See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Violence

by Jess Hill

Argentina introduced its first police station for women in 1985, and today in Buenos Aires alone there are 128 comisaría de la mujer y la familia (police stations for women and children), staffed by around 2300 police. They have all the powers of regular police – they conduct investigations, make arrests – but that’s where the comparison ends. Their structure is completely different – they report to the police minister via their own Commissioner for Women’s Police, not the head of the common police – and their mission is different too. Their primary purpose is not to enforce the law; it’s to protect the victims. ‘The police there are completely guided by what the woman wants to do,’ says Carrington, who spent three months with the women’s police in Argentina. ‘They will listen to her story, and investigate and prosecute – if the woman chooses to do that. Whatever they do, it’s always at the woman’s instigation, because they know that intervening is not always the solution. They prefer to empower and prevent. They never turn a woman away, and they never take their power away from her, which is what abusers do.’ Sometimes they will help a woman apply for a protection order. Other times, she may want them to kick her abuser out of her house. Or she might just want them to talk to him. ‘It’s not driven by punitiveness,’ says Carrington. ‘It’s driven by what works.’ No matter is too trivial – they are there to listen and protect, not to decide whether a law has been broken.