Women may want to think twice about the latest leftist fad.
Despite the media hand-wringing and equivocating around the terms, “defund the police” and “abolish the police” are no mere slogans. After George Floyd, an unarmed black man, died following a white Minneapolis police officer crushing his neck with a knee for nearly nine minutes, a veto-proof majority of the city council voted to disband the Police Department. Ensuing media appearances from council members make it even less clear whether they plan to replace the Police Department with any other type of law enforcement apparatus.
The immediate implications of this socialists’ dream come true are obvious enough, from removing any incentive for drivers to abide by speeding laws to the imminent threat of violence against people and property. Hence, it should come as little surprise that even the most left-leaning black members of Congress have balked at the move. But the longer-ranging inevitabilities resulting from the move prove there is a structural dissonance within the cult of intersectionality. Namely, feminism is antithetical to the prison and police abolition movement.
If you’re a woman in the modern United States, the odds are that you will never be a victim of sexual assault. The same also goes for domestic violence. While it’s hard to pin a precise figure on how many women in the U.S. will ever experience sexual violence, academics and the Justice Department estimate the figure is somewhere between 2.8% and 18%.
In large part, this is due to cultural standards. Even without policing, social norms have heavily stigmatized sexual violence to the point where it’s safe to assume the overwhelming majority of men wouldn’t turn into serial rapists overnight. But we know what happens in societies without law enforcement.
For a most extreme contemporary example, consider Papua New Guinea. The oceanic nation has just a few thousand police officers charged with overseeing millions of people in a culture already unaccustomed to law enforcement, leaving police forces stretched thin and rejected by the nation’s disproportionately rural and nonglobalized population. Sounds like the Democratic Socialists of America’s dream, right? Well, it also includes a de facto patriarchy, with about two-thirds of all women experiencing domestic violence and at least half suffering sexual assault. The Lancet found that about 3 in 5 men in Papua New Guinea have committed rape at some point. At least 1 in 5 men were found to have raped at least four victims.
For a closer cultural example, take Sweden, which shares similar elements of cultural liberalism with the U.S. but suffers from a police force severely stretched thin (only Finland seems to have fewer police officers per 100,000 people of other major European nations). Not unrelatedly, Sweden suffers one of the worst rape rates in the developed world, with more than 60 rapes per 100,000 Swedes each year. In France, which has nearly twice the number of police, that number is 17 reported rapes per 100,000.
Civilization is inherently feminist. In a market-based economy that values merit and effort and a society with police to protect people and property from violence, women, who on average are physically weaker than men, are functional and financial equals to them. But strip away those protections, and women will inevitably become a second class again. The Left can abolish police or protect women. They can’t have both.
