the policing of gender violence: Lessons GENDER, RACE AND LAW – EPISTEMOLOGICAL AND EMPIRICAL ARTICULATIONS Reimaging the policing of gender violence: Lessons from Women’s Police Stations in Brasil and Argentina

The criminalisation of domestic violence during the 1970s and 1980s was lauded by feminists as a victory, as the state taking responsibility for the safety of women. The problem was that its regulation was delegated to a masculinist judicial system and its policing delegated to a militarised and masculinised police service that left victims disappointed, re-victimised or disbelieved. Our paper investigates how to re-imagine the policing of victims/survivors of gender-based violence from a women-centred perspective. Drawing on secondary and primary empirical research on women's police stations (WPS), that first emerged in Brasil in 1985 and Argentina in 1988, this paper investigates whether this model could offer an innovative remedy to the masculinised ill-equipped traditional models of policing of gender-based violence. Framed by southern theory our project reverses the notion that knowledge/policy transfer should flow from the Anglophone countries of the Global-North to the Global-South. Our project aimed to discover, firstly, how women's police stations – a unique invention of the Global-South, respond to and prevent gender-based violence and, secondly, what aspects could inform the development of new approaches to policing and prevention of gender-based violence elsewhere in the world. We conclude that this uniquely South American innovation might serve as an inspiration to Australia and elsewhere in the world struggling with the shadow pandemic of gender violence. Our paper draws on original empirical and historical research undertaken in Brasil, Argentina and Australia to offer new practical and conceptual insights into how to enhance the policing of gender-based violence.

Latin America. 14 The unstated assumption was that all societies were bound to follow the lead of modern societies of the Global-North if they were to successfully modernise. This theoretical strategy produces 'readings from the centre', making universal knowledge claims based on the specificity of the wealthy countries from the largely Anglo speaking world. 15 This way of seeing the world has been challenged by de-colonial, post-colonial, southern and subaltern perspectives. 16,17,18,19,20 Framed by a southern perspective, 21 our project reverses the notion that knowledge/policy transfer should flow from the Anglophone countries of the Global-North to the Global-South. 22 Our project aimed to discover, firstly, how women's police stationsa unique invention of the Global-South, respond to and prevent gender-based violence and, secondly, what aspects could inform the development of new approaches to responding and preventing gender-based violence in Australia and elsewhere in the world. We argue that this uniquely South American innovation might serve as an inspiration to Australia and elsewhere in the world struggling the shadow pandemic of gender violence. 23 A small body of research has been undertaken on novel models of state-based female-led police responses to gender-based violence unique to the Global-South. Many have taken shape in challenging historical political contexts: emerging during or post-conflict 24,25 or following the fall of dictatorships or periods of political instability, 26,27 or where state institutions are weak, or hybrid regulatory systems sustain gender inequality. 28,29,30,31 The most significant of these innovations in the Global-South have included Women's Police Stations in Argentina and Brasil; 32 Women's Help Desks and Women's Justice Centres or Violence Against Women Centres in Punjab; multidisciplinary centres that co-locate medical, counselling, on-site emergency accommodation services, forensics, legal and police support for victims of gender violence in Rwanda; Women's Justice Centres in Peru; All Women Police Units in Tamil India, 33 all women police units called Crimes Against Women Cells in Delhi, and Mobile Women's Police units in Hyderbad and Jiapur; and Family Support Units which are specialised police units attached to police stations for women and children victims of violence in Sierra Leone. Variations of women-centred policing responses to gender violence have since spread across other parts of the Global-South-in Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Peru, and Uruguay, and more recently in Sierra Leone, India, Ghana, Kosovo, Liberia, the Philippines, South Africa and Uganda. 34 In this article, we focus on the foundation of women's police stations in Brasil and Argentina. This article then explores their possibility for improving the prevention and policing gender violence in Australia and elsewhere.  Pasinato,42 these groups can be considered the first idea of a specialised service targeting women facing violence, assisting them to leave this situation by providing personal, psychological and legal assistance. 43 In the 1980s, feminist movements gained more visibility among communities and the media. These movements demanded a State response to the murders of women from the middle and upper classes by their male partners, which often result in impunity. 44 These femicides were frequently identified as crimes of passion and perpetrators were rarely punished, as they often used provocation defences known at this time as 'legitimate defence of male honour'. 45,46 These perspectives reinforced the roots of gender-based violence against women -because women were seen as men's property, and contributed to normalise and romanticise violence. 47 Besides, women facing domestic violence were often not heard at the traditional police stations, because the police officers refused to attend them or advised them to go home and make amends by "cooking their husbands a tasty dinner and not provoking further arguments". 48,49 Domestic voilence was seen as the women's fault. These policing responses clearly reflect the rigid stereotypes and norms that violence against women is a private not a police matter. 50,51 In response to this discriminatory treatment by masculinist policing services, feminist movements and organisations called for legal reform and recognition of domestic and sexual violence as a violation of human rights. This led to the engagement and actions of the SOS groups, which were the foundation of the first WPS in 1985. 52,53

WPS in Brasil
Brasil was the pioneer in creating and implementing Delegacias Especializadas de Atendimento à Mulher (Specialised Police Stations for Womenhereafter WPS). WPS are considered the first public police directed explicitly to assist women in Brasil. 54,55 They also became the central public policy to combat violence against women and are currently recognised as the only national policy whose existence has been uninterrupted since the 1980s. 56,57,58 This is particularly important in a country marked by political discontinuity. The WPS played a fundamental role in recognising violence against women, often invisible, as a common, serious, social and public matter. 59 WPS provided a means to break the silence about domestic violence, recognise this violence as a crime and a threat to women's rights as well as to create a new professional field for policewomen (and also men) among the police structure. 60,61,62 WPS have prevention and enforcement roles based on human rights and the principle of Democratic Rule of Law. 63 WPS aimed to encourage reports of domestic and family violence, by providing a welcoming, multi-disciplinary and specialised spaces in which women could feel safe to denounce their aggressors. 64 To achieve this goal, it was initially thought that this service should be provided by female staff only, because some women at risk or experiencing violence may feel more comfortable to talk to policewomen, which were also expected to be more sensitive than policemen, especially considering past negative and sexist responses from traditional police stations and its male-dominated environment. 65,66, 67 The presence of a multi-disciplinary service, including psychologists and social workers, also contributed to make WPS a 'feminine place'. 68 The attempt to make WPS a 'feminine space' was a way of making reporting a positive and supportive experience, conducive to an increase of denouncements of domestic and family violence. Yet this essentialist assumption was also criticised by experts in the field. 69,70 According to Pasinato 71 and Santos 72 better service and responses to women facing family and domestic violence cannot be achieved without training, regardless of the sex of the police officer. In this vein, the Technical Standard for the Standardisation of Specialised Police Stations for Women in Brasil 73,74 prescribed that the police chief of WPS should be preferably women, and the police officers and all staff should be qualified, trained to comprehend and respond to gendered violence according to Maria da Penha Law. 75 In this vein, Frugoli and colleagues 76 highlighted that following the Technical Standard, WPS staff should use active listening skills, capable of providing adequate support and guidance, besides following the legal procedures. The reporting should happen in a private and humanised space, with different rooms for victims/survivors and aggressors, without prejudice and discrimination. Ideally, all that should occur in all WPS. 77 Maria da Penha Law 78 is the legislation to address domestic and family violence in the country and is considered one of the best legislation in the world to combat gendered violence against women because it established an integrated policy approach based on prevention, assistance and punishment. 79, 80,81 It recognises that violence against women is a gendered violation of human rights. 82 Following the human rights conventions signed by the country and the United Nations Handbook for Legislation on Violence against Women that legislation in this field should not be gender-blind, but gender-sensitive. 83 Thus, it acknowledges the historical inequalities between men and women, and the need to address the problem with a gender lens. The importance of WPS was outlined in Maria da Penha Law, which increased the WPS attributions including starting legal procedures, ensuring the compliance of domestic violence orders, and resulting in more WPS being implemented around the country. 84 Today, there is approximately 460 WPS in Brasil, yet, this number means that only 8.3% of cities in the country have a WPS. 85 WPS is part of the service network (rede) to respond and support women in a violent situation. This service network faces several challenges regarding its implementation in practice, including the scarcity of human and financial resources which affects the quality the police service and the availability of multi-disciplinary service; and the lack of personnel trained from a gendered and human rights perspective. 86,87 Despite these limitations, the pioneering foundation of WPS generated awareness about violence against women and improved responses to gendered violence -reflected in the sharp increase of reports and women using WPS services, enabling women to exercise their citizenship rights and access to justice. 88,89,90 . An empirical study of WPS in Brasil found that where they existed the female homicide rate dropped by 17 per cent for all women, but for women aged 15-24 in metropolitan areas the reduction was an astonishing 50 per cent (or 5.57 deaths reduction per 100,000). 91 The popularity and credibility achieved by WPS in Brasil, led other countries to implement similar models of WPS, such as Argentina, India, Philippines and Uruguay. 92,93,94 The Argentinean experiences of WPS is presented in the next section.

Women's Police Station in Argentina 3.1 Context
The first Women's Police Station explicitly designed to respond to violence against women in Argentina was established in La Plata, the capital city of Buenos Aires province, in 1988. They were initially called

WPS in Argentina
The structure of policing in Argentina differs somewhat from how many police services operate in countries like Australia, the UK or US. Rather than operating as a single unified police service, 12 commissioners oversee the hierarchal command structure of distinctly different police units. These include road safety; accident safety; rural safety; police planning and operations; gender policy; judicial investigation; drug trafficking investigations and illicit crime organisation; scientific police; criminal intelligence; communications; social services and local crime prevention; and general secretary of police. 102 There are eight regional superintendents and one Superintendent to whom all commissioners report. The Province has two different types of police stations that offer the public an emergency response: the common police (Comisaría) and police stations for women and families (Comisaría de la Mujer). There are currently 645 stations in total in the Province, of which 517 are common police stations and the remaining 128 Women's Police Stations. 103 Accordingly, one in five police stations in the Province is specifically designed to respond to and prevent gender violence. Their Sub-Commanders (who are mostly women) report to the Superintendent of Gender Policy, providing a career structure for female officers in law enforcement. Their main features drawing on Carrington et al's original research in Argentina are summarised below. 104 The first characteristic that can be highlighted is that WPS are mainly staff by female police officers. Also, they have the same powers as common police as well as the same training. The only requirement to work there is to undergo specialist training on gender violence, despite the police officer's gender.
The second particularity is that WPS buildings are deliberately designed to receive victims, not offenders and do not have holding cells. Most of them are located in brightly painted houses far from the inner cities, have welcoming reception rooms and playrooms or spaces exclusively for children. Those playrooms are trough to prevent children from being re-victimised while their mothers are denouncing. Part of the police officer's working activities at WPS is to provide child care. 105 In the third place, WPS work from a gender perspective policing and preventing gender violence. This approach has a legal and institutional frame. The provincial law, passed in 2001, on Family Violence; and the national law, passed in 2009, to Prevent, Punish and Eradicate Violence against Women, 106 provide WPS with tools to comprehend and respond from a gender-sensitive perspective. Institutionally, WPS are under the scope of the Commissioner of Gender Policy Coordination within the PPBA. Created in 2004 as the General Directory to Coordinate Gender Policies, it shifted in 2015 elevating the state response to gender violence into a higher position in the police hierarchy. The Commissioner is in charge of WPS including their design, recruitment, plans, and programs. In addition, it is responsible for training of police officers in preventing and responding violence against women from a gender perspective.
The fourth distinguishing feature is that they work in multi-disciplinary teams of lawyers, social workers, psychologists and police to provide an integral service to respond to cases of VAW. These teams offer "legal support, counselling, and housing and financial advice to help address the multidimensional problems that survivors of domestic and sexual violence typically experience". 107 In the fifth place WPS coordinate actions and strategies to respond to and prevent gender  42-67, 2020. 106 This law widened the legal definition of violence to include: physical, psychological, sexual, economic, patrimonial, and symbolic forms of gender violence. According to the Law, economic and patrimonial aims to cause impairment in the economic or patrimonial resources of the woman. It can be exercised through: the disturbance of women's possessions or properties; the loss, subtraction, destruction, retention or undue use of objects, work instruments, personal documents, assets, values or property rights; the limitation of the economic resources destined to satisfy their needs or deprivation of the indispensable means to live a dignified life; and the control of women's income, as well as the perception of a lower salary for the same task, within the same workplace. Symbolic violence refers to stereotyped patterns, messages, values, icons or signs that transmit and reproduces domination, inequality and discrimination in social relations, naturalising the subordination of women in society. These definitions are broader than the Law of Family Violence of the Province of Buenos Aires because they include violence against women in a range of other contexts-beyond the domestic sphere to include institutional, obstetric and work settings. 107  Local Boards is to coordinate public policies to prevent and address family violence, at a local, regional and provincial level.
Finally, WPS are mandated to undertake prevention activities in the community at least once a month. They organise community prevention campaigns around an annual program of festival and events, such as days of protest against femicide (known as Ni Una Menos day), women's right day, children's day, or Christmas. Through these activities, WPS seek to challenge the cultural norms and values that support IVP and VAW. 108

Can women's police stations improve the policing and prevention of gender violence in Australia and elsewhere?
There is some evidence that women's police stations are more strategically designed than traditional policing models to widen women's access to justice. 109,110,111,112,113,114,115,116 Nevertheless, the role of women as police, in policing of gender violence, is contentious. 117 Do they simply reproduce masculinist biases and dismiss victims? Or do they navigate gender, cultural and faith-based norms and forms of authority and state power in different ways when they respond to victims of gender violence? While we know in Latin American contexts specialist women's police units provided new jobs for women and, for the first time, a career structure in what is traditionally a deeply masculinist field of employment, 118,119,120 what we do not know is: in what context, and to what extent, could these novel approaches to policing gender violence adapt to, or transfer to, other settings in the Global-South. 121 This is the question that Carrington's ARC funded research team have been studying.
Initially, the team undertook three months of field research in Argentina investigating how Women's Police Stations respond to and prevent gender-based violence. 122,123,124 They discovered that these police stations operate in unique ways to respond and prevent gender violence. Firstly, by denaturalising violence and empowering women; by partnering with the community to transform the local norms that sustain violence against women and by working collaboratively with other local organisations to produce a local roadmap. 125 The team then constructed a survey based on those unique characteristics to explore whether the innovative strategies used by specialist police stations in Argentina could improve the way Australia could respond to gender violence. Their survey was completed by a Community cohort (n=566) and a Workforce cohort (n=277). 126 One of the key questions in both surveys, asked "In your opinion, which aspects of Women's Police Stations (in Argentina) could improve how Australian police stations respond to victims of gender violence?" (see Figure 1). There was a considerable level of agreement that following nine aspects of women's police stations would improve how Australia responds to the victims of gender violence: Work in multi-disciplinary teams with lawyers, counsellors and social workers; Collaborate with local agencies to prevent gender violence; Provide emergency support to victims of violence; Police Stations designed to receive victims; Provide childcare and a space for children; Undertake violence prevention work in the local community; Provide interview rooms designed for victims (not offenders); and Work with both victims and offenders to break the cycle of violence. 121  (See Figure 1) 127 One of the most contentious aspects of women's police stations is whether police units that respond to domestic and sexual violence should work from a gender perspective and whether they should be staffed by women. 128,129,130 Just over half (56%) of Workforce respondents favoured police stations staffed predominantly by female police officers, compared to just under half (46%) for Community respondents. Workforce respondents were considerably more in favour of working from a gender perspective (62%) than community respondents (38%). Some empirical research suggests that policewomen are not always naturally more empathetic to female victims of violence. 131 This is because policewomen can also be part of a wider institutional culture of policing that is militarised and masculinized, 132 where "machista" values, such as those that lead to victim-blaming, are internalised. 133,134,135,136 The assumption that female police will automatically express empathy with female victims of gender violence has been rightly criticised as essentialist. 137,138,139,140,141 Importantly, being female is not an essential requirement for working as a police officer in Argentina's women's police stations. However, working from a gender perspective is crucial, and supported with mandatory training. Notably, 78 per cent (n=216) of Workforce survey respondents indicated they wanted more specialist training in responding to gender violence. 142 Carrington and colleagues conclude that Australia does have much to learn about how to improve the policing of gender violence from women's police stations that first emerged in Brasil and Argentina. 144 They argue that adapted to an Australian context where Indigenous women are many times more likely to experience domestic family violence, these specialist police stations will need to be appropriately staffed by Indigenous and non-Indigenous officers trained to work from both gender and culturally sensitive perspectives. 145 As a by-product they could also address the significant gender equity discrepancies in policing in Australia, attracting more women into the profession and providing a more rewarding career for those who choose to work in the field of violence prevention.

Concluding Remarks: The need for alternative policing responses to gender violence
When domestic violence became a crime in many countries during the 1970s it was lauded by feminists as a victory, as the state taking responsibility for ensuring the safety of women. The problem was that its regulation was delegated to a masculinist judicial system 146 and its policing delegated to a militarised and masculinised police service. 147,148 This male dominance matters because a victim's first contact with the justice system is often through front line police, who have systematically disappointed victims of gender violence by not believing them, not taking their complaints seriously or worse blaming them for their own victimisation. 149,150,151,152,153,154,155 One of the responses to this problem has been to increase the number of women who enter policing. 156 Women have been making gains and steady progress in their assimilation into contemporary police forces and now represent between 20-25% of police in England, South Africa, Australia Ireland, Fiji and Scotland. 157 While the proportion of women entering policing has grown over the last century, it remains male-dominated, especially among the senior ranks. 158,159 Policing services worldwide face difficulty in attracting and retaining women 160 who 'universally suffered discrimination and marginalisation'. 161 Consequently, policing gender violence in Australia and elsewhere continues to be carried out by male-dominated institutions ill-equipped to respond to victims of gender violence with empathy and understanding. 162,163,164,165,166,167 Empirical studies of women police, and women's police stations in Latin America and India have consistently shown that women are more comfortable reporting to women police in a family-friendly environment. 168,169,170,171,172,173,174,175 Policewomen are uniquely placed to gain the trust of women because of their gender and experiences of having families and partners, but female police also have the authority of the state to advocate on behalf of female victims in ways that women cannot. 176 Police who negotiate the divide between gender and justice are simultaneously both regulators of the social order and 'engines for change' who challenge prevailing patriarchal norms that sustain gender violence. 177 This body of research suggests female police enhance women's willingness to report, which then increases the likelihood of action taken to prevent revictimisation. As they operate as a holistic service, they also enlarge women's access to a range of other services such as counselling, health, legal, financial and social support. 178,179,180 Most crucially better service and responses to women facing family and domestic violence cannot be achieved without training, regardless of the sex of the police officer. 'Law and policing have long proved weak remedies to a seemingly intractable problem that demands more imaginative and sustainable solutions including primary prevention'. 181 Women who are victims of gender-based violence need a 'remedy beyond law'. 182 We conclude that there is mounting evidence that WPS, especially those that prioritise prevention over a criminal justice response, could be one of those innovative remedies to gender-based violence. 183,184,185,186,187,188,189,190