Interrupting Intimate Partner Violence

A Guide to Community Responses Without Police

Introduction

Many communities in the United States — especially Black, Indigenous, and other people of color; immigrants; disabled people; and queer and trans people — experience state violence at extremely high rates. When violence erupts in the home, survivors in these communities cannot depend on state systems for safety. 

For generations, people in these communities have found safety outside of the state in one another, developing alternative, often informal responses to intervene in violence in their homes and communities. Building from this tradition, a growing movement has been experimenting with processes for preventing and disrupting violence and holding people who harm accountable within the community without relying on the criminal punishment system.  

What is Intimate Partner Violence — and why do we need alternatives?

Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) refers to abusive behavior and/or a pattern of behavior that some believe aims to establish power and control by one person over another within an intimate relationship, such as current or former spouses, dating partners, sexual partners, and domestic partnerships. Other motivations for IPV are harder to establish as there are multiple factors that contribute to the emergence of IPV, including past trauma, economic stress, and long-standing trauma. 

Acts of IPV can include physical injury; threats to cause harm to others or self; verbal or emotional abuse; intimidation; isolation; stalking; coercion; sexual abuse or assault; economic abuse or deprivation; control of reproductive or sexual health; and threats or use of other systems of oppression to gain power and control (such as immigration enforcement, queer outing, etc.)

IPV is a widespread public health problem. In California, more than 1 in 3 women will experience IPV at some point in their lives. For some marginalized identities, particularly Black and Indigenous women and LGBTQ individuals, the rates are even higher. Roughly 3 people — mostly women — die every day in this country as a result of IPV and ineffective police and carceral responses.

Less than half of survivors will ever report this violence to law enforcement. Some may turn to established domestic violence service organizations. Many more will turn to friends, family, co-workers, neighbors, and others in the community, who are likely best positioned as first responders to intervene when this violence happens — and often are intervening already.

Police involvement is dangerous, and Fear of Police Deters Many Survivors from Seeking SerVices

Not only does police involvement present a significant risk of injury or death, especially for Black and Brown people, but it can also trigger other systems, like child welfare or immigration. A majority of survivors who responded to a 2015 survey said that calling the police resulted in collateral consequences like intervention by Child Protective Services, deportation, financial loss, job loss, and criminal charges against one or both partners. For many survivors, law enforcement is simply not an option. One of the primary reasons why is because most survivors do not want their families broken up or the person causing harm to be harmed themselves.

Fear of police involvement is a major barrier preventing people from accessing traditional domestic violence services, such as emergency shelters, crisis lines, and safety planning, especially among survivors in immigrant communities and communities of color. While DV organizations legally cannot require survivors to engage with law enforcement, it is a common fear that some survivors have, according to advocates. The perception of possible law enforcement involvement deters many survivors.

Such fears are ever present for many families given the long and ongoing history of state violence, arrest, incarceration, and murder of Black, Brown, and other vulnerable people in the United States. According to one survivor, “Police shoot people of different races or those who are mentally ill, of which my family has both.” 

Acts of state violence are deeply traumatic and have a devastating impact on a whole family’s stability, income, and health for life. Even the presence of law enforcement can be triggering for many families.

Often survivors are not the ones who call police; it might be their neighbors or someone else nearby. Law enforcement interaction starts down the road of the criminal legal system, and it does not center the survivor, and because it does not center the survivor or the needs of the survivor in that family, it actually becomes out of their hands. It’s no longer up to them to determine what is best for them and their family.

When police show up at a scene of possible IPV, they often end up arresting or otherwise harming the survivor. More than half (55%) of survivors surveyed felt the police discriminated against them in some way. One-quarter were threatened with arrest, and 12% (or one in eight) — were arrested in spite of identifying as the victim.

We’ve even seen reports of police using DNA from rape kits to criminalize rape survivors for unrelated property offenses years after coming forward for help.

One of the reasons law enforcement so often criminalize survivors is due to antiquated mandatory arrest and primary aggressor laws that were ushered in by the foremothers (mostly white feminists) of the anti-violence movement. We discuss the cooptation of the anti-violence movement towards the end of the guide.

Police are often perpetrators of violence against survivors. Two-thirds of survivors and service providers said police use force against survivors sometimes or often during IPV calls, particularly against Black survivors, and 55% of respondents reported that police hold anti-Black, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, and anti-LGBTQ attitudes. 

Police and prisons in particular are perpetrators of sexual violence.

Law enforcement officers themselves report far higher rates of intimate partner violence than the general public. One survey of two East Coast police departments found that a staggering 40% of officers reported behaving violently to their spouses or children.

According to Survived and Punished, a national network that organizes grassroots defense campaigns for criminalized survivors, between 70-95% of incarcerated women have experienced physical violence from an intimate partner, and a staggering number of women behind bars were incarcerated for killing their abuser or otherwise defending themselves.

Incarceration, of course, does not address the problem — quite the opposite. It does not increase stability for survivors and disappears community members. It can sometimes decrease overall safety because of loss of income, child care, and housing, or immigration concerns, etc. People in prisons and jails — institutions we often refer to as US concentration camps — do not receive the healing and health care they need and are released with even less stability than before they were incarcerated. 

Many survivors say they want and need options other than punishment and separation for the person causing the abuse, that they fear losing control of the process if the criminal legal system were involved, and that they believe the system is complicated, drawn out and would cause them more trauma. A majority of survivors list housing, health care, income, and immigration status as what they need most to prevent or escape violence and stay safe.

The Purpose of this Guide

It is critical that we ensure there are other pathways for responding to IPV that do not lead with law enforcement. The Anti Police-Terror Project and our statewide program The Justice Teams Network ground our work in the ethos that those closest to the problem are best equipped to design the solution. Survivors have clearly said they want alternatives to law enforcement, they are not utilizing law enforcement, and that more violence will not bring them peace. Forcing law enforcement onto survivors who reject it means there is no one to call for help, thus abandoning survivors to suffer in silence, ensuring ongoing abuse, placing the lives of them and their children in grave jeopardy. 

The purpose of this guide is to present organizers, IPV providers, advocates, policymakers, community members, and families with practical, safe considerations and tools to create a community first response for IPV that is not based in the punitive U.S. carceral system. 

Thankfully, we are not starting from scratch. We don’t need to invent something new. We are building off of the work of Indigenous, Black, Brown, and other POC, queer, trans and disabled communities who for decades and centuries have been building a world without prisons and police, without violence from the state or from within our own communities. This guide is only possible because of the rich tradition of the abolitionist, transformative justice and anti-violence movements, particularly the leadership and contributions of Black and Indigenous women. 

Some of this work is already happening all over the country in communities in different ways every single day. People in the home, in the neighborhood, in the workplace, in the community are already responding to violence. Let’s equip them with as much info and tools as possible. 

There are models already in existence for rapid response in other situations, such as mental health crises. We will highlight some of the work already being done, formally and informally, around IPV and other crisis response models that we can draw from.  

This guide is a product of conversations with IPV providers, transformative justice advocates, and others in the antiviolence movement. In the course of writing it, we found broad agreement on the urgent need for an alternative to police for IPV, especially for those survivors who cannot or will not engage law enforcement no matter what. There is a definite gap that existing service providers are not able to fill, compounded by lack of adequate funding and capacity. The advocates with whom we spoke also pointed to the much broader work of healing that law enforcement fundamentally hinders or makes impossible. 

Our goal is to create a replicable model grounded in safety, healing, family, and community. We as a community have the answers to many of our most pressing problems. We don’t need police because we take care of us.

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