One of the arguments that comes up time and time again in debates over defunding the police is what would happen to victims of crime — often mentioning survivors of sexual assault — if the cops had fewer resources. But what do survivors actually think about it?
HuffPost reporters Alanna Vagianos and Jenavieve Hatch set out to find out by talking to more than a dozen survivors of sexual violence. Those survivors cannot, of course, speak for everyone. But their comments were illustrative of just how complicated the idea of policing is for people who survived sexual assault.
How did you come up with the idea to do this piece?
Jenavieve: I’ve covered the intersection of law enforcement and sexual violence on and off for years, and I noticed that people who were opposed to defunding police were using rape and other forms of violence against women to justify the need for police — but for so many survivors, involvement with law enforcement was its own separate trauma. I also know of people who had great experiences with it. I wanted victims of sexual trauma to be able to explain what law enforcement meant to them, and how they felt about the larger defund police movement, and I knew that Alanna would be the right person to do this piece with.
You spoke to more than a dozen survivors, but as you noted, survivors aren't a monolith. How did you handle sharing their stories without implying sweeping statements about all survivors?
Alanna: Jenavieve and I made a conscious decision to include the survivors’ words on their own. It made the story a bit longer than we would’ve liked, but I think it’s important to hear from survivors on their own terms, in their own words and without much else — especially on a topic like this.
Jenavieve: We wanted to make sure that different identities and different experiences were represented. Sex workers have their own unique experiences, and victims of child sexual abuse also have different experiences with the system at large from a young age, so letting survivors share their own stories was really important.
Were you surprised at anything the survivors told you?
Alanna: I was surprised by how all of the survivors we spoke to were very much in support of defunding the police. We went into this piece simply asking survivors how they felt about the movement, and we got this. We worked for weeks to get a diverse set of responses, and we did in respect to experiences and demographics, but everyone was still actively in favor of defunding, which I think is reflective of just how broken law enforcement and the criminal justice system is when dealing with crimes of sexual violence.
One response that really stuck with me was from a woman named “Maggie,” who was sexually abused over the course of a relationship with a former partner. She said that her former partner would tell her not to report him to police because he would just be raped in jail. And while those scare tactics are another form of abuse, “Maggie” said it did stop her from reporting for a while. And that really got me because it’s true: Is the system really working if it’s just perpetuating the same kind of violence we send perpetrators to jail for in the first place?
Jenavieve: Like Alanna, I thought we would get more people who were against the movement to defund police. It surprised me that everyone we spoke to felt similarly!
What do you hope readers learn from these survivors?
Jenavieve: That listening to and believing survivors requires the ability to hear some really uncomfortable truths — like the fact that law enforcement really doesn’t do much to prevent and punish rape and abuse. Like we wrote about in the piece, survivors aren’t monolithic, but a lot of them can agree that involvement with the criminal justice system did not heal them and did not prevent more instances of violence. This is a hard pill to swallow when so much in our culture — think “Law and Order: SVU” and other police shows with strong women leads — tells us that police are here to save victims. | 
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