Women’s shelters? We should abolish them! For the same reason U.S. neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky once suggested we should abolish the criminal justice system: On the greater scheme of things, they do not make sense. Not if our goal is to end violence against women. As opposed to accepting women becoming victims, then offering them a space for a brief respite, and possibly, recuperation. Before we let them become victims again. And, likely, blame them for ‘not having learned’.
Almost one in three women are subjected to physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence, violence by a non-partner, or both at least once in their life time (UN Women, 2025). UN Women notes that progress in reducing intimate partner violence has been slow. Over the last two decades they report only a 0.2 per cent annual decline. Other reports conclude that domestic violence cases have increased by 25 to 33 percent globally over the past five years. Some argue that this increase isn’t ‘real’, that it may even be a ‘positive’ sign reflecting a heightened awareness that leads to more women reporting these crimes. But UN Women (2025) notes that less than 40% of women who experience some form of violence from men do speak about their victimisation to anyone at all. Less than ten percent of victims report to the police (UN Women, 2025).
Significant also: The (deliberately?) neutral-sounding “intimate partner violence” remains a gendered crime. It is predominantly committed by men against women. The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence notes that 1 in 4 women experience various forms of intimate partner violence compared to 1 in 9 men. In 2022, police reports in the UK registered that the victim was female in 73.5% of domestic abuse related cases (Boserup, McKenney, Elkbuli, 2020; ONS, 2022).
Shelters can and often do save women’s and children’s lives. What they cannot do, is prevent violence against women, or even just minimise it. And while they arguably were not invented for this purpose, I fear they even work to the contrary, inviting further victimisation. Not least, because they are the opposite of what women need to live a life free of violence from the men they love and others: autonomy.
Autonomy is, unsurprisingly, the single most important thing for a woman to break free from a violent partner (Nolet & Morselli, 2021). And yet, autonomy remains absent from many women’s lives. This is even more true for women who have experienced and fled abuse. After escaping to a shelter, to family or friends, victims often experience the opposite, found late Canadian criminologist Carlo Morselli. The rigid rules shelters apply to try and keep women safe, the scrutiny and the anxious control family members may exert over them to keep them from returning to their abuser often resemble the conditions the women have just fled. Coming at a time where the women should feel relieved and free, they may be felt even more poignantly (Nolet & Morselli, 2021). Administrative requirements and suspicion may be understandable. It’s just the opposite of what women need, often turning into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Moreover, I argue, shelters are an expression and have become the epitome of our understanding of “real” women and how they should behave. Particularly, when they are exposed to violence: They shall retreat. “Real men advance, real women retreat,” writes Mary Anne Franks, law professor at George Washington University (Franks, 2013). To this gender image we cling, more or less subtly. On various societal levels.
Workplace studies show: Women with leadership aspirations and who show other “typically male” characteristics like self-confidence and assertiveness are often perceived as “strident”, “aggressive” or “overbearing”. In their work assessments, women are ten times as likely as men to be recommended to “tune it down” (McKinsey Report, 2023).
Our view of gender shapes our view of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’
Our perception of the genders shapes our understanding of violence. Of perpetrators and victims. It determines which measures and responses to intimate partner violence we deem “reasonable” and which measures we consider “right” and “just” (Grembi, Rosso & Barili, 2023; Miller, 2005). “Why didn’t you leave?” is still what we ask abused women. And if they leave and the perpetrator trails them and tracks them down, as they frequently do, we find it “reasonable” for them to flee hundreds of miles into the next women’s shelter and the one after that.
Our gender images shape our general view of law and order (Barker, Kirk & Sah, 2018). The US Sentencing Project registers a significant increase in prison sentences for women globally. In the UK alone, the number of female prisoners has risen by 60 percent in recent years. This compares to a 20% increase in incarcerated men. That doesn’t mean that women have become more violent. The harsher, longer sentences for them are the result of bias, stigmatization and stereotypical ideas of “proper women”, concludes The Sentencing Project’s report (The Sentencing Project, 2021).
Studies from the U.S. and the UK find that, since the introduction of mandatory arrests at IPV call-outs, women who retaliate against their abuser with force are far more likely to get arrested than their male partners. One UK study finds their arrest to be three times as likely, regardless of the fact that many of the women had been demonstrably subjected to more severe violence than they were accused of and had been subjected to it over a much longer period of time (Hirschel et. al, 2007; PRT, 2017; Hester, 2012). What we don’t know is how police officers in DA call-outs decide who is the primary perpetrator. And who is victim.
Scholars suggested that police officers use ‘common sense’, based on traditional views about men, women, and men’s violence against women. Earlier ethnographic studies concluded that officers commonly label call-outs to IPV incidents ‘rubbish’ (Stanko, 1995). This view has improved with new legislation demanding DA to be recognised as just as severe a crime as i.e. terrorism (Barlow & Walklate, 2022). And yet, policing responses remain limited. Recent studies in the UK and Canada found that police officers continue to have difficulties establishing the presence of DA. Moreover, they show that most police officer’s understanding of DA remains conventional with officers seeing incidents as a family dispute, for example. At best, they were found to have a mixed conventional/progressive perception. While they may be able and willing to recognise the abuse as an ongoing pattern, they may find ways to excuse it. Or they may generally feel that it isn’t a woman’s place to hit back (Gill et. al, 2021; Perez Trujillo and Ross, 2008; Gill and Fitch, 2016).
Dangerous ‘common sense’
Unfortunately, what we perceive to be or declare as “common sense” cannot be trusted. Neither should we trust our morality. Social psychologists and neuroscientists have long been able to demonstrate how we all think and act within fractions of a second. Rather, it sems that “something” thinks and acts for us (Sapolsky, 2017; Haidt, 2012; Greene & Haidt, 2002; Greene, 2014). Our intuition, our gut feeling. Whatever we call it, we have little if any control over it. What we think of as “reason” represents likely no more than our efforts to make our split-second decisions look “right” in retrospect. To ourselves and to others. Moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt compares the process to government declarations: “The president (our gut feeling) makes his decisions – then he commissions his press secretary (our reason) to justify them.” The press secretary usually has no idea what the true motivation behind the decision is. Instead, he or she is free to concoct an explanation. The only condition is that it must sound as credible as possible (Haidt, 2012; Sapolsky, 2017).
What our inner press secretary deems and will be able to sell as credible depends on the opinion of the majority. Of our collective “reality”. This also applies in court. Women who are being tried for assaulting their partner regularly find that their own experiences of violence have little significance for their defense. Or they are recognised and used in a negative way. Defense attorneys often encourage their clients to keep silent about the abuse. It could backfire. Cast doubt on their their credibility: How, if they were able to fight back, could they possibly claim victim status (Centre for Women’s Justice, 2023; Franks, 2013; Goodmark, 2008)?
Many of us seem to struggle with this idea, the general compatibility of victimhood and defensiveness. Norwegian criminologist Nils Christie (1986) described the “ideal victim” of our imagination as follows: an old lady who has spent all day caring for her sick sister and is robbed on her way home by a drug-addled criminal who is unknown to her. She is vulnerable, was doing or came from an honourable job at the time of the attack, and, most importantly, the perpetrator is a stranger. This stereotype, along with our persistent models, harms women. The British Prison Reform Trust (PRT) writes in its report on imprisoned women: “Many who are sentenced to prison have previously been victims of far more serious offences than those of which they are accused.” Over half of women imprisoned in the UK (57% ) are victims of intimate partner violence. The Prison Reform Trust estimates the real numbers to be much higher, since most of the abuse and violence directed against women remains undetected. Or its severity is unrecognised (PRT, 2017).
Over half of officers (52.3%) in the above-mentioned studies believed callouts to DA were really just for a verbal family argument, and 65.9% officers considered repeated calls to the same address and/or the same couple as majorly problematic (Gill et. al, 2021; Perez Trujillo and Ross, 2008; Gill and Fitch, 2016). The late Evan Stark, who spent decades researching domestic abuse in the US and UK and coined the term ‘coercive control’, described how officers and social workers often come to see these repeated callouts as a “nuisance”. Consequently, they start to withdraw their engagement and support when it is most needed: at a time when abusive incidents are increasing and/or the violence is becoming more severe. Repeated calls must be seen as a signifier, advised Stark (Stark, 2008). But recent UK studies find that officers’ understanding of domestic violence continues to be at odds with the reality of coercive control (Barlow, 2023). The term describes a form of abuse designed to subjugate and control the victim on various levels, i.e. taking control of their finances, controlling their social contacts, their work engagements, chipping and tearing away at the woman’s autonomy (Barlow & Walklate, 2022). While the effects can be severe, coercive control doesn’t necessarily result in visible bruises. At talks, Stark frequently referred to a coercive and controlling husband who, “in 30 years of marriage only ever had to hit his wife ONCE, right at the beginning of their relationship.” For the remaining 30 years, she felt the Damocles’ sword of ‘Or else!’ hanging over head. It was enough to keep her in check.
Who gets to decide what is ‘reasonable’ resistance?
To successfully claim self-defence in court, a defendant’s actions must have been “reasonable”, and the force they used must have been “appropriate.” But how can women claim “reasonableness” and “appropriateness” when fighting back against a force that is palpable and life-threatening to many women, but remains invisible, even inconceivable to outsiders? Who decides what is “reasonable” and “appropriate”? On what grounds, against which measures? In everyday life, and in law, into which our everyday life experiences ultimately translate. The law assesses “reasonableness” through an inherently conservative and predominantly male lens, say feminist legal scholars (Barlow, 2023; Barlow & Walklate, 2022; Bettinson & Wake, 2024).
Our ideas of “right” and “wrong” depend on and are linked to class. They depend on and are linked to race. They are dictated by gender. These are some of the parameters that shape our view and understanding of the world. They shape our morality, our reality. In law, our understanding of what we should find acceptable and what must be punished is largely based on the life experiences and understanding of men. Predominantly of white men with high status. For centuries, this group have been the ‘law makers’ in every sense. Their resulting world views have filtered into policies and legislation, and “right” and “wrong” are restated through these policies and legislation (Haidt, 2012; Bettinson & Wake, 2024, Westmarland, 2002). “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread”, wrote French poet Anatole France, tongue in cheek, more than a century ago. Equality is something different.
Some legal scholars hoped that introducing a „reasonable woman“ lens into self-defence laws could bring more fairness to criminal justice responses. But the move has backfired, serving to reaffirm gender biases and myths. Using the “reasonable women” lens, the reasonableness and appropriateness of women’s retaliation is now measured against how the majority of abused women overtly react: with enduring, or retreating to a women’s shelters, or elsewhere – rendering the women who resist an intimate abuser with force „unreasonable“ and their violence “inappropriate” (Bettinson, 2022; Bettinson & Wake, 2024; Franks, 2013). After all, for women to retreat is what we have come to expect. It is what, in accordance with our inner press secretaries, we have made “reality”. What makes an intimate partner’s ‘Or else!’ so effective is that women find this threat backed and their lives controlled on every societal level, suggested Evan Stark (Stark, 2008).
In Germany, the Federal Court of Justice recently moved to severely restrict the right to self-defence against an intimate partner. German law now obliges partners to show mutual solidarity, protection and consideration. The Court ruled that this duty remains with a partner, even if the other temporarily fails their own obligation. In the case of minor physical injuries, the attacked partner should show restraint. That these obligations and the restrictions associated with them come primarily at the expense of women becomes clear from the statistics. “An untenable legal position,” writes legal scholar Jonas Koschmieder (Legal Tribune Online, 2024). It fits seamlessly into our understanding of “real men” and “real women” and how they ought to conduct themselves.
Justice may declare itself blind. But it certainly has a gender. It belongs to a class, and a race. “That’s the patriarchy!”, we sigh as an explanation. But the phrase explains nothing. It only confirms what is. And thus serves to restate power and control. “The subject to be explained – the development of male supremacy – is effectively presumed. Social power is not explained, it is only restated.” writes legal scholar Catherine MacKinnon (MacKinnon, 1989).
The hegemony of violence
The problem with women’s violence is not a lack of recognition. Scholars and practitioners widely acknowledge that women are capable and willing to use force in their intimate heterosexual relationships (Dasgupta, 2002; Leisring & Grigorian, 2016; Boxall, Dowling & Morgan, 2022,; Miller & Meloy, 2006). The problem is the moral value and judgement we have attached to men’s and women’s violence respectively. “There has been heated debate about whose violence should be the primary focus of public discussion and which groups of people are the principal perpetrators of violence”, writes Finish social-psychologist Suta Venäläinen. “The significance of gender has been at the core of much of the debate.” In online posts and discussions, it is fiercely claimed that women’s violence is just as prevalent as men’s, but that it has long been and is continued to be overlooked. “If in these cases the judicial system and the police were more just in their treatment of men and women, the numbers of violence- against-women cases would get significantly smaller”, one poster commented. Casting suspicion on statistics has proven an effective tool for manifesting the status quo (Venäläinen, 2017).
In the past few years, the argument that our societies are no longer male-dominated and that women’s violence has become the more pressing problem has gone viral. It has infiltrated main stream media and public and professionals’ discussion (Corbally, 2015; Venäläinen, 2017). In my own experience and that of colleagues who regularly teach and present on gender-based violence, every article, every presentation and lecture on men’s violence against women must now include an acknowledgment “that men can be victims as well”. While the argument that “women are just as violent as men” is commonly framed as an acknowledgement of “true gender equality”, it actually serves the opposite, writes Venäläinen (2017). It reproduces hierarchies by casting violence as solely the right of white men. In her evaluation of online comments on violence committed by migrant men, on the one hand, and by women, on the other, she found that both are overplayed and seen as morally reprehensible. Meanwhile violence committed by white men, especially in intimate relationship, is denied or declared virtuous, a necessity to preserve morality and social order (Venäläinen, 2017).
Scholars register that women use violence for different reasons than men. Self-defense, a lack of emotional self-control, provocation from a partner and the need to appear tough are the reasons women most often cite (Dasgupta, 2002; Leisring & Gregorian, 2016; Miller & Meloy, 2006; Swan & Snow, 2002). “Violence gives me a feeling of strength and self-confidence,” said one woman in a study conducted by Finnish social psychologist Suta Venäläinen (2017). She had wanted to secure the respect and value that she felt, society otherwise denied her. And another: “I had to distance myself from my victim self!” From the vulnerable, pitiful creature that has become our standard perception of – not only – abused women. Just try and type “domestic violence” into the Google image search: You will be shown endless variations of a shadow man hovering, fist clenched, above a cowering woman. Or the ubiquitous puppet woman, mindlessly dangling on the strings of her invisible puppeteer. These are the go-to illustrations of intimate partner violence, in the media and for activists alike. To what effect?
The making of the ‘vulnerable woman’
“People are more readily perceived as inferior by nature when they are already seen as oppressed”, write American sociologist Karen Fields and historian Barbara Fields. They explain how we attach a sense of inevitability to our social routines – until we perceive our feelings and doings as ‘natural’ (Fields & Fields, 2022). It is true that, through their oppression, women have been rendered vulnerable (Ardshead, 2024). For many ‘battered women’, shelter places are the only rescue. It’s the only place where they can find protection. The problem is, we have accepted this man-made reality as ‘natural’. A ‘truth’ we consistently confirm. Stressing how oppressed women are, how vulnerable, and how badly they need protection might secure them an opportunity for respite, here and there – whilst contributing to the conviction that they are inferior by nature. Attempts to distance themselves from this image routinely backfire for women, particularly when they seek to re-establish their strength and claim respect through forceful resistance. “Women do not have the same right to inviolability as men,” concludes Venäläinen (2017). “They shouldn’t even desire it.” (Bettinson, 2022; Venäläinen, 2017; Franks, 2013).
Battered women who have killed their partners can – at best – invoke “Battered Women’s Syndrome” or “slow burn” as a partial self-defence. Both are an acknowledgement of temporary insanity due to long years of abuse (Bettinson, 2022; Centre for Women’s Justice, 2023; Franks, 2013; Goodmark, 2008). Is this a concession from the judiciary? Or just another way to manifest the status quo? How does it impact our all view of women when they have to declare themselves crazy to hope for judges and juries to condone their willingness to defend themselves?
There are parallels in the history of racism. In 1851, Samuel Cartwright, a medical doctor practising in Louisiana and Mississippi, claimed he had found a mental condition that was particular to black slaves. He coined it “drapetomania” and described it as an inherent urge “causing negroes to run away.” (Saini, 2019). These parallels are not accidental. They are the reflection of oppressive designs. Through all times and the world over, ‘reason’ has been harnessed and turned into the tool of the powerful to defend and preserve the hegemonic Status Quo and keep the marginalised masses in check: Women, indigenous people, people of colour, immigrants, and the poor. The practice forecloses the need to define and impress upon us what is ‘unreasonable’. What’s ‘dangerous’. A threat to the social order presented to us as unquestionable.
Is violence moral or immoral? That depends. Not only on who is using it, for what purpose, and against whom. It also depends on who holds the power over the definition of ‘violence’. Of ‘morality’ and ‘immorality’. It depends on who holds the power over what is ‘truth’. Speaking and writing against the Indian governments’ exploitation of the poor and its legitimisation of violent oppression of the poor’s resistance, Indian author and political activist Arundhati Roy holds that by definition of the government “poverty is a crime and the poor are terrorists”. Corporate media, she suggests, holds the governments hand, pursuing and pushing a “moronic” and dishonest debate if the people’s violent resistance should be condoned. While ignoring the state’s violence that makes it necessary. What is really immoral, writes Roy, is “to lecture people [whose houses and lives are being burned down] how to defend themselves.” (Roy, 2012).
We may laugh about Cartwright’s made-to-order diagnosis today. But our current-day responses to women who speak up, push for status, or who dare to defend their mental and bodily integrity at all cost, show how little we have moved on from cartwright-ish reasoning – if we have moved on at all. To this day, what doesn’t serve us and goes against our convenient beliefs of ‘reasonable’, ‘moral’ and, consequently, ‘natural’ – people being exploited, women being subjugated by men – we readily fashion into a ‘disease’. Or simply declare ‘nuts’. For women to be ridiculed, chastised and declared “mad”, they needn’t use forceful resistance. Being angry at their oppression – and voicing that anger – is enough.
The colour and gender of ‘rightful’ resistance
American scholar Kelly Carter-Jackson reminds us that the idea of a ‘free America’ was infused with riots and violent rhetoric as markers of patriotism right from the country’s beginnings: “When our Founding Fathers fought for independence, violence was the clarion call. Phrases such as “Live free or die,” “Give me liberty or give me death,” and “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God” echoed throughout the nation, and continue today.” Not only in U.S. history, force and violence have always been accepted and liberally used to defend liberty – as long as the ones defending it were the ‘right’ colour of skin. When riots erupted after the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Tayler and Ahmed Arbrey, politicians and corporate media deemed them ‘un-American’ and degraded the protesters to “looters” and “thugs”. “The philosophy of force and violence to obtain freedom has long been employed by white people and explicitly denied to black Americans”, writes Carter-Jackson (Carter-Jackson, 2020).
It has been even more violently denied to black women lacking both markers of eligibility to a forceful resistance. In slavery times, Black women were often used to produce offspring equivalent to the production of more slaves. For this purpose, many women were being raped by white landowners and enslaved Black men and forced to bear children. The practice was common and legal (Ohio Alliance to End Sexual Violence, 2021). To this day, the legal system in the U.S reflects these racist laws, and the victim-blaming myth of the “promiscuous Black woman” stemming from them, responding less vigorously to black rape victims than to white victims (Williams, 1986). Instead, the system criminalizes the measures black women take to survive consisently feeding black women into the abuse-to-incarceration pipeline the system has created (Williams, 1986; National Black Women’s Justice Institute, 2023).
And yet, the “angry Black woman” stereotype characterizes Black women as “ill tempered, illogical, overbearing, hostile, and ignorant”. And, this is the essential bit, it insists that Black women are all of these things “without provocation” (Ashley, 2014). How better to deny you the reasonableness of your – righteously – furious reactions to the persistent violation of your humanity and integrity than by negating that any such violation exists? How better to deny you any feeling of fury itself?
What, then, do we permit the oppressed to feel? When in a German talk show a woman became irate while telling her story of how, during a callout, the police quickly sided with her abusive partner, taking her aggressed state as proof for his assertion that she was ‘the problem’, the talk show host eagerly pushed for her to ‘take a break’. The memory, he asserted, was causing her too much distress and making her ‘sad’ (‘Mal Ehrlich’, SWR, 2021). All I could see was anger. Fury. Rage. “Fuck that!”, I thought. “Deal with it, let her talk!” But ‘fear’, ‘sadness’ and ‘depression’ seem to be all the feelings we are prepared to accept as a response to violent oppression and exploitation. Too often, this appears to be just as true for the very people that should know and do better.
Working as an Outreach Support Worker Domestic Violence, I found telling that the line manager, when advising on how to correctly report on clients’ responses, only ever had one example response to offer: “Be precise, do not write ‘XY became distressed’. But ‘XY became tearful’.” I, myself exasperated with our patronising and exploitative systems, and often with the organisation’s patronising and exploitation of clients and workers itself (pressing clients to go through often lengthy court ordeals to take out restraining orders, even when their now estranged partners had not once tried to make contact and when all the women wanted was to move on; expecting support workers to handle ’15 to 18 cases’ in a 18.5 hours work week) and was repeatedly reprimanded for ‘appearing too angry’. I was angry. But I never acted it. Yet, the ‘appearance of anger’ and that I had the apparent audacity to let clients’ voice theirs, was inappropriate enough. This, again, makes me angry. It makes me question how women’s shelters and other support organisations can appropriately ‘protect’ and ‘support’ women when they remain indebted to a morality that serves the very systems that make women’s protection and support necessary in the first place – when they remain indebted to – predominantly – state funders whose interest so obviously is and never can be women’s autonomy.
A 2024 study by insurance provider Royal London Ireland estimates the annual salary of a stay-at-home parent to be €57,140. This salary is up from an estimated €54,590 in 2023 and €40,560 in 2015, when the company first undertook the same research. Analysing the typical daily tasks and responsibilities of a stay-at-home parent, the study came to the conclusion that if you wanted to employ someone (probably someone other than a female worker, but that’s just my guess) to do the job, nearly 55’000 Euros is what you would have to pay. What’s more, in an accompanying survey, almost nine in ten people underestimated the monetary value of a stay-at-home parent. Only 11% of respondents valued the work at over 50’000 Euros, while almost a third of them lowballed it between 20’000 and 30’000 Euros. Women are almost three times more likely than men to put an accurate value on the work of a stay-at-home parent – which ultimately remains ‘women’s work’. According to 2022 census data for Ireland, the most recent to date, 90% of the country’s 272,318 stay-at-home parents were women (Royal London Ireland, 2024).
Boston University Law Professor Jonathan Feingold defines slavery as ‘wealth building through the means of violence’ (RaceClass, 2023). Going by his definition, what else to call women’s unpaid stay-at-home-work (and their consistently underpaid care and hospitality work outside the home) but slave labour? And following this recognition, what chance is there that the individuals and institutions relying on “wealth building through violence”, and women’s subjugation as its prerequisite, will ever willingly stop the subjugation and violence? Or will fund and support an organisation that truly and honestly fights for women’s autonomy? That advocates for women and other marginalised groups unapologetically, in the sense of Dyson’s definition of ‘advocacy’: “Some advocacy involves taking serious risks, caring enough about a cause to question another authority and even to court personal repercussions.” (Dyson, 2008). This must include, I suggest, caring enough to recognise that to effectively protect ourselves against longstanding, ‘morally’ justified and legitimised violence it takes other than ‘fear’ and ‘sadness’. It takes more than clinging to promises of ’empowerment’ and ‘protection’. History tells us: Social change often requires powerful, forceful rage. “Power concedes nothing without demand”, abolitionist Frederick Douglass claimed in 1857. “It never did and it never will.” Instead, it will declare its violent suppression of resistance a moral necessity.
Justifying and legitimising inequality
This is the even more effective way to deny women and other marginalised group their outrage and resistance to the everyday denigration and subjugation they face than simply negating that such injustices exists: You declare the injustices ‘reasonable’. Morally sound. You legitimise them. Which, consequently, as the ultimate coup d’etat, allows you to declare ‘reasonable’ and legitimise the suppression of any resistance.
Statistics show, women who kill their abuser routinely receive harsher sentences than men who kill their non-abusive female partners (Centre for Women’s Justice, 2023; PRT, 2017, The Sentencing project, 2021). And regardless of the fact that women are at a far higher risk than men of being murdered by their partner or a former partner. In the U.S., the percentage of women murdered by an intimate partner in 2021 was five times higher than for men (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2021). In the UK, in the year ending March 2023, 186 women were killed by a male partner or ex-partner, compared to 30 men killed by a female partner or ex-partner (ONS, 2023a). In Germany, in 2021,113 women were killed by a partner or ex-partner, compared to 14 men who were killed by a partner or former partner (BKA, 2022).
The pattern is, of course, also evident on the economic level. In our Western societies, we have been taught to commonly, often solely define ‘power’ as economic power. On a global average, women earn 20% less than men. When men enter traditional women’s professions, wages for men and women rise. When women enter ‘men’s professions’, wages for everyone fall. It is not that we feel the work itself is worth less. We feel it is worth less when allegedly less worthy people, women, do it. American blogger and manosphere voice Myron Gaines manifested that ‘Women Deserve Less’ in his 2023 book with the same title. It quickly became a global bestseller.
Policies serve to confirm this feeling of ‘righteous inequality’. When journalists asked newly elected German Bundeskanzler (Prime Minister) Friedrich Merz in March 2025 if he aimed for gender parity in his parliament, he replied with pretentious benevolence: “This has been tried by the previous government. Turned out, it didn’t do women any favours.” (Der Spiegel, 2024) Just recently, Merz’ government ‘missed’ the deadline to incorporate the new EU Pay Transparency Directive into Germany’s law. The new rules are supposed to guarantee workers transparency over their pay and make sure that they get paid equally for doing the same job. Their incorporation in national law is now an EU requirement. Having ‘missed’ the deadline, Germany risks a warning from Brussels and, essentially, a hefty fine (DW, 2016). Must its powerful care?
Dyson (2008) teaches that genuine advocacy requires asking ‘Why?’. I suggest, it also requires asking ‘Who?’. Who benefits from inequality? Who cashes in on women’s and other’s subjugation? And, subsequently, who has a vested interest in upholding and restating inequalities and subjugation – If necessary with violence or with the persistent threat of it, with the powerful, legitimate vengeful suggestion of ‘Or else!’ on every societal level? What else to conclude at the German governments’ ‘missing the deadline’ than that illegitimately paying women and other marginalised groups consistently out-benefits a potential million-Euro fine?
Social researcher Evan Stark (2008) found that women are not as tolerant as we like to believe. Women resist and fight back to the best of their possibilities. Stark told of the woman whose husband forbade her to sit on the sofas. Whenever he left the house, she would have a go jumping around on them. He spoke of the woman who defied her husband’s demands to keep the carpets immaculately clean and dust-free by leaving dust mice in strategic places – that would escape his control (Stark, 2008). That we mostly overlook or downplay or ridicule such acts of revolution, what effect does that have on women? Berefting them of even the smallest islands of resistance. Chipping and tearing away at what is left of their autonomy.
‘Empowerment’ is not autonomy
Autonomy is also a prerequisite for preventing violent partners – and other men – from being able to control and exercise power over women in the first place. The right to mental and bodily integrity, the right to inviolability – that is autonomy. And to defend this right with force if need be. Recent studies suggest that we have not understood or accepted that simple fact, yet. Instead, we remain comfortably stuck in empathy, refusing to make the jump to acknowledging that mental and bodily inviolability is a human, a woman’s right (Eliffe & Holt, 2019).
Like ‘race’, women’s ‘vulnerability’, I argue, is a social construct. That’s not to say that race and women’s vulnerability are not real. They are real. But that doesn’t mean they are ‘natural’. They are real, because we have made them our reality by way of our beliefs and convictions that there are different human races which can and must be divided into ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’. That there is one gender who can and must rule. And the other, who must be righteously kept in its inferior place. Anthropologist Christian Boehm argues that with the advent of weapons physically weaker humans no longer were at a disadvantage in a fight. Weapons, he claims, brought equality (Boehm, 2001). We have not let that become reality for women resisting or defending themselves against an abusive partner. Instead, our morality and our laws serve to restate and enforce women’s ‘natural vulnerability’: Women who use weapons in an attempt to make up for a weaker disposition and physical disadvantage are routinely punished harder than women who resist or defend themselves with their bare hands (Centre for Women’s Justice, 2021).
Instead of respecting women’s autonomy, we seem to be working hard to take it from them: we lock them up “for their protection” and put them under surveillance. We arrest women who reject the role of the vulnerable victim forcefully resisting their abuse and abusers. We judge and punish them. Or, if we are “progressive,” we send them to a perpetrator program. “Since we don’t seem to be very successful at stopping men from being violent towards women, what sense does it make to tell women not to defend themselves?”, I recently asked on an expert panel discussing perpetrator programs for women who fight back. “We want less violence – not more!” True. But how do we get there?
“By tolerating, encouraging and legitimizing women’s violence against men where it is justified,” suggests law professor Mary Anne Franks (2013) from George Washington University. “One reason men are more likely to commit unjustified violence against women is that men do not have to fear any consequences. Women, on the other hand, have to be very much afraid of consequences if and when they commit violence against men.” She calls for an “optimal violence” between the sexes. To achieve this, we should even accept if a woman’s violence initially appears unjustified or disproportionate. “Sometimes it takes extreme violence to right long-standing societal and political wrongs”, writes Franks (2013). Is that crazy? Or was civil rights activist Rita Mae Brown right defining insanity as, “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome.” (Brown, 1983).
Back in the days, when we were still burning women as witches, Dutch doctor Johann Weyer called for a criminal law reform. He did not doubt the existence of witches. Nor did he object to them being burned or drowned. What worried Weyer was the accuracy of one of the “witches tests” judges routinely subjected the women to: They would have the Passion of Christ read to them, and if the women could not cry over Jesus’ sufferings and pain, they had ‘revealed themselves’ as a witch. “Older people, especially women, sometimes suffer from a narrowing of the tear duct,” cautioned Weyer. This made it impossible for them to cry. “Make sure you don’t burn down a poor elderly person just because their tear duct stopped working.” (in Sapolsky, 2017). “Now, that’s one liberal reform of the criminal justice system! Limited to a tiny corner of a completely insane edifice!”, sneers Robert Sapolsky, the neuroscientist advocating for the abolishment of the criminal justice system. He suggests our criminal justice systems still reason, judge and punish in the same crazy way.
That’s how we – legislators, politicians, the media, activists and society as a whole – keep discussing intimate partner violence and suggest to remedy it: We act where we feel it is unavoidable. Then we reform so craftily that everything stays the same.
Instead of recognizing and promoting women’s autonomy and strength, we encourage a collective belief in their weakness and vulnerability. Making their socially constructed and prescribed inferiority look and feel almost natural. Our ideas about gender and morality determine which actions we consider sensible. The reverse is just as true: Our choice of actions is an indicator of how firmly anchored we are in these ideas.
The good news are that morality is a moving target, and that “reality” is fickle (Haidt, 2012; Greene, 2017). Social constructs can be dismantled and substituted with something new. Depictions of the Indian goddess Kali as a divine mother and demon slayer, adorned with the severed heads and limbs of enemies, are an example that women were not at all times and in all cultures considered and resigned to be weak and vulnerable, writes British science journalist Angela Saini in her recent book “The Patriarchs – How men came to rule” (Saini, 2024).
“We need a radical reform of the current trend in legal and social practice,” demands law professor Mary Anne Franks (2013). “So far, we have tolerated unjustified violence by men against women, while at the same time discouraging and legally restricting women’s justified violence against men.”
The promise of women’s ‘protection’ and with it the call for more shelters is a far cry from reform. ‘Empowerment’, another benevolent buzz-word, is not autonomy. Nor can it substitute it. ‘Empowerment’ is, at best, a top-down action. The suggestion that the powerful will give some of their power to the less powerful. As abolitionists have established: such a scenario was never true. It never will be. Autonomy, on the other hand, needn’t and cannot be given. It is already there. Women possess it to start with. Until it is taken from them. Gradually. Morally justified. Legitimately. And, if need be, with force. Or with the persistent threat of it.
Unquestioningly accepting that women are ‘vulnerable’, that they need ‘protection’, that they need ’empowerment’, and, essentially, that there is someone powerful who should graciously hand it to them, keeps us on the same-old beaten track. Acknowledging and respecting women’s autonomy is the opposite from ’empowerment’. It doesn’t require to give. It requires to not take away. It doesn’t require ‘stepping in for women’. It requires stepping out of their way.
As long as we fancifully word and ‘reform’ around this recognition nothing will change.
***
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Antje Joel’s master’s dissertation focused on how media shapes the discourse around violence against women and girls essentially helping to maintain the status quo – while allegedly advocating for change. Her PhD research is into women’s resistance against violence and the suppression of this resistance through state actors. The research investigates the global decline of women’s rights against the backdrop of the active erosion of human rights and through the lens of moral convictions and the link between morality and power. It analyses the language and mechanics of marginalisation and linking misogyny, racism and oppression of marginalised groups.
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