Much of my work over the last four decades has grappled with questions that provide the central themes of this book: how do we ensure that the state protects the most vulnerable among us and guarantees their human rights without violating wider human rights and the rule of law itself? The urgent and contemporary challenges we face as feminists are encapsulated in our endeavours to address the role played by the criminal justice system and the state in a context of rising violence against women and girls. In addressing the issue, we are compelled to examine how power, race, class and sex intersect to reproduce inequality and injustice, raising profound questions about how and under what terms we engage as feminists with the state. This dilemma becomes all the more profound when situated in the wider context of an increasingly austerity driven and controlling state that makes progress difficult, threatening to wipe out the feminist gains that have been made by taking away the very tools needed to hold state and non-state power to account.

Over the years, much has been achieved through feminist struggles for state intervention in its protective capacity in respect of crimes of violence against women and girls. We have seen, for example, changes in criminal laws and policies around battered women who kill and the abolition of the law of provocation which was built on male norms of behaviour. There have been a plethora of laws, policies, strategies and action plans around violence against women which recognize that physical, sexual, financial and psychological abuse form part of a continuum of abuse and a wider dynamic of patriarchal control to which women are subjected in the private sphere. The 2019 case of Sally Challen led to a wider understanding of the concept of coercive control in reproducing gender inequality, while the 2018 Worboys case at the Supreme Court established that the police have a duty to investigate serious crimes of violence under the Human Rights Act. At the same time, incessant campaigning by Black and minority feminists has enabled us to put to bed the worst aspects of state policies on multiculturalism that failed to recognize forced marriage, female genital mutilation (FGM) and honour-based violence as forms of abuse and violence rather than as cultural practices that had to be tolerated.