; Whalley and Hackett 2017). Yet, while feminist and criminal legal pluralist coalitions mobilized material resources to fund and staff hotlines, shelters, and legal support for victims, their alliance ultimately institutionalized criminal legal interventions such as pro-victim advocates in prosecutorial offices and newly formed victim response teams with advocates and law enforcement (Kim 2020).

Black and other women of color grassroots feminist activists criticized the 1970s carceral turn in antiviolence advocacy, arguing that subsequent policies such as the 1994 Violence Against Women Act increased efforts to incarcerate men perpetrators who were disproportionately Black and Brown (Gottschalk 2016; Whittier 2016). For example, Goodmark (2018, 19) reveals that “by 2013 social service authorizations made up only 15 percent of VAWA grants,” while the vast majority of grants went toward criminal legal interventions. Moreover, Black and critical race feminist activists from organizations such as Survived & Punished (https://survivedandpunished.org/) contended that carceral feminist pro-criminalization policies also harmed women of color, who simultaneously encountered both underpolicing, through the exclusionary politics of protection, and overpolicing, via the arrest and prosecution of survivors who exhibited self-defense against their abusers (Crenshaw 1991; Goodmark 2018; Gross 2015).

As survivors of interpersonal, community, and state violence, Black women and other women of color often rely on “carceral protectionism” (M. C. Bell 2016; Derr, Hattery, and Smith 2024; Musto 2016; Powell and Phelps 2021), yet we caution against arguments that this reliance implies support for punitive responses (Saleh-Hanna 2017; Whalley and Hackett 2017). For as Kramer and Remster (2022, 10.11) note, “Demands for state support become requests for more police, not because police are the ideal intervention but because police are the visible and conceivable intervention.” Although empirical data on public perception of restorative and transformative justice responses remain sparse, recent survey data from the Alliance for Safety and Justice (ASJ 2022, 5) suggest that “seven in 10 victims prefer that prosecutors focus on solving neighborhood problems and stopping repeat crimes through rehabilitation, even if it means fewer convictions and prison sentences.” Furthermore, according to a 2017 report from Common Justice (https://www.commonjustice.org) executive director Danielle Sered (2017, 16), “Among victims of crime in the United States who have taken part in restorative processes, 80 to 90 percent have reported being satisfied with the process and its results.” Such data reflect a longstanding desire to address violence within communities through nonpunitive alternatives. Below, we highlight the history, ongoing activism, and scholarship that imagines abolitionist responses as effective alternatives for public safety.

Abolition Feminist Mobilizations Toward Safety

Alongside practitioners and organizers in the community, scholars, especially those within the Black feminist traditions, have long made the case for abolition (Davis 2003; Du Bois [1935] 1998; Gilmore 2007; James 2005; Prison Research Education Action Project 1976; Richie 2005). Building upon liberation work that began with the transatlantic slave trade (Davies, Jackson, and Streeter 2021), the contemporary abolitionist movement started in the 1970s as Black radical activists fought against carceral expansion and for community-centered alternatives, with a particular focus on political prisoners (Davis and Rodriguez 2000). The U.S. abolition movement comprises groups of various sizes, organizational structures, and action strategies ranging from, for example, a small, locally planted grassroots organization co-founded by the first author in 2020, Triad Abolition Project (https://www.triadabolitionproject.org/), or the national organization Critical Resistance (https://criticalresistance.org), founded in 2001.

Alongside the on-the-ground abolitionist movement, an emerging sect of interdisciplinary social science scholarship explores how abolitionist approaches might transform and dismantle the criminal punishment system (Beardall 2020; Byrd 2016; Calathes 2017; Karakatsanis 2019; Rodriguez 2019; Saleh-Hanna 2017; Tillman 2023), how organizers understand the praxis of abolition (Battle 2022), abolition’s place within traditional academic disciplines and feminisms (Brown and Schept 2017; Whalley and Hackett 2017), and calls to abolish all carceral systems, including, for example, the family regulation system (Roberts 2020). Although much scholarship examines the place of abolition as a theoretical grounding for social science, few studies explore the implementation of abolition as a strategic practice, especially outside legal frameworks (Davies, Jackson, and Streeter 2021). Jeffries and Ridgley (2020) examine the sanctuary city as a nonreformist reform (i.e., reform that does not reinforce carcerality) with the potential for improved material conditions for undocumented immigrants. Okechukwu (2021, 2) uses archival data to examine how grassroots efforts around neighborhood safety and security demonstrate abolitionist possibilities for alternative models of safety “grounded in feminized and queer relationships of care and concern.” Battle (2022) draws on interviews with abolitionist organizers to illuminate how their praxis is rooted in the ethos of Black radical feminism. Ultimately, Davies, Jackson and Streeter’s (2021) critical call for social scientists to confront carcerality offers a valuable entry for academic research to engage with communities working toward the abolition of carceral punishment and to develop collaborations that advance a (re)imagining of interpersonal and public safety.

Importantly, abolition is understood as a radical Black feminist practice, where the work to end gendered violence cannot be isolated from the work to end structural and state violence (Bhattacharjee 2001; Davis et al. 2022). As such, abolitionist activists mobilize toward community safety. Organizations such as INCITE! (https://incite-national.org) and Critical Resistance delineate “precisely why abolition must be feminist and why feminism must be abolitionist” (Davis et al. 2022, ix). For Davis and her collaborators (2022, xii), “abolition feminism has always been a politics—the refusal to consign humans and other beings to disposability—inseparable from practice,” as well as an ecosystem that “amplif[ies] a dynamic ecology of political work, highlighting legacies, analytics, and questions often erased or obscured” (xiii). The “practice and promise” of abolition feminism (Battle 2022) then offers a critical ecosystem for responding to the carceral feminist reliance on law enforcement in responding to gendered and racialized interpersonal and state violence (Goodmark 2023; Kaba and Ritchie 2022; Richie 2012; Ritchie 2017).

While critiques of carceral feminism rightfully highlight the orientation’s failure to account for the (re)production of harm and violence against oppressed groups and address the prevalence of carceral violence within the criminal punishment system, questions remain regarding how to respond to situations of interpersonal gendered violence. In their 2001 Statement on Gender Violence and the Prison Industrial Complex (https://incite-national.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/incite-cr-statement.pdf), INCITE! acknowledges that the mainstream anti-prison movement has “not always responded adequately to the needs of survivors of domestic and sexual violence.” Nevertheless, organizers have long developed and facilitated alternatives, including Project NIA’s (https://project-nia.org) transformative justice initiatives, Generation FIVE’s (https://transformharm.org/resource_author/generation-five/) responses to child sexual abuse, localized projects to protect sex workers, and violence interruption and community defense initiatives (Davis et al. 2022; Dixon and Piepzna-Samarasinha 2020). These approaches are grounded in Chen, Dulani, and Piepzna-Samarasinha’s (2011, xxv) questions of early antiviolence initiatives, such as Sista II Sista’s Sistas Liberated Ground, Critical Resistance’s Harm Free Zone, and Northwest Network’s Friends Are Reaching Out, who asked, “What if we sat on the stoop, talked to folks on the block, . . . and began weaving a web of folks who agreed to try something other than calling the police when it came to violence?” We attempt to “sit on the stoop” and uncover how various persons, including anticarceral/abolitionist activists and organizers, state and community advocates, and survivors interrogate the criminal punishment system, articulate desired responses to harm and violence, and think about a safer world beyond the confines of the carceral state.

Abolition Feminist Methodological Approach

As anticarceral Black feminist scholars of violence and carcerality, we followed each other’s work over several years. Our informal collaboration led us to recognize overlaps in our respective studies exploring violence, the state, and anticarceral reform and abolition. We employ an abolition feminist methodological approach, where the theory and practice of abolition feminism guide our data collection and analysis. Black feminist scholar activism reminds us that “the world is remade in the context of the dynamic interplay of theory and practice—praxis” (Brewer 2021, 49). The praxis of abolition feminism is our guide in this study.

Our interests in our respective projects were rooted in a deep concern for justice, transforming conditions that cause harm, and practicing a care ethic for ourselves and our participants during all phases of the projects, from conceptualization of the studies to dissemination of the findings. In part, our care ethic is informed by our relationship with the populations we were collaborating with: The first author is a grassroots organizer who co-founded an abolitionist organization, and the second author is a former sexual assault victim advocate and now works with several organizations on addressing sexual harm within correctional institutions. We understand our positionalities as research strengths that allowed for deeper authenticity and connection. We aimed to bring our full selves to the projects and to center the full selves of our participants and their relationships to power “in creating alternatives of self-governance and self-determination” (Carruthers 2018, 10). Our interviews aimed to understand the interpersonal and state harm participants had experienced and their perspectives on the criminal punishment system, but also, importantly, we wanted to explore how they were engaged in worldmaking beyond the structures of carcerality. We are encouraged by how our work contributes to an emancipatory project with, by, and for the communities whose stories we illuminate here and ourselves.

Pathways to Abolition Study (October 2020–August 2021)

The Pathways to Abolition study was conducted by the first author and a collaborator, using in-depth interviews with 55 anticarceral/abolitionist activists and organizers across the United States who participated in the 2020 Uprising to examine experiences and perspectives on organizing, abolition, and the carceral state. The principal investigators’ (PIs) organizing background and community work with and for criminalized, incarcerated, and returning folks were central to the Pathways to Abolition project as activists and organizers continue to be criminalized, making participants’ trust in the PIs critical. Participants received $25 as compensation for their time. Of the 55 interviews, 17 participants were Black, three were Latinx, one was Indigenous, one was Asian American, 26 were white, and seven were multiracial. Women were just under 75 percent of the sample (n = 40), with six men and nine nonbinary/gender-expansive people.

Sexual Violence in Carceral Institutions Study (March 2020–May 2022)

The second author examined how carcerality shapes experiences of and institutional responses to sexual violence of formerly and currently incarcerated survivors through 76 interviews with formerly incarcerated survivors, state practitioners (e.g., Prison Rape Elimination Act personnel, social workers, attorneys), sexual assault victims advocates, and community activists. All participants had either directly experienced sexual harm before and/or during their incarceration, provided support services for (formerly) incarcerated survivors, and/or worked on Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) implementation within correctional facilities. In total, 25 participants described acts of sexual harm within the carceral context. While the project centered sexual abuse within carceral settings, almost all survivors disclosed prior sexual victimization by relatives, partners, or other acquaintances outside of carceral contact. Seven survivors self-identified as cisgender men, 14 as cisgender women, two as trans women, and two as trans men. Eleven survivors self-identified as Black/African American, nine as white, two as Indigenous/Native, and three as mixed-race. Importantly, several survivors discussed their current roles and professions as community organizers and sexual assault advocates. Survivors received a $40 electronic gift card for their participation.

To further understand the social, political, and legal constructions of sexual safety under the carceral state, the second author also conducted an additional 51 semi-structured interviews with sexual assault victim advocates from the community, sexual assault victim advocates within correctional facilities (e.g., PREA personnel), and community activists who had participated in sexual violence advocacy and policy implementation within carceral institutions. Sixteen of these advocates identified as cisgender men, 34 as cisgender women, and one as a transgender man. Thirty-five advocates identified as white, 12 as Black, one as Latinx/Hispanic, two as “White Hispanic,” and one self-identified as a “person of color.” Participants were offered a $20 electronic gift card.

Joint Analysis

The methodological approach for this study is informed by other innovative analyses that draw on data from separate but related studies (Elliott and Reid 2019; Randles and Woodward 2018). The 131 total participants across both studies held multiple roles as survivors, community organizers, and even state practitioners. We synthesize this group as a collective of antiviolence advocates despite differing—or even opposing—views on how to achieve safety, accountability, and justice. Due to institutional constraints,⁴ the complete transcripts for each interview in the full sample were analyzed first by the respective project’s PI to identify examples of the major themes we jointly developed. During our initial respective analyses, we used an inductive approach to identify themes and subthemes through close readings and line-by-line coding, followed by second and third waves of coding to refine the schema and identify relevant quotations (Saldaña 2016). Based on the previous coding, we collaboratively devised an updated schema⁵ to individually code our project’s transcripts for the present analysis. After individually coding our transcripts in ATLAS.ti, we created a shared document listing de-identified quotations for each theme. We discussed each to rate their relevance for the codes and to decide on the final set of evidence to be drawn upon for this article. We use pseudonyms for most participants to protect their identity, except those who requested their real names be used.

Abolition Feminist Worldmaking

Abolition feminist worldmaking involves identifying and dismantling oppressive institutions and collaboratively (re)envisioning how to build communities that center care while grappling with nuanced everyday needs, fears, and concerns. Through the lived experiences of abolitionist organizers, antiviolence advocates, and survivors of interpersonal and state violence, we illuminate how worldmaking occurs on the ground. Participants disrupt carceral feminist logics that situate safety in criminal punishment system intervention, although they do not necessarily use the language of carceral or abolition feminism, nor do all explicitly identify as abolitionists. We detail how their collective perspectives reflect ongoing abolition feminist discourses about the state’s failure to protect their communities, the (re)imaginative power of noncarceral alternatives for public safety, and the ensuing tensions of transformative praxis in everyday antiviolence work.

Carceral Failures in Responding to Harm and Violence

Emergent discourses on abolition and transformative justice have repeatedly faced fear that communities cannot effectively address violent crime, especially gender-based violence, without police and prisons. Such discourses situate abolition as antithetical to public safety. Yet, for many community members in both studies, these arguments reflect taken-for-granted assumptions about the role of law enforcement in ensuring protection (Derr, Hattery, and Smith 2024; Powell and Phelps 2021). Indeed, most advocates who had worked with survivors of gender-based violence in community and correctional contexts voiced ambivalence around these tensions amid growing public debate about the limitations of “criminal justice reform.” In the months following the 2020 Uprising, Beverly, a white woman and longtime advocate for sex-trafficked girls, surmised:

There needs to be reform. I’m listening to people in the community. . . . I’m listening to people of color and marginalized groups that are saying, “No! Don’t defund the police! We need the police. We just need changes.” And then, of course, there’s other people that say, “No, we need to defund!” So I don’t have an answer. I think we have a lot of work to do. . . . Answers to that question are going to be pulling the people who are most impacted together and having them create the solution to identify what are the issues and then what needs to be done. It really has to come from the community.

Like many advocates who worked with system-impacted survivors, Beverly remains unsure about her personal commitment to either stance. Yet, she identifies the importance of the community’s lived experience in determining how to achieve public safety.

Debates around community safety exposed the intracommunal nature of gendered violence, where people, particularly women, were harmed by men in their community (Lindsey 2022). Yet, for the vast majority of survivors, carceral feminist responses failed to adequately address harm and violence within their homes and communities (Powell and Phelps 2021; Richie 2012). Through stories of repeated child sexual victimization, intimate partner abuse, and state sexual exploitation, survivors challenged the logics of carceral protectionism (Musto 2016). Sofia, a formerly incarcerated Native woman survivor of child sexual abuse, reflected that she would “never” call the police even in the most dire circumstances:

I still don’t find peace with [police]. . . . I’ve kind of learned to protect myself. . . . I’ve gone with friends who have gone to report sexual assaults or domestic violence, and I was a victim of domestic violence, and the police did nothing. They’re like, “Well, we have no proof that it happened to you. We can only give you a restraining order.”

Similarly, Yuvette, a white community activist and formerly incarcerated survivor, shared how the police and correctional response to her childhood sexual abuse only exacerbated her trauma as an adult. When asked what resources she needed in the aftermath of her abuse, Yuvette replied:

I needed an adult to protect me for once and not criminalize me for trying to survive abuse. . . . You don’t have a problem charging me with escape charges of running away from home and locking me up, but you wouldn’t even try to protect me [and] go after this man that sexually molested me?

Yuvette concludes, “[Police] are not there to protect us at all.”

When asked whether prisons keep communities safe, Keesha, a multiracial formerly incarcerated survivor and community activist, responded:

People wouldn’t go to jail every fucking day if prisons was keeping us safe. No matter how many people we’ve got in prison, how many women are killed today by a current or former intimate partner? How many women are sexually assaulted every motherfucking day? . . . So yeah, prisons ain’t keeping us fucking safe.

As survivors of child sexual abuse and IPV, Sofia, Yuvette, and Keesha observed how the state both underprotected them from the abuse of men family members and partners while overpolicing and criminalizing their acts of trauma and survival (Lindsey 2022; Saar et al. 2017). Interactions with apathetic police shaped their beliefs that law enforcement is largely ineffective in protecting them from men’s gendered violence in their homes and communities, and they firmly rejected carceral feminist visions of safety. These accounts echo recent data on the Rape And Incest National Network (RAINN) statistics on the criminal justice system (https://www.rainn.org/statistics/criminal-justice-system) indicating that for every 1,000 sexual assaults, only “310 are reported to police,” “28 cases will lead to in a felony conviction,” and “25 perpetrators will be incarcerated.”

Several organizers echoed survivors’ concerns that the criminal punishment system failed to center victim-survivors in their responses to harm and violence adequately. For example, Olamina, a Black woman college student who participated in the 2020 Uprising, described how the “convoluted” structure of policing left little room to prioritize domestic violence training. She argued:

They don’t get enough training to do what, like, they’re supposed to be doing. . . . Like, they deal with domestic violence, but people have trained their whole lives. People have degrees for these things. And they’re just being done by police officers with less than 1,000 hours of training.

Those who worked directly with victim-survivors also shared their reluctance to rely on police and prisons as forms of prevention and protection from gender-based violence. Ellen, a white woman who worked for a sexual assault crisis hotline, expressed:

Police are bad at [responding to sexual assault]. And there needs to be someone else in charge of it. And the amount of money that the police get that goes to things like SVU [special victims units] or [rape] kit testing is obscene. And they’re not doing a good job.

Together, Olamina and Ellen described an overresourced and yet largely ineffective policing system that neither deterred nor protected their communities from gender-based violence (Goodmark 2018). Such responses led Hakeem, a formerly incarcerated Black man and community activist, to conclude that survivors “[get] victimized twice by going through that grueling court process.” This “revictimization” only reinforced community ambivalence about reporting.

Several community organizers and survivors further expressed that state violence is not simply an aberration of “criminal justice,” but intrinsic to its very functioning—particularly for Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities who do not receive social or political legibility as “ideal victims” (Hart 2023). Cherry, a Black woman college student and activist for Black liberation, highlighted the abuse and trauma present in Black folks’ relationship to the carceral state:

So, like I said, it’s an endless cycle of feeling gaslit. . . . I like to compare it to the relationship between an abuser and their victim. Why is it that Black people are always supposed to acquiesce to the abuser? Why is it that Black people are always the ones extending the olive branch to the abuser? This is sick.

Cherry situates the state as an abuser exerting coercive control over Black communities in particular, directly paralleling cycles of abuse in interpersonal relationships (Saleh-Hanna 2017). Whether through direct violence or the ongoing threat of violence, Cherry contends that Black communities carry the burden of losing their autonomy, their bodies, and their humanity to the abusive state.

Carceral harm also manifested in coercive sexual control inflicted on predominantly poor, racialized, and queer communities under correctional surveillance. As Sky, a white woman sexual assault victim advocate and abolitionist organizer, reminded other advocates:

The highest instances, the highest concentration of survivors of sexual violence are actually in prisons, the people who are criminalized. [Abolition and safety] aren’t in conflict because many, many people are survivors and are criminalized. Many people are victimized through their criminalization, like for those who are experiencing sexual violence in prisons. So I don’t really buy the pitting of these issues against each other.

Sky’s assertion remains empirically supported by numerous studies that show that over half of incarcerated women and girls are victims of sexual assault upon entering confinement (Pasko 2010; Saar et al. 2017) and that sexual violence remains endemic to carceral institutions through sexual harassment, incessant coercion, and sexual degradation through everyday practices such as strip searches (Ritchie 2017).

Leah, a white formerly incarcerated sex traffic youth survivor, explained that police “basically did the same things [e.g., sexual exploitation] that we were supposed to be there getting help for,” referring to experiences of sexual assault. She described how the police “would pick me up from running away, some of them would, instead of bringing me back home, they would sleep with me, they’d give me money, or they would just be like, “We won’t turn you in, but you got to do this for us.”

Relatedly, Yasmine, a formerly incarcerated Indigenous trans survivor, recounted the constant barrage of sexual and gender surveillance during several periods in jail. According to Yasmine, cops would inquire, “‘How long have you been a trans? . . . Can you get naked?’” Yasmine surmises:

That’s violence! That’s sexual harassment! . . . Even if you agree, you’re right there in a cell by yourself, when there’s nobody around with a white shirt [i.e., Correctional Officer]. . . . And they literally giving you an order to be naked or to get on your knees.

Together, Leah and Yasmine’s stories elucidate a key carceral feminist contradiction: Criminalization often leads to the very violence that is supposed to be addressed through a carceral feminist response to abuse and victimization (Ritchie 2017).

Because most of the community organizers and survivors understood violence as intrinsic to the criminal punishment system and the system as unable to respond to interpersonal violence, they were ambivalent to reformist policies that sought to tweak the system rather than fundamentally transform it. Olamina, who had criticized police training in domestic violence situations, concluded, “I don’t think there’s anything we can do at this point to, like, turn it around. It just has to be like, completely, like, remade.” Gwen, a white woman poet and educator with a long history of organizing for reproductive justice and socialism, echoed Olamina’s sentiments: “We had four people killed by police in four months [in this city]. . . . None of the reforms they put in place are going to prevent this. . . . It seems like they’ve had their chance to reform.” By highlighting the carceral state’s complicity in violence, organizers and survivors like Olamina and Gwen offered a searing critique of punitive justice, which opened abolitionist alternatives for community safety.

Collaboratively Dreaming of New Worlds

Alongside their critiques of carceral feminist responses to harm and violence, participants offered nuanced alternatives grounded in abolition feminist logics that called for (re)imagined visions of safety. Although not always framed in explicit language of abolition feminism, organizers and survivors conceptualized a world free from the strains of carcerality (Benjamin 2022). Moon, a Black and Asian nonbinary graduate divinity student engaged in healing and peer support work, defined abolition as a triad comprising dismantling oppressive systems, building community, and dreaming together of a new world. Moon’s final dimension of the triad—collaboratively dreaming of a new world—reflects a significant element of participants’ experiences with abolition feminism, particularly evident in their interpretations of safety (Benjamin 2022).

In the spirit of “dreaming together of a new world,” Ella, a formerly incarcerated Black woman survivor of sexual abuse who runs a peer support wellness organization, describes her vision of safety rooted in community and not the carceral state:

We’ve got to take care of each other. We gotta take care of ourselves, you know. Who keeps us safe? We keep us safe. I think about that all the time. As simple as that sounds, I think about that one all the time. . . . And when it occurred to me how important that concept is, that together, we find and produce safety. And so each one of us is responsible for the other. That right there is my vision of a world gone right. Where we all feel responsible for each other. Where your issue is my issue, and vice versa. . . . That’s my dream.

Ella’s reflections, highlighting the movement chant “Who keeps us safe? We keep us safe!,” centers the importance of community relationship-building in producing mass safety. Similarly, Crystal, a Black woman college student and new activist, described community building toward safety:

Like, when I be thinking about it, sometimes I [think] we should have more, like, just community safety programs where we in our community just keep ourselves safe and not just rely on the police to keep us safe. ’Cause sometimes when we call the police, they end up just shooting us.

According to Crystal, police were not only undependable but also dangerous, as they might end up committing extreme violence against someone calling for help. Crystal highlights strategies for community safety that have long been central to abolition feminist organizing.

Although most state advocates were ambivalent about abolitionist discourses, several conveyed what a world without carcerality might entail in their day-to-day professional lives. Denny, a white man PREA auditor who evaluated sexual safety policies in youth correctional facilities, confided, “I don’t believe any facility is safe. I think the nature of incarceration is, I think, lack of safety is implicit.” Denny proposed a “restorative or transformative justice model” where people are “welcomed back into their community and held accountable and their actions are held accountable to their local authorities and to their families, to their church, to their support system, [and] they can be working and honoring their values.” Relatedly, for Hazel, a Black woman sexual assault victim advocate for incarcerated survivors, abolition meant creating a world where her job no longer exists:

I really would like us [advocates] not to have a job. I would like us to not be continuing to have this same conversation. And I really think that the only way that we don’t have this conversation, is that we just decide that the money that we are spending on prisons, and jails, and juvenile detention and residential treatment, and all of that stuff, that we actually spend some of that money to really support families. Not just, “Okay. Here’s a check.” That’s fine, too. But actually embed people, . . . people that folks can trust, that they can rely on to actually create the conditions for kids to stay in their communities.

Here, Hazel’s understanding of abolition in practice means creating the conditions that would eliminate the need for victim advocacy in correctional institutions. Rather than invest in building more facilities, Hazel imagines a world wherein financial resources and community aid are provided to the very families whose lives become entangled in the carceral state.

Like state advocates, organizers and survivors frequently identified community as the catalyst for safety. Semassa, a Black man doctoral student engaged in Black liberation work, elaborated on his definition of safety, saying, “It’s like security is about settling and securing yourself. . . . Whereas safety is about building, and actively building, a sense of relationality between and with other people and other things . . . in order to create a collective sense of safety.” Semassa’s articulation speaks to an important feature of abolition feminism that pushes back against individualized notions of safety and the individualization of harm (Goddard and Myers 2017). Instead, an abolition feminist vision recognizes violence as a communal act and calls for a response of care that seeks to dismantle the structural conditions that lead to violence (Davis et al. 2022; Whalley and Hackett 2017). Bianca, a white woman preschool teacher who has contributed to movement building through theater, education, and direct action, conveyed that community-based safety not only involved interactions but, more importantly, meeting the material needs of the community:

I think safety starts with being a part of your community in a real way. . . . You have to know your neighbors to care about them. . . . You have to, like, use the alleyway sometimes, so you can see that there are like syringes out there. . . . We have to, like, know our neighbors and know what they need and ask them what they need, and then figure out how we make that stuff happen, right? Like, cool, you need a car. Can we have, like, neighborhood car shares? . . . Baby, like, you need more groceries. Great, like, I have more food than I know what to do with or I have, like, this gift card. . . . So, like, I guess my community safety vision is a lot of, like, what do I have that I can offer? What do I need that I can ask for? . . . We need to know how to care about each other in a practical way.

Hazel, Semassa, and Bianca moved the responsibility of safety from the carceral state to the community, focusing on investments in relationships and meeting individuals’ and the community’s immediate and long-term material needs. The dreams offered as responses to harm and violence outside the criminal punishment system reflect what Clair (2021) calls “legal envisioning,” defined as a “social process whereby criminalized people and communities imagine and build alternative futures within and beyond the current legal system.”

Participants involved in local abolitionist efforts were not simply dreaming of a new world—they were actively mobilizing toward abolition using transformative justice methods within their local communities (Benjamin 2022). The praxis of abolition included organizing community bail funds; providing medical, emotional, and material support to currently and formerly incarcerated people, including survivors; attending and organizing direct actions to demand police accountability and show solidarity with incarcerated people; organizing jail and court support for criminalized people; engaging in mutual aid; participating in violence interruption and de-escalation efforts; organizing community health and education programs; and aiding in de-arrests. For example, Hakeem, a Black man, shared that his everyday abolitionist praxis included finding ways to “build us up and create a force field around Black folks to where you don’t even have interaction with police or reduce that as much as I can. . . . Me and my friends, six of us, walked the streets of [our city] just talking to kids and giving them resources and just being good to young folks”.

Hakeem asserted that these efforts significantly reduced the youth crime rate in his city over the next several years. Hakeem also shared how he co-created a program for people convicted of sex offenses and a mental health response system to address community conflicts. Similarly, when asked what transformative justice facilitation entails, Sky, a queer white woman advocate, responded:

Transformative justice inherently means working with somebody who has caused harm to recognize that they caused harm, to change their pattern, to atone in the ways that a survivor wants, and then be held accountable to changing their behavior by their community. And that can look like so many things. It can look like mediation. It can look like doing sexual assault and consent education with somebody who’s caused harm. It can look like engaging that person in a paid program, in a support group for people who are working through harmful patterns that they have built up in response to harm they experienced.

For community activists like Hakeem and Sky, abolitionist praxis entailed one-on-one work with members of their communities that centered on meeting people’s material and social needs, and offering a range of strategies to prevent and respond to violence as a collective phenomenon.

Importantly, participants’ relationships to safety were racialized and gendered. White participants regularly expressed a lifelong lack of consciousness and concern about safety that was a product of the protections and privileges connected to their racial identity (Phelps 2024). When asked about the impact of seeing police violence around her, Edith, a white woman, broke down in tears. The interviewer inquired about her raw emotions, and Edith replied:

I know I’m safe. . . . Low income, people of color, like minority groups, right? You’re seeing LGBTQIA+ people, Black people, Hispanic folks, Asian folks, like, these people are victimized at such higher rates, and often by the police. They’re not safe. And I am. You know, as a cishet-passing white lady.

Similarly, when asked about how he defined safety, Duncan, a white man pacifist who had engaged in anti-war efforts, replied:

Hmm. Hmm. No. Safety has never been one of the things that I’ve had to, I’ve never given it much thought at all. I haven’t had to. I’m a white cisgender male. And I recognize that I can access [safety] anywhere, anytime.

Edith’s and Duncan’s reflections on the inherent safety of whiteness were a poignant articulation of the often unnamed power dynamics grounded in white supremacy that lead to folks of different identities experiencing safety differently (Powell and Phelps 2021).

Conversely, Black participants indicated that they had long struggled with questions of safety, including in relation to the criminal punishment system. For example, Leo, a Black nonbinary graduate student activist, recounted a police raid they lived through at just 6 years old in their family home. They described the experience as a “very radicalizing moment” and one that impacted their childhood notions of safety, which they were acutely aware was a result of their family’s race. While Edith and Duncan had never thought about their safety, it was clear from Leo and other Black participants that safety came into the consciousness of Black folks at an early age. Moreover, these racialized differences in participants’ relationships to safety contributed to similarly racialized differences in the processes through which they came to hold abolitionist perspectives and participate in anticarceral movements (Battle 2022). Specifically, as Black folks often became aware of their safety in connection to racism and violence in the criminal punishment system as young people, while white folks rarely or never had to consider their safety, Black folks likely grappled with abolition as an alternative for a longer period leading up to the 2020 Uprising, when it became a more mainstreamed discourse (Phelps 2024).

Unpacking the Everyday Nuances of Abolition Feminist Praxis

While participants articulated nuanced responses to violence grounded in abolition feminist praxis, they also described ideological and material tensions with the real-world implementation of abolitionist approaches. One question that produced tensions around abolition was how people could rely on community if harm also stemmed from members of that community (Lindsey 2022). Selena, a white woman attorney who had worked extensively with incarcerated survivors, believed that while “there is certainly a better use of funds, I think abolishing is not going to be effective.” She came to this understanding through her recent conversations with her social worker friend. Selena relayed:

Her perspective was, “I would go to a domestic violence dispute, but I’m not equipped to handle it if he is going to continue the violence.” She’s like, “I wouldn’t want to go there by myself.” . . . There is obviously situations where it’s just going to be . . . definitely don’t send in the social workers.

Selena represents the ambivalence several state practitioners expressed about the real-life implications for a police- and prison-free world. These concerns stemmed from a perspective that while criminal punishment intervention was flawed, that system was still necessary to ensure safety for first responders, especially in domestic violence contexts (Phelps 2024).

Other apprehensive discourse surrounding abolition centers on debates over reform versus divestment/transformation/abolition. Some participants working on the ground found little use in debates that they viewed as elitist and out-of-touch. Chloe, a Black trans advocate for incarcerated survivors, expressed:

I don’t do that abolitionist work versus reformist shit. I think it’s counterproductive for people who say that they want to live in a world where systems of good and bad and hierarchy don’t exist. And they will sit there from an elitist standpoint and tell people that what they’re doing isn’t getting someone free. And you ain’t even talking to the people who you’re trying to get free. . . . I’m like, yo, my ultimate goal is eradication of these systems. At the same time, I’m not fool enough to look at an opportunity to really have my hand in something, to shift it from my people and to say no because my pride is too big.

Chloe disrupts static binaries between reformist and abolitionist frameworks. Unlike the “elite” whom she believes do not work within communities they claim they support, Chloe and other trans advocates of color are involved in the day-to-day decisions that might reduce immediate harm for incarcerated queer communities.

Other participants shared similar concerns about protecting family members who did not feel safe without having the police available to them when they were in danger. Quinta, a Latina woman professor who has engaged in advocacy for (undocumented) immigrants as well as abolitionist organizing, said:

I still struggle with and try to think about . . . how much it’s also impacted the way I think about sort of police too, . . . my mom, is a domestic violence survivor. . . . [H]er boyfriend at the time would still, like, come home . . . and we had to . . . witness that. . . . But I think for me, it’s . . . partially a suppressed emotional response to . . . law enforcement and . . . their role, especially as I continue to learn more about, sort of, the instances when law enforcement does take sort of any action when it comes to domestic violence disputes.

Zora, a queer Black woman working in child policy, who first got involved in direct action after the murder of Michael Brown when she was a high school student, also had concerns about her family’s perceptions of safety if police were abolished. Speaking of her grandmother, Zora said:

Um, so like talking to her about . . . how she defines safety . . . who keeps her safe, um, has been an experience because telling someone who was born in ’55 don’t call the police, call your neighbor. She’s like, “My neighbor will harm me.” So, I think a lot of older Black people have been groomed and learn to fear young people. They fear children. . . . So, [challenging] that alongside her has been, like, literally my life’s work.

For Quinta and Zora, the impetus for their struggles was forged through thinking about how to best care for the needs of these important figures in their lives. By speaking of their concerns for their mother and grandmother, Quinta and Zora elucidated an abolitionist feminist praxis by centering the needs of individuals vulnerable to violence while also recognizing the structural underpinnings of such violence and the ways that reliance on these systems (re)produces violence against the larger community.

For participants, the implementation of an abolition feminist praxis often meant navigating impulses for vengeance rooted in the trauma of victimization, as well as society’s conflation of justice and punishment. Some questions centered on how to respond to what are commonly considered the worst forms of violence. Priscilla, a white queer woman organizer and nurse, said:

We used to have these conversations, and being, like, perfectly blunt and honest, we always stopped with like, “But what do you do with the child molesters?” You know? And I know that may seem, I don’t know, [laughs quietly] whatever it might seem like. But it’s, like, we, we definitely, like, we would go there and we’d really think like, what would it look like if we just didn’t lock people up or lock people away? But you know, like, there has to be some way that we deal with people who aren’t safe to be around others. And what does that look like? And I still don’t have an answer for that.

Priscilla’s questions highlight the struggle among abolitionists on the difficulty in collectively identifying pathways for ethically responding to serious harm. Nevertheless, these questions have answers among abolitionist communities, such as Generation FIVE, an organization aiming to end child sexual abuse within five generations, who have provided resources for navigating these struggles, along with many others (Generation FIVE 2007; see also Dixon and Piepzna-Samarasinha 2020). Importantly, within an abolition feminist framework, these answers are victim/survivor-centered, informed by the community, iterative, and experimental. Such responses are not scalable or generalizable, which is the goal of research and policy reform. Instead, such approaches recognize that if the criminal punishment system, with all its resources, has not been successful in preventing harm and violence, and often actually exacerbates them, then abolition offers promise for real safety and liberation.

Some participants avoided judging survivors/victims for their yearnings for retaliatory punishment. Erin, a Korean-American woman doctoral student who got involved with direct action after the murder of Michael Brown, said:

I would never fault someone for justified anger or a want for justice. Like, that doesn’t help anything. . . . Like, of course, you want to like lock some horrible person up. . . . You know, who doesn’t feel vindication in, like, seeing a Nazi punched? But then how do you, how do you kind of, like, square that very, almost like visceral pleasure with, like, a desire for something more? . . . I think you can.

Erin recognized counter-violence as a product of socialization and an understandable response to harm and violence, but her desires for vengeance did not override her abolitionist commitments.

On the contrary, Zora felt compelled to challenge folks who celebrated justice rooted in the criminal punishment system. She said:

I would say the two things that I struggle with sometimes are the joy people feel after a cop is convicted. I struggled to be like, “Why are you smiling?” Because I’m like, “I know why you’re happy, bro. I’m Black. I was born and raised in the United States of America. I know what we’ve been trained to believe about justice.” So I see celebrating, and I don’t want to be, like, “Stop laughing because abolition now!” But I’m like, when is there room for that to be a conversation?

The dissonance between Erin’s and Zora’s positions represents two points along a continuum of perspectives held by folks grappling with abolition. Their positions also reflect the potential impact of race, by way of when and how they came to consider the failures of the carceral state, on participants’ tensions around abolition. More specifically, as a non-Black person of color, Erin as well as other non-Black participants describe coming to movement spaces relatively recently in young adulthood. In contrast, Zora and other Black participants (Black women participants especially) describe the impact of their Black (women) ancestors and elders in shaping their perspectives on the criminal punishment system throughout their entire lives. Racialized collective knowledges and journeys to a critique of carcerality highlight some barriers to abolition feminist solidarity among folks of different racial identities (Powell and Phelps 2021).

As participants advocated for community interventions for violence, some also struggled with the reality that engaging in these types of interventions could put them in danger. Scofio, a Black man with 20 years of organizing experience who regularly engaged in violence de-escalation/interruption efforts, said:

I’ve been in a fair amount of situations where the sane person would have called the police. Um, you know, the American sane person, the person who’s been, you know, indoctrinated to hit 911. And [me] not doing that. And trying to deescalate, defuse, intervene in situations. And then, just like this tension, what if it doesn’t work this time? What if this time, your sister gets killed by her boyfriend? Like, what if this time the guy with the knife actually makes it to your neighbor? Or what if this time, like that shoot-out that was about to happen, like, it still happens? And you didn’t call the cops? What are you going to do with yourself then? So that’s always a thing in the back of my mind. . . . Part of me knows, like, that in many cases, probably most cases, it’s just going to make things worse anyways for the police to be there. But I do still have this thing, like, “Are you being irresponsible? Are you like putting your life in danger in ways that you probably shouldn’t?” . . . I want to live so, like, that’s definitely a tension.

Scofio’s awareness of the danger that he and those who he is trying to shield face causes an internal tension around his decision to refrain from calling the police. Although he strongly feels that the police will likely cause more harm than good, Scofio questions whether he is making the best decision when pushing back against our collective socialization to call in law enforcement when violence is possible or imminent. Nonetheless, Scofio and others who articulated nuanced tensions in their anticarceral commitments and practices did not allow these questions to stop their abolition feminist praxis. All of these tensions reflect an abolition feminist approach by “embracing this ambiguous terrain located in the space between necessary responses to immediate needs and collective and radical demands for structural and ultimately revolutionary change” (Davis et al. 2022, 5).

Conclusion

As communities across the country are grappling with the consequences of criminal punishment and the real threat of interpersonal and community violence, abolition feminist ecosystems provide a critical starting point for how we might end gendered violence without expanding the carceral state. Our findings, based on 131 interviews with antiviolence actors, including survivors, community activists, and sexual assault victim advocates within the community and state agencies, show that criminal punishment intervention often exacerbated violence through unresponsiveness and apathy, particularly for formerly incarcerated survivors. Both survivors and those tasked with advocating for them (re)imagined safety through localized transformative approaches that challenged the neoliberal individualization of harm and violence.

Although it can be tempting to attempt to find ways to scale these approaches and/or to situate them within institutionalized resources and structures, an abolition feminist approach reminds us that “predicated on sameness and eradicating difference, scaling up can foreclose transformation” (Davis et al. 2022, 129) and that while state and private funding can enable important work, it is critical to consider the constraints and restrictions on radical efforts to disrupt power that often come with these funding sources (INCITE! 2017). Within the abolition feminist framework, the focus on localized, grassroots efforts aimed at building alternatives to carcerality exists as one dimension of a multipronged revolutionary struggle to dismantle oppressive structures wherever they exist through a robust analysis of what bell hooks (2004) calls the “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” existing in the United States and globally. The community building commitments and strategies of meeting immediate and long-term needs described by participants provide empirical evidence of the worldmaking potential of abolition feminism to subvert racial capitalist constraints that attempt to make us believe that individualism and stark inequality are necessary for society to function.

Nevertheless, within these commitments to transformation, participants continued to grapple with the everyday implications for what abolition might entail in their professional and personal lives. Importantly, the antiviolence field is not a monolith. For many antiviolence advocates, criminal punishment intervention remains a desired form of protection despite the recognition that these interventions do little to change the conditions that produce harm. Yet, our findings echo recent national survey data that show survivor preference for rehabilitation, mental health and drug treatment programs, and community service over punitive responses (ASJ 2022). For the most part, our findings define safety beyond the confines of the criminal punishment system, offering support for the argument to redirect resources to alternatives that are conceived and led by the community. Here, our findings reinforce the abolition feminist understanding that relying on state conceptualizations of safety “allows the state to determine the nature of the problem, to decide on ‘reasonable’ solutions, and to categorize people as either deserving to be free from injury or not” (Davis et al. 2022, 111).

Centering people who are directly impacted calls us to directly confront the lived experiences of gendered violence. Indeed, one of the ongoing critiques of anticarceral feminism is the perception that it remains divorced from the community’s lived experiences of violence. Reformist approaches situate gendered violence as a criminal punishment concern and instead invest in reforming responses to the “non-non-nons,” or the nonviolent offenses, nonsex offenses, and nonserious offenses (Gottschalk 2016). Yet, attention to these “low-level” crimes will do little to reduce the population under carceral control significantly (Goodmark 2018; Gottschalk 2016) or, more important, to cultivate prevention strategies for these or more serious offenses. Rather than pit these forms of violence against one another, abolition feminism recognizes both the ongoing needs of victims/survivors of sexual assault and IPV in households and communities for support and protection and the ongoing gendered harms from carceral control touted as protection.

Carceral feminism has relied on radical grassroots feminist organizing to support already-existing systems of punishment cloaked in claims of justice and protection. However, by ignoring the reality that these responses to gendered violence result in the criminalization and harm of Black and Brown, LGBTQIA+, disabled, and low-income communities, carceral feminism inculcates injustice. The purported protection of some groups cannot take moral precedence over the safety and well-being of the most vulnerable and oppressed communities. To combat this injustice, abolition feminism is an indivisible worldmaking praxis grounded in the principled commitment to ensuring that all people have what they need to thrive.

Furthermore, abolition feminism does not avoid contradictions or claim to end all harm or interpersonal violence (Davis et al. 2022). The framework instead centers accountability and safety in the very communities of people harmed by carcerality. Abolition feminism provides an ecosystem that supports survivors and facilitates accountability for harm-doers while building communities and working to dismantle the carceral state. As a theoretical framework and methodological practice that envisions new worlds, abolition feminism is well suited for examinations of the criminal punishment system, but it is also valuable for examinations of power, oppression, justice, and carcerality beyond the walls of formal institutions of incarceration, including, for instance, in healthcare, in public policy, or even within our scholarly disciplines.

Moving forward, we are motivated by the movement chant “We keep us safe,” and encourage feminist scholars to continue to engage, explore, and examine on-the-ground, noncarceral models of safety, justice, and accountability. In naming a wide range of efforts that they were building, and that they dreamed would be built if safety was understood through an abolition feminist framework, participants provided concrete evidence to counter perceptions that abolition traffics in idealistic beliefs without any practical recommendations (Davis et al. 2022). Communities across the country and globally are building community safety through projects, such as Mimi Kim’s “Creative Interventions” (https://www.creative-interventions.org/) in the United States aimed at returning power to those most impacted by violence or Flat Out’s (https://www.flatout.org.au/) work to illuminate the harm of carceral responses to domestic violence in Australia. Through community-engaged research, relationship-building with those most impacted by interpersonal and state violence, and collaboration with those working on the ground to respond to harm and violence, feminist scholars might collectively assess how and to what extent these modes of justice serve survivors while also actively working to reduce the violence of carcerality. As Davis and colleagues (2022, 16) remind us, “The productive tension of holding onto a radical, real, and deep vision while engaging in the messy daily practice is the feminist praxis: the work of everyday people to try, to build, to make. And this requires collectivity. Always.”

Footnotes

Authors’ note:

We thank Shannon Malone Gonzalez, Matthew Clair, and Michelle Phelps for thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

ORCID iD

Brittany Pearl Battle

1.

We use “criminal punishment system” and “criminal legal system” rather than “criminal justice system,” given the stark injustice in the system and its orientation toward punishment as a symbol of justice, and to honor the language and commitments of community members, activists, advocates, and scholars working to eliminate carceral harms.

2.

We use “gender-based violence” and “gendered violence” interchangeably to represent the continuum of sexual, physical, and emotional harms, including, for example, sexual assault and intimate partner violence (IPV).

3.

We define “carcerality” as the punitive logics embedded across institutional policies and practices under the “prison nation” ().

4.

The institutional review board at one study’s institution would not authorize the sharing of the full transcripts given the original study design.

5.

Available upon request.

Brittany Pearl Battle is an assistant professor in the Sociology Department and affiliate faculty in the African American Studies Program at Wake Forest University. She is also the co-founder of Triad Abolition Project, a grassroots organization based in Winston-Salem, NC, working to dismantle the carceral state. Her research agenda includes social and family policy, courts, social justice, and carceral logics.

Amber Joy Powell is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology & Criminology at the University of Iowa. Amber’s research examines the intersections of gendered racialized violence, law, and the carceral state. Her most recent work explores how juvenile detention centers enable and respond to the sexual victimization of incarcerated youth. She is conducting ongoing research on prison rape reform and the fight for sexual safety among legal practitioners and anti-prison rape activists.

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