White Feminism and Carceral Industries: Strange Bedfellows or Partners in Crime and Criminology?

In this article, we examine the existing policy and academic literature on punitive responses to gender-based and family violence, focusing, in particular, on women’s police stations. Specialist women’s police stations have been a feature of policing in Argentina, Brazil, and other South American as well as Central American countries since the late 1980s. They are considered to be a phenomenon of ‘the global South’, having also been set up in some African and Asian countries including Sierra Leone and India. In this article, we critique research on women’s police stations as well as the public discourse within which women’s police stations are being proposed as a solution to domestic violence – looking at questions of research design, methodology, empiricism, ethics, and criminological claims to knowledge or ‘truth’. We reflect on the significant dangers posed by the potential transfer of women’s police stations to the Australian context, especially for sovereign Indigenous women and girls. Finally, we critique what we see as deep-seated contradictions and anomalies inherent in ‘southern theory’ and white feminist carceralism.