We critique contemporary management of “difficult” mental health, offering a discussion of Community Treatment Orders (CTOs), the limitations of rights advocacy, and offer some alternative avenues for organizing against the neoliberal and carceral management of “difficult” mental health.

Community-based services can be a crucial support system for marginalised young people, particularly when schools fail to meet their needs. Yet these same young people are also among those most frequently targeted or harmed by police or other state services.

In spite of tort law’s ‘architecture of bias’, some feminist scholars and activists have argued that there is potential for tort law to be expanded to encompass and redress harms which more often and more greatly affect women and other marginalised people. While this can be important for some survivors to meet material needs and provide recognition for a wrong and harm, Martha Chamallas argues that it is not only a matter of individual compensation. It is connected to addressing systemic injustices because harm and violence are not equally inflicted and experienced, varying with intersecting forms of oppression. 

the legal and cultural obsession with affirmative consent evidenced in popular feminism, media, and mandatory university trainings cruelly reifies victims of sexual violence as abstract legal subjects, capable of protecting themselves through savvy risk assessment and contractual relations. Indeed, the privileging of consent as a marker of acceptable sexual relations has been thoroughly critiqued by feminist, queer, and liberal legal scholars.

We are less likely to intervene, than to report an incident after the fact. This happens across the spectrum, from the most violent rapes, through street harassment, into universities and other institutions: at the ‘everyday’ end, complaints tend to be submitted when difficult conversations would be more effective. Faith (or hope) in authoritarian systems seems unshakeable, even given overwhelming evidence they don’t keep us safe:

Feminism is a political methodology that can help us name the structural, interpersonal and otherwise murky forces which make up a social landscape. It does so by enabling an examination and analysis of the material conditions which underpin social organisation, it helps us understand the ways that capitalism’s operation is specifically gendered and racialised in its arrangement of labour, social relationships, the economy as well as prisons and the police.

abolitionist strategies, if given support, would be able to address some of the complex root causes of sexualised street harassment which include misogyny, patriarchy, economic inequality, and intersecting forms of marginalisation. It is these structures and norms that render some women more vulnerable to harm, particularly since that harm reflects entrenched norms emerging out of histories of “heterosexism, colonialism, and slavery.”

Mainstream feminism in Britain is commonly preoccupied with the desire for a seat at the table of power; for a stake in the empire, for legislative wins and more women in board rooms and on parliamentary benches. Yet multiple, competing feminisms exist—arguably, feminist work has always been characterised by fragmentation and internal dissent. The halcyon years of the women’s liberation movement (WLM) in the 1970’s is also wrought with dissent and disagreement.

As “carceral feminism” has become ever more distilled, rigidly individualised ideas around what – and who – the “carceral feminist” is have also emerged. A process which has been accelerated with the growing interest in anti-carceral perspectives following calls to defund the police in 2020 in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter protests.

A response to political and academic discourse that has emerged in support of a devolved criminal justice system in Cymru (Wales). It challenges, from an abolitionist perspective, arguments that present devolution as the solution to what is often presented as a criminal justice system that is both failing and at breaking point.

Irish Penal Abolition Network launch their three legged General Election Manisfesto for the upcoming elections to the Dáil in Dublin. Challenging the ‘Law & Order’ myths that more prisons will bring us safety, and connecting to what communities actually want and need- more social investment.

Despite the 2004 act, foxhunting has continued as if the ban did not exist. Illegal hunting, however, is just one strand to the package of harms that accompanies foxhunting, with overt and organised violence by hunts and their supporters regularly experienced by sabs and monitors.

We often talk about the mental health system being “broken”. Yet an abolitionist lens teaches us that the very idea of psychiatric institutionalisation centres around isolation and containment - not care.

Read Dalton’s reflections on visiting Bent Bars

protecting our streets: police are never the answer? Over the last week, Britain and Ireland have witnessed escalating violence incited by far-right groups. This can’t be used to increase police powers.

The parts of the state that provide welfare and the parts of the state that provide punishment are deeply intertwined and interdependent. This is especially paramount for Care Experienced people, who are the children of the state.

Abolitionists must actively show their solidarity with the Palestinian people, call for an immediate end to the Israeli military attacks, and urge the end of the occupation of Palestine as a key demand of the global abolitionist movement.

G. Ryan explores how we as Abolitionists can address the harms and suffering experienced by animals

John Moore provides a brief reflection on last month’s event: Activating the Archives: Prisons, Abolition and Histories of Resistance organised by Martha O’Carroll and Margaret Malloch from the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research.