The BBC recently reported the case of Sarah (a pseudonym), a woman who tried to use the UK’s Domestic Violence Disclosure Scheme — better known as Clare’s Law — to find out whether her partner had a history of abuse. She was pregnant at the time and growing increasingly afraid.
Her boyfriend had become controlling and manipulative: he accused her of cheating, forbade her from leaving the house, and claimed her behaviour was worsening his mental health. When Sarah asked police for information under Clare’s Law, she was told after a month that there was nothing to disclose.
Five months later, the police contacted her again, this time admitting they had been wrong. Her partner, it turned out, had strangled previous partners and was considered a high-risk perpetrator. By that time, Sarah herself had already experienced strangulation, threats, and physical assaults from him.
The Structural Nature of State Failure
Under Clare’s Law, anyone can make a “right to ask” application to police to learn whether their partner has a record of violence or abuse. Government guidance states that forces must respond within 28 days. But BBC Freedom of Information data revealed that many police forces in England and Wales are routinely breaching that limit:
- Avon and Somerset Police missed the 28-day deadline in nearly 80% of cases in 2024.
- West Mercia and Wiltshire Police failed in over 60% of cases.
- Some people waited over two years for responses.
In Wiltshire, police delays and failures under Clare’s Law have already led to two people coming to harm.
These are not isolated administrative lapses. They are symptoms of the capitalist state’s class character. The capitalist state presents itself as a neutral protector, but its real purpose is the preservation of the existing order: the defence of property, hierarchy, and capitalist social relations.
Protection of the working class, especially of women facing violence, is never its primary concern. The same state that enforces austerity, evicts tenants, and crushes strikes cannot sincerely prioritise women’s safety. Its bureaucratic inefficiency is not a technical glitch; it reflects whose lives are valued, and whose are expendable.
Patriarchy and the Bourgeois Family
In Sarah’s story, her abuser justified his violence by blaming her for his emotional state — “I only do what I do because you make me feel that bad.” This logic mirrors patriarchal ideology itself: women are held responsible for men’s behaviour, and abuse is reframed as a domestic or psychological problem rather than a political one.
The oppression of women under capitalism is not accidental. It stems from the material function of the capitalist family, which Engels described as a unit of both reproduction and domination. The family system isolates women, privatises domestic labour, and turns the home into a site where unpaid reproductive work sustains the labour force.
In this setup, the violence Sarah endured is not a private tragedy, it’s a socially produced condition of women’s subordination. When such violence occurs, the capitalist state responds in ways consistent with its broader role: minimizing, delaying, and depoliticising it.
Reformism Without Power
The Domestic Violence Disclosure Scheme was introduced to appear as a progressive reform: empowering individuals with the “right to know.” Yet the BBC investigation reveals how this reform, filtered through police bureaucracy, becomes hollow.
Police blamed “resource pressures,” an increase in requests (from 14,000 in 2019 to nearly 59,000 in 2024), and fragmented IT systems. But this reflects the contradictions of liberal reformism: reforms that could meaningfully challenge oppression are either underfunded, delayed, or administered through institutions designed for repression.
Instead of strengthening community-based support networks, the capitalist state centralised disclosure in the police, the very institution most distrusted by victims of abuse. Dr Katerina Hadjimatheou, a criminologist quoted in the BBC piece, even noted that most applicants for Clare’s Law disclosures had not previously sought help, meaning these moments were crucial opportunities to prevent serious harm. Yet the police’s mishandling of such cases squanders those opportunities.
This is not merely inefficiency; it is a reflection of class priorities. Capitalist governments will fund surveillance, prisons, and military interventions, but leave domestic abuse units short-staffed and survivors waiting for years.
Economic Dependence and Entrapment
Sarah described how, after her baby was born, she felt “sucked in” and “couldn’t get out of the relationship.” Many women in abusive relationships face the same situation: fear of escalation, lack of money or housing, and concern that authorities will not believe them or will take away their children.
These are material conditions, not psychological weaknesses. They exist because under capitalism, economic dependence and the privatisation of care leave women trapped. Austerity has gutted women’s refuges, housing support, and welfare, making escape from violence ever harder.
The state’s response, meanwhile, is to demand victims navigate bureaucratic systems like Clare’s Law, whose delays and errors expose them to further harm.
A Socialist Alternative
The lesson is clear: reforms like Clare’s Law cannot eliminate the structural roots of gendered violence. Real protection requires social transformation, the construction of a socialist society where the working class holds power.
Such a society would:
- Guarantee housing, childcare, and employment, removing the economic dependence that traps women with abusers.
- Socialise domestic labour and childrearing, breaking the isolation of the family unit.
- Replace police-led disclosure systems with local, democratically run institutions involving trade unions, women’s organisations, and social workers, accountable to the community rather than the state bureaucracy.
- Educate and mobilize the masses to see violence against women not as a private failure but as a betrayal of proletarian solidarity.
Under socialism, the machinery of the state would no longer serve property and profit, but the collective welfare of the working people, and therefore the liberation of women from both economic and patriarchal oppression.
Conclusion
Sarah’s story exposes the moral bankruptcy of a system that leaves survivors begging the police for information it already possesses. It shows how capitalist bureaucracy, austerity, and patriarchal ideology intertwine to perpetuate women’s suffering.
As Sarah herself said, “Had the Clare’s Law disclosure been given correctly at the correct time, I could have made an informed decision. And I would more than likely have left.”
Her words are a condemnation not just of one police force’s delay, but of a whole social order that treats women’s lives as expendable. Until the capitalist state is replaced by a workers’ state, dedicated to uprooting the material basis of exploitation and domination, such tragedies will continue to repeat themselves.
