Okay Margot Robbie reminded me. I have a friend who’s obsessed with Harley Quinn and the joker and thinks they’re relationship goals and Um do I drop her off at therapy or
The reality is that the police are often more likely to hurt women than to help us. Let’s face the grim facts
The failure and indifference of police is not a matter of a few bad apples or mismanaged departments. The failure is nationwide. Conservative estimates indicate that American police departments have 200,000 untested rape kits in their possession, with DNA samples that could be used to identify rapists and prevent future assaults collecting dust, often because police have not bothered to send them to be tested.
Police departments systemically fail to make arrests in sexual assault cases, and their failures are mirrored throughout the justice system. According to Rainn, only 4.6% of sexual assaults ever lead to an arrest, and only 0.9% are ever referred by police to prosecutors. Conviction rates are also lower than for other violent crimes, in part because of police mishandling of sexual assault cases.
Then there’s this troubling fact: the police themselves are often perpetrators of gender violence. And they frequently use the privileges and protections of their job to hurt women with impunity.
Police households have dramatically higher rates of domestic violence than other homes, with approximately 40% of officers having intimate partner violence in their households, compared with roughly 10% of the general population. Worse, women beaten by cop partners often have no one to call: the very people they are told to seek help from are the friends and colleagues of their abusive husbands and boyfriends. And if their abuser is a cop, he has a gun, knows the locations of women’s shelters, and knows how to shift the blame to his victim if she seeks help.
The police also have a tendency to commit sexual violence on the job, abusing their authority to prey on women in their custody. There are famous cases like Daniel Holtzclaw, the Oklahoma City officer who raped and assaulted black women, secure in the belief that the system would protect him and punish his victims if they attempted to seek justice. And then there were Eddie Martins and Richard Hall, the two NYPD officers who got no jail time after they allegedly raped a teenager they had arrested in Brooklyn. Martins and Hall claimed that the sexual encounter was consensual – a claim that strains the definition of consent, since the girl in question was in their custody. Until recently, it was legal for police officers in many US jurisdictions to claim that sex with people under arrest was consensual.
Those are just the cases we know about. Unlike police brutality of the kind that killed men like Eric Garner and George Floyd, police sexual brutality often occurs behind closed doors and inside locked paddywagons, away from the reach of camera phones. It does not go viral, but that does not mean that it does not happen. According to Andrea J Ritchie, the author of the book Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color, sexual violence is the second most commonly reported kind of police misconduct. But reports of police sexual abuse are obscured by secretive police disciplinary and oversight bodies. This is in part because police unions have lobbied to ensure that sexual violence and sexual harassment complaints against police are kept under wraps. The targets of police sexual brutality? Overwhelmingly black women.
Within the feminist community, calls for police abolition sometimes face opposition from those who are understandably frustrated by the historically lenient enforcement of sexual violence crimes. Why should we abolish the police, these feminists ask, when they are already doing too little to protect women? Shouldn’t they do more? But it is precisely because the police are such terrible sources for justice in sexual assault cases, and because they are often so much more likely to commit sexual assault than to punish it, that feminists must become police abolitionists. The police have proven that they are no allies of women’s rights. A large, unaccountable group of primarily men, empowered to commit violence to maintain existing hierarchies of power, is not going to end the scourge of sexual violence against women. As feminists, we must recognize that the police are more likely to hurt women than to help us.
This is a great example of the tendency for discussions of police abolition to hand-wave away questions about violence against women, sexualized violence, domestic violence, rape, etc. Like this article is certainly correct–the system is fucked up beyond recall, police are perpetrators of heinous sexualized crime, all of that. But this article is LITERALLY titled “Here’s my answer to that question” and does not offer any ideas or suggestions whatsoever. Like it’s one thing to make it clear that this is a very difficult question, and perhaps there is no single answer, but like… either come up with SOMETHING or give up the pretense that you have a workable concept
I mean, the only reason I don’t think it’s hypocritical for “Native News” to block people here is that despite their name, they’re just some rando posting twitter screenshots and links on tumblr, like anyone else. You can’t just like, declare yourself a news service because you (re)post stuff about current events on your blog. I’m just as much of a news service as they are, should I rebrand so people start reblogging me uncritically?Â
ok hang on, post cancelled. Sure I said it wasn’t hypocritical for them to block people because they clearly are not a news outlet, but now I’ve noticed that they’ve blocked me. Unbelievable.Â
@nativenews I hereby renounce the statement above. Also, I have decided to declare myself a free, not-for-profit grassroots news service, just like you. I look forward to you unblocking me as soon as possible. Thank you.Â
to be frank, the instagram model look is really just commodified body parts from various women of color (lips and hip/ass from black women, brows/lashes/general face/skin tone from MENA and central asian women, hair from asian women, etc) all mashed together. i have never understood and never will understand the argument that it’s straight up black features. and frankly the caveat is always “look black but ethnically ambiguous” or look black and make blackness look ambiguous like. i dont know how to tell you this but there is no such thing as “ethically ambiguous” black features. especially not in this country. no one is contouring their nose to make it wider or doing their hair to make it 4c. the ig look definitely rips off african thighs and hips, but the look actually is to look like a bratz doll because nobody has that natural body shape. black women are not all shaped like a perfect hourglass. there are several ethnicities of women worldwide that white people have fetishized and eroticized. shocking i know
You could copy and paste a whole MRA screed, add “white” to every instance of “woman” or “women” and get hundreds if not thousands of alleged progressives and leftists on here to sign off on it.
believe it or not but nancy pelosi does things besides make up stupid nicknames for trump and when democrats are ineffective in congress it’s because of these people called republicans who block every attempt they make at passing meaningful legislation. and even so, the success of joe biden has demonstrated that, yeah, actually during a pandemic with a president who actively makes things worse every single day, people do want to hear anti-trump rhetoric even when it’s packaged and delivered by an older woman who doesn’t know how to be “cool”
After seeing people just, idk 2 days ago, side with an abuser on twitter and harass and mock the abused woman because she (according to her ex) said some problematic things years ago, I don’t trust average people (or “the community” I keep hearing about) to hold abusers accountable lol
Obviously there is an outrageous and concerning probability for black people to be mistreated by authority figures and, some amount less likely (statistically speaking), but still outrageous and concerning, to be mistreated by them violently. However, as it stands currently, the systems that are in place for people to rely on in times of need, imperfect as they may be, are going to be utilized by those people, and if you physically injure your girlfriend (as one example) during a domestic dispute, it is not her onus to consider the sociopolitical consequences for you when that help arrives.
i wish i could stop thinking about that horrible man on twitter but you know it is really not surprising at all how he invoked her bisexuality and mocked her same sex attraction, all while portraying her as some sort of cruel biphobe for the rather innocuous comment of “i’m not sure if i could date someone who’s bi,” which also is kind of textbook closeted, self-hate language for a bisexual woman who spent years playing straight....and it absolutely gives you an insight into the kind of misogyny specifically leveled at bisexual women by abusive men who view themselves (and other men) as the only ones allowed humanity.
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