Abby’s Reviews > Abolition. Feminism. Now. > Status Update
Abby
is 95% done
“[even if SOME deterrence occurs], as an overall strategy for ending violence, criminalisation has not worked…impact of mandatory arrests laws for domestic violence have led to decreases in the number of battered women who kill their partners in self-defence, but they have not led to a decrease in the number of batterers who kill their partners. Thus, the law protects batterers more than it protects survivors.”
— Feb 08, 2026 11:23AM
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Abby’s Previous Updates
Abby
is 70% done
“research illustrating that the majority of calls to police are not about “crime” but about a need to support or services.”
Things police do that are unrelated “crime” could be done by other bodies e.g. social workers, bin collectors, counsellors etc. This is the “core of a practical, stepwise process of police abolition: begin to give nonviolent agencies…the tasks currently allocated to [police]”.
— Feb 08, 2026 09:19AM
Things police do that are unrelated “crime” could be done by other bodies e.g. social workers, bin collectors, counsellors etc. This is the “core of a practical, stepwise process of police abolition: begin to give nonviolent agencies…the tasks currently allocated to [police]”.
Abby
is 70% done
“The Coins, Cops, and Communities Toolkit produced by this campaign made visible the deep asymmetries and ethical dimensions of a city budget. For example, Chicago’s annual budget for substance abuse ($2,581,272) amounts to what Chicago spends on half a day of policing.”
— Feb 08, 2026 09:12AM
Abby
is 70% done
“While there are undoubtedly individual police officers who are racist and transphobic, systems and institutions empower, educate, reproduce, validate, and arm these individual actors. Yet if the criminal legal system is barely equipped to indict its own employees, it is completely unable to critically examine and indict its own structure.”
— Feb 08, 2026 07:50AM
Abby
is 70% done
“In the rare cases where state violence is made visible, accountability is thinly individuated: the problem is a discrete incident, a specific officer.”
— Feb 08, 2026 07:45AM
Abby
is 50% done
“Turning to punishment agencies and tactics of social control will not protect women and others harmed by gender violence. Survivors of violence would be much more likely to benefit if [the money was spent on] free and subsidised services like safe permanent housing, education, accessible health and mental health care, high-quality childcare, and job training and employment placement……”
— Feb 08, 2026 06:16AM
Abby
is 50% done
“Police are trained to use force rather than to prevent or address root causes of violence, which is perhaps why police officers are not likely to engage in violent behaviour with their partners than other groups.”
— Feb 08, 2026 02:39AM
Abby
is 50% done
“Involvement in the criminal legal system does not deter intimate partner violence, does not lower rates of intimate partner violence, and it does not make violence less severe.”
— Feb 08, 2026 02:38AM
Abby
is 50% done
“Remaining at the level of the individual will compel endless repetition of legal and other proceedings in efforts implicitly predicated on the impossibility of purging our societies of these harms.”
— Feb 08, 2026 02:26AM
Abby
is 50% done
“As attention [around gender violence] is most often focused on individual perpetrators, as if they themselves are the beginning and end of these violences, the structural and institutional underpinnings of sexual assault and other forms of gender violence are neglected.”
— Feb 08, 2026 02:26AM
