Violence against women and girls has reached epidemic levels and police are treating it as a threat on the same scale as terrorism, Britain’s police chiefs said Tuesday.
More than 1 million violent crimes against women and girls were recorded by U.K. police in 2022 to 2023, accounting for one-fifth of all recorded crime, a new report commissioned by the National Police Chiefs’ Council and the College of Policing said.
One in every six murders was related to domestic abuse in the same period. At least one in every 12 women each year will be a victim of crimes including sexual offenses, rape, stalking, harassment or online sexual abuse, the report estimated, with the exact number thought to be much higher because of crimes that go unreported.
That’s absolutely what I want. Community self defence is a far better alternative to the police. The police are a relatively modern invention - historically, people would just look after their own communities without any special powers or privileges. That is the system we should return to, more or less.
If you remove poverty from the equation, most crime would drop. Take special powers away from the police and just watch how domestic violence suddenly is much less of an issue.
Let me get this straight. You want to put the power back into the hands of men to freely beat their wives, and the only deterant is OTHER men, who can also freely beat their wives might stop them???
You realize that right now the UK is already dealing with this problem of violence against women, and the police are having trouble keeping up over there.
And now you want to remove the ONLY deterant for that type of behavior?
If you’re genuinely interested in discussing it, I’d like you to just have a serious think about what you wrote here, and see if you can come up with a satisfactory explanation for why you think that this description, which you claim is what I want, does not also describe the system that is currently in place.
Because in the current system, women are free to call the police, get care and housing to escape domestic abuse, and they arrest the man. In the UK, I’m hearing the amount of women calling is overwhelming the system, and more men beat their wives than police can arrest…but that just means that they ARE arresting them as quickly as they can. They just have an amount of liquid thats more than their cup can hold.
In your scenario, you’re saying take the cup away, and everyone’s on their own with there the liquid falls. Which in my estimation will only increase the amount of domestic abuse without ANY precautions in place.
Right now, we have a system that can’t keep up with demand. In your system, we IGNORE the demand.
So… what you’re telling me is, under the current system, men can freely beat their wives, and the only deterrent is the police (OTHER men), who can also freely beat their wives, and only might stop them?
I’m not sure if you’re aware of it, but the police are infamously more likely to be domestic abusers than average. They cover up for eachother, making it harder for abused women to get away from their abusers.
Having an imbalance of power is what creates the conditions necessary for this kind of violence. I am proposing that we remove the imbalance of power.
You should also be aware that punitive measures are notoriously ineffective for preventing crime. They have no impact on crime rates, especially for things like violent crime, which are kicked off by heightened emotional states. People don’t think rationally in those situations, they don’t consider the potential punishment for the crime they’re committing.
The underlying cause of the problem has to be fixed - domestic violence is strongly correlated with financial insecurity, poverty, low level of education, high unemployment rates, low levels of community interaction and economic stress. Anarchism would effectively resolve all of those problems, meaning domestic violence rates would be significantly reduced. But even then, I’m not saying that there shouldn’t be someone that you can call for help if you’re in an abusive situation, I mentioned before having a community self-defence team of some kind - the only difference is that those people would have no special powers or protection than average people.
At the moment, the rich and powerful have control over violence, and they vest that power in the police and military, and enforce that monopoly. I don’t see why you think that’s a good thing. The police do not exist to protect working people from violence, they exist to protect the ruling class from the working class. Anything else they do beyond that role is PR.
We can do better just protecting eachother from violence. Society needs to change to be less individual and more collective, we need to go back to helping each other and being friendly with your community.