Intimate Partner Violence, Security, and the State 

Research

Intimate Partner Violence, Security, and the State 

Abstract

 


I defend a security-based account of how the state should address intimate partner violence. Protection of basic security against violence must have a high priority in liberalism. Violence in intimate relationships is a widespread threat to security; indeed, intimate relationships create vulnerabilities to violence and hence involve security risks. While it is often assumed that the criminal justice system protects security, in the case of intimate partner violence, there are distinctive barriers to protecting security. I argue that interventions in intimate relationships to address intimate partner violence are required on grounds of security. I respond to objections that such interventions are paternalistic and illiberal. Not only are such interventions justifiable, they are required by justice to protect basic security – entailing that such interventions have equal priority as securing basic liberties. Taking intimate partner violence as the paradigm security threat compels us to rethink how we understand security and its protection.

Keywords:

  • Keyword: security
  • Keyword: liberalism
  • Keyword: intimate partner violence
  • Keyword: domestic violence
  • Keyword: marriage
  • Keyword: family
  • Keyword: personal relationships
  • Keyword: intimacy

How to Cite:

Brake, E., (2026) “Intimate Partner Violence, Security, and the State ”, Political Philosophy 3(2). doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/pp.27544

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Intimate Partner Violence, Security, and the State

Elizabeth Brake

Philosophy, University of Wisconsin, Madison, US

Violence in intimate relationships is a widespread threat to security, especially for women. This is widely documented and the numbers are staggering. The scale and severity of intimate partner violence are such that a UN report concluded that home is “the most dangerous place for women.”1 According to the UN, roughly one in three women has experienced IPV; more than half of female homicide victims are killed by intimate partners or family members.2 Intimate partner violence is a, if not the, leading threat to women’s security.

An approach to security which takes women’s security seriously should therefore attend to intimate partner violence – yet the state’s role in protecting security in intimate contexts is under-examined in philosophy. Indeed, the topic of intimate partner violence itself is under-examined3 – yet, it raises questions of central importance to political philosophy, such as the nature of security and its protection. Here, I will ask how the state should address intimate partner violence and defend an approach to security which takes women’s security seriously. A plausible approach to security must take intimate partner violence (IPV) as seriously as other forms of violence – and this, I will argue, will have implications for how we conceptualize and address security.

Most of what has been written in recent political philosophy on IPV focuses on criminal law, especially, mandatory arrest and no-drop policies.4 In the US context, for one, this is explicable in light of social and legal changes which have spurred prosecution of IPV since the 1994 Violence Against Women Act. But, as I will argue, intimate relationships pose distinctive threats to security, not all of which are addressed by criminal law. Taking IPV as a central threat to security forces us to rethink how security is to be protected and even how security is defined. Given the barriers to deterring IPV through the penal system, I will defend interventions beyond criminal law. Such interventions, I will argue, are required by justice.

I’ll begin with some terminology. First, I use “intimate partner violence” and “domestic violence” interchangeably, reflecting the literature I discuss, although the term “intimate partner violence” helpfully reminds us that such violence need not occur between cohabitants, or in a home. Second, I use the term “victim” as opposed to “survivor.” “Survivor” is often preferred in therapeutic contexts to emphasize the agency of victims; I use the term “victim” because it is consistent with how we refer to those subject to other crimes, and for the sobering reason that not all victims survive.5 Third, my primary focus is on physical violence as opposed to psychological, emotional, or financial abuse. This is not to dismiss their severity, and indeed, I will have something to say about them. My reason for focusing on physical violence is that physical assault is a clear case in which almost everyone agrees that the state should intervene; yet there are, I argue, unappreciated claims of justice to state action here. Fourth, despite my focus on women as IPV victims, men, genderqueer, and non-binary people are also IPV victims, and IPV occurs in same-sex as well as in straight relationships.

I will argue that any plausible form of liberalism must accept the arguments I make regarding security. The article proceeds as follows. First, I argue that basic security of the person must be a high priority for the liberal state. Liberal theories of justice need an account of how security will be protected: I argue that its priority requires that legal institutions (or any state institutions) should be framed so as to protect security (Section I). Then, I argue that intimate relationships in themselves create vulnerabilities to violence and hence security risks. The state should thus protect against such risks in intimate relationships. While it is assumed that the criminal justice system protects security through deterrence, in the case of IPV, there are distinctive barriers to protecting security through the criminal justice system. Addressing the underlying vulnerabilities in relationships is arguably a more effective means to protect security than criminal law. Addressing IPV effectively thus requires interventions in intimate relationships (Section II). In the third section, I reply to objections that such interventions are paternalistic or otherwise illiberal. In the fourth and final section, I highlight some benefits of the account. Notably, it dovetails with recent work in non-ideal theory and it provides a response to recent arguments for abolishing marriage.

I. THE PRIORITY OF SECURITY

Justice requires that citizens enjoy basic security. By “basic security,” I mean effective protection from physical violence by other agents, e.g., assault, kidnapping, and murder – and not protection against disasters or other non-agential dangers or risks. A just society requires that citizens enjoy basic security of the person against threats to life and physical assault. I will argue that security of the person must be at the highest level of priority because it is a precondition of enjoying other rights and liberties.

Security is noted as a right by many liberal theorists. John Locke wrote that reason teaches us that, according to the law of nature, “no one ought to harm another in his Life, Health, Liberty, or Possessions.”6 Basic security, of course, protects “life, health, and liberty” against harm by others. John Rawls includes “integrity of the person” among the liberties in Political Liberalism and the revised edition of Theory of Justice.7 And Robert Nozick argued that the (minimal) state was justified as an association protecting security, including one’s external property as well as one’s body, “against force, theft, fraud, …”8

But, as Henry Shue influentially argued, security stands in a special relation to all other rights. Shue defines the right to security as a right “not to be subjected to murder, torture, mayhem, rape, or assault.”9 In Shue’s terminology, security is a basic right. Basic rights are those rights which are necessary for or presupposed “in both the enjoyment and the protection of all other rights. Other rights could not be enjoyed in the absence of security or subsistence, even if the other rights were somehow miraculously protected in such a situation.”10 Although we might, for example, be able to run from Point A to Point B “miraculously” unharmed in an area where violent attacks are widespread, we cannot be said to enjoy the right to freedom of movement if bullets are whizzing past in all directions: “from the viewpoint of the bearer of a right it would be false or misleading to assert that a right had been fulfilled unless in the enjoyment of the substance of that right, a person also enjoyed protection against the threats that could ordinarily be expected to prevent, or hinder to a major degree, the enjoyment of the initial right.”11

Security is thus a basic right (like subsistence, on Shue’s view) because it is a condition for the protection and enjoyment of all other rights: “No one can fully enjoy any right that is supposedly protected by society if someone can credibly threaten him or her with murder, rape, beating, etc., when he or she tries to enjoy the alleged right. Such threats to physical security are among the most serious and … widespread hindrances to the enjoyment of any right.”12 Without the right to security, one could not reliably exercise rights to freedom of movement, free speech, political participation, freedom of association, and so on.

Shue is a human rights theorist, but these points regarding the enjoyment and protection of liberties apply across liberal frameworks. If people cannot reasonably expect freedom from arbitrary violence, they cannot reliably exercise their liberties, and so security of the person is a condition of reliably exercising the liberties. Security is thus a precondition to a just society: a society in which we could not regularly and reliably go about our daily lives without assault is not one in which liberties could be reliably exercised. Exercising the liberties depends on having the right to move about and speak without assault or the constant threat of assault.13 In James Nickel’s words, security rights are “essential building blocks for a system of liberty.”14

Security rights thus must be at the highest level of priority for liberal theories of justice, because securing them is a necessary condition for securing all the liberties.15 (Even though one might “miraculously” enjoy that which the liberty protects in the absence of security, one cannot say that the liberty itself is protected if one cannot exercise it securely.) As Shue writes, because basic rights are needed to protect all other rights, “giving less priority to any basic right than to normal non-basic rights is literally impossible.”16 Any theory of justice committed to liberties must thus accord the highest priority to security in the design of its institutions. The priority of security grounds a claim that the state take effective means to protect security (subject to epistemic burdens, feasibility, and conflict with other liberties). This implies that the design of legal institutions should protect security, with at least equal priority to (other) liberties. (Security is not technically a liberty, but I refer to it thus, loosely.17)

This claim about the priority of security is not a normative claim about what justice demands, but a logical claim about the precondition for the protection of any other rights.18 Nicholas Southwood and Robert Goodin have helpfully distinguished two senses of the phrase “justice requires.” This phrase, they note, is “ambiguous between claims involving requirements-as-necessary conditions for justice and requirements-as-demands of justice.”19 That is, we can distinguish between what is required as a necessary condition for justice and what is required as a deontic demand of justice addressed to certain individuals or collectives.20 Shue’s argument, applied to liberal theories, suggests that security is required as a necessary condition of liberal justice, because liberties cannot be enjoyed in the absence of security. And this requirement (in the sense of necessary condition) gives the protection of security a priority.

To clarify, I am not arguing that security should have absolute priority; a moment’s reflection will show that not all other goods should be sacrificed to security. Security must be weighed with other liberties and moreover, it requires effective protection, not every conceivable protection. (And, as Shue argues, it only requires protection against commonplace threats, not every conceivable threat.21) For example, prohibiting and redacting all discussions of violence, including in journalism, works of history, and works of literary merit, would (in my view) clearly be going too far, even if it were demonstrated that this could somewhat reduce the incidence of violence; plausibly, this is not required for effective protection against commonplace threats. But it is clear that there may be more realistic, and more difficult, cases of conflicts between security and liberties such as freedom of speech, religion, movement, and association.

While I will return to these conflicts briefly below, how to resolve such conflicts with liberties and how much protection is required are important questions outside the scope of this article (and different theories will yield different approaches to settling this question). Dealing with tradeoffs among liberties, and among risks, raises very difficult questions.22 My point is simply the modest, and general, one that the effective protection of basic security must be at the highest level of priority.

One point about tradeoffs should be noted here, however. The distribution of security matters. Security should not be interpreted merely as a requirement to prevent the most violent assaults, no matter their distribution. Because security is required by justice as a precondition for enjoying rights, theories committed to the equal protection of liberties are committed to the equal protection of security. Thus, equal distribution of security (i.e., effective protection against violence) among different social groups matters. A policy which saved the most lives would be unjust if it saved only the lives of the wealthy while the worse-off were unprotected. To take another example, Amia Srinivasan cites a study suggesting that mandatory arrest policies in IPV increase violence against black women, through retaliatory violence, while deterring violence against white women.23 A policy which inadvertently increases violence against black women while reducing violence against white women exemplifies the distributive point: this distribution of protection is unjust. The distribution of security matters from the standpoint of justice.

Finally, protecting basic security has priority over protection against non-agential risk and hazard, such as disease and disaster, as well as over non-directed risks arising from negligence. An assurance that basic security is protected allows us to interact in relations with others in which violence is prohibited and we have some confidence that the prohibition is effective. We cannot interact with others in decision-making or cooperation if we do not feel some assurance that they will not violently assault us. This is a reason, one which links basic security to citizens’ status as equal rights-bearers, for elevating the protection of basic security over protection against other kinds of risk.

Before proceeding to ask how the liberal state should protect security, I will make one further point about taking IPV seriously as a security threat against which the state should provide effective protection. I have defined “basic security” in an uncontroversial way as protection against physical violence: (almost) everyone agrees the state should play a role in addressing physical assault. But taking IPV seriously suggests we should consider larger patterns of abusive behavior, some of which does not consist in physical violence. IPV predominantly occurs as a pattern of behavior including isolation, threats, financial control, and monitoring of behavior (termed “coercive control” by Evan Stark).24 This led Claudia Card to remark that domestic violence “is a campaign, a policy, not an isolated episode.”25 IPV is a distinctive type of violence: repetitive, patterned, not all physical.26 A focus on single acts of physical violence may obscure threats to security. When the law focuses on single incidents of violence, it is “unable to ‘see’” the repetitive nature of the violence and may consequently underestimate it.27 Likewise, when the law focuses only on physical violence, it may ignore other behaviors, such as emotional abuse, which enable and compound physical violence.28

In favor of extending “basic security” to include a larger pattern of violence which is not all physical, consider that agents’ exercise of their rights, and more generally, pursuit of their plans, requires not just that the state take effective means to protect security, but that agents have warrant to believe that they can proceed securely. Such warrant may be undermined by a persistent atmosphere of threats and control, even when physical violence is not present.

Despite these considerations in favor of expanding the definition of security beyond protection from physical violence, my argument does not rely on expanding it. The argument of this article depends only on interpreting security more ecumenically, as “effective protection from physical violence by other agents.” But the interventions I argue for may in effect protect against the larger pattern of coercive control as well.

Having set out the definition of basic security and its priority, we can move forward. It might be thought that the criminal justice system has a special place in protecting security, since punishment might deter violence, as well as removing users of violence from society, expressing social disapproval of violence, or preventing escalating retaliation.29 Rawls, for example, suggests that security justifies the penal system in a Hobbesian way, because the threat of punishment provides security through mutual deterrence.30 But, as I will argue is the case with IPV, deterrence through the penal system does not always adequately protect security.

The priority of security implies that security should figure in any legal institutions in which effective protections can be implemented; its protection should not be limited to the criminal justice system. To take a low-level example, security is just such a consideration when a council places lighting on a dark street to deter opportunistic violence. Likewise, marriage and family law may be designed to protect security by protecting against vulnerability to abuse. Limiting the protection of security to criminal justice and the penal system is arbitrary, if other institutions can protect it more effectively (without countervailing costs sufficient to block or outweigh the protection). Other legal institutions may protect security and may be needed to do so effectively. There is no principled reason to restrict protection of security to criminal law, if other institutions can protect it as, or more, effectively.

It might be thought that, unlike other liberties, security should only be upheld in a backward-looking way – that is, that the state has no special role in protecting against security risks, but it should punish security violations. But, for one thing, this would differentiate it arbitrarily from other liberties, which are protected across institutions. For another, a common argument for the penal system is that it protects security by deterring violence – for those holding such a view, its rationale is to reduce risk of violence, not (simply) to punish offenders. But punishment is not the only – and arguably not the most effective – way to protect security.

So far, I have been defending the priority of security at the theoretical level. But how would the priority of security be applied in designing institutions? The priority of security suggests that (so far as it can) the state should take effective means to preventing interpersonal violence. Surely this implies that it should take the most effective means among alternatives when there is no countervailing cost; it might also require that the state provide effective protection above a certain baseline (e.g., reducing incidences of assault to a certain rate). The priority of security also implies that where legal institutions can be structured to protect more effectively against it (without countervailing costs), the state should do so.

Institutions can seek to protect security directly or indirectly. Direct protections offer protections against vulnerabilities and interventions aimed directly at stopping violence or allowing escape, such as a safe-house to shelter the victim. Direct interventions targeting violence may be long-term, such as job counseling within the safe house to help the victim become independent or educational programs aimed at decreasing violence. Indirect approaches try to reduce the incidence of violence by addressing its precursors or social determinants. For example, Goodmark argues that because male unemployment correlates with domestic violence, reducing unemployment is an effective means of reducing IPV.31 Direct protections will be the main focus of my argument. This is not because I am ruling out indirect approaches. However, because they aim at protecting security by addressing some other thing (such as unemployment), they less clearly fall within the rationale for the priority of security which I have given. They aim not at protecting security directly, but as a side effect of some other intervention. However, with adequate empirical evidence of their effectiveness, there well may be a strong case for such indirect measures as a means of protecting security.32

II. INTIMATE RELATIONSHIPS AS SECURITY RISKS

Intimate relationships are security risks. They create distinctive opportunities for violence. Such opportunities are not limited to marriage or marriage-like relationships, but they also exist in friendships, between adult children and elderly parents, and between parents and children. I have argued that basic security must be a high priority for the state because insecurity constrains the exercise of liberties. Yet, for victims of intimate partner violence, such insecurity is common, limiting the exercise of their liberties to some degree. For example, a victim of IPV may be limited in her freedom to associate, her freedom of occupation, even her right to vote.

Indeed, many philosophers have argued that some vulnerabilities are intrinsic to valuable relationships and such vulnerabilities reflect or deepen their value - for example, making oneself vulnerable to another can build trust.33 But the same features of intimacy, access, and trust which can make such relationships valuable also make them sites of vulnerability to wrong-doing.34 There is a long history of feminist work on women’s vulnerability, in particular, within marriage and intimate relationships.35

I argue, drawing on some of this work, that intimate relationships create vulnerabilities to violence and that these vulnerabilities also produce distinctive barriers to enforcing criminal law against IPV. I focus on vulnerabilities to violence in adult intimate relationships. Some of these vulnerabilities may be inherent to intimate relationships and hence intractable. Some vulnerabilities are created by the state. (For example, marriage law may exacerbate some pre-existing vulnerabilities and create new ones in preventable ways.) In either case, to the extent that vulnerabilities to violence can be addressed through protective measures, they should be addressed by the state as a means of protecting against a widespread threat to security.

To be clear, by “intimacy,” I mean physical, informational, and emotional access not granted to strangers; this comes in degrees.36 It is not limited to romantic or sexual relationships, but extends to friendships and family relationships. By “relationship,” I mean an evolving series of interactions between particular persons over time.37 Intimate relationships, through their essential features of evolving patterns of access over time, create vulnerabilities to violence. Feminists have drawn a great deal of attention to one way that this happens, typically in gender-structured relationships: exit options are limited as economic dependency develops. But a second kind of vulnerability, which I call “vulnerabilities of access,” arise from the features of intimate relationships themselves.

A. Economic and Material Dependency

Economic and material dependency which arises in relationships creates vulnerability to abuse. While such dependency arises from contingent, not essential, features of intimate relationships, it is associated with gender-structured marriages and, more broadly, with shared lives. Lack of funds, secure housing, child care, and health insurance burdens victims’ exit options from relationships and thereby enables abuse.38 One study found that “90 percent of wives who stayed with their husbands following a rape depended on the husband for money, whereas only 24 percent of those who left faced this financial constraint. . . . 100 percent of those women who were the sole providers for their households at the time of the rape left their husbands following the act.”39 Means to support oneself and one’s children are a key determinant of vulnerability to abuse.40 While feminist analyses have focused on economic dependency in gender-structured marriages, material dependency occurs more broadly in long-term intimate relationships when partners share aspects of their lives: for example, when they share housing and could not easily afford separate housing, when they depend on one another for childcare and could not easily afford paid care, and so on.

Economic and material dependency also creates difficulties for enforcement of criminal laws against IPV, deterring victims from reporting.41 Victims might not report IPV because imprisoning the abuser risks removing their financial support or housing, placing them at risk of homelessness or poverty.42 Addressing abuse by simply removing the abuser does not protect, and may even overall harm, victims who are economically dependent on their abusers. This may deter victims from reporting abuse; Srinivasan cites reports that criminalization leads to a drop in reports of violence, not of violence itself, due to victims’ fears of losing financial support.43 Once again, this does not only apply to gender-structured relationships, but any relationships involving economic or material dependency.

Insofar as poverty and lack of access to housing, healthcare, and childcare are distributive injustices, the state should address them on those grounds. On my view, they are unjust for a further reason: within relationships, they create vulnerability to violence, risking the basic security of the person. In effect, the victim is trapped in the relationship with the abuser by these needs. This raises the priority of these interventions to the level of the liberties. However, even with increased access to resources, intimacy would still, in itself, create vulnerabilities to violence.

B. Vulnerabilities of Access

Intimacy, including social and legal aspects of intimacy, creates multiple “vulnerabilities of access.” Vulnerabilities of access afford the abuser the opportunity – the time and place, the privacy, and the knowledge, including knowledge of the victim’s psychology – for violence. These arise from the physical, informational, and emotional access involved in intimacy as well as through its legal formalization (such as legal marriage). For example, Lacy Johnson’s memoir The Other Side recounts the ordeal of kidnapping and assault she underwent after voluntarily entering her ex-partner’s car.44 Her entering the car gave him the physical opportunity to kidnap her, but it was the emotional access – his understanding of how to manipulate her into the car – which gave him that opportunity.

Intimate relationships produce vulnerabilities of access. Some of these are physical and logistical. Cohabitation or simply spending time together provides the abuser with physical access. Many vulnerabilities of access arise through the logistics of intimacy and shared lives, which give the abuser knowledge of how to access the victim: knowledge of daily routines, access to information such as workplace, work and school schedules, leisure activities, financial information, and passwords to accounts and smart appliances. Depending on the jurisdiction, legal terms of marriage or jointly owned property can enable access.45

Emotional interdependency, co-parenting, and shared family and friends and social networks also contribute to vulnerabilities of access, providing opportunities for contact as well as significant pressures on choice (such as pressures to reconcile at the risk of shunning by one’s entire family). Two types of emotional vulnerability should be distinguished here. One is the vulnerability which Niko Kolodny argues arises in love: in loving another you become vulnerable to their fate, so that you suffer if they suffer.46 Another is the vulnerability to manipulation, blackmail, or emotional abuse created by exposing one’s emotions: a partner who knows their partner’s tendency to jealousy, anger, or fear can use those emotions to harm or control them, for instance. Both types of emotional vulnerability typically arise in intimate relationships and both create opportunities for abuse (again, as the case of Johnson entering her abuser’s car exemplifies).

Social pressures and expectations regarding relationships in particular, such as strong social disapproval for divorce or (less formally) for leaving one’s partner, or simply against being single, can also increase vulnerability.47 Such pressures also strongly interact with social expectations around gender, such as that women should play specific roles in marriage or that it is fitting for a male partner to express jealousy through violence.48

All of these vulnerabilities may be exacerbated by hierarchy or dominance. A specific concern of feminists has been gender hierarchy within male-female relationships.49 Gender norms and gendered norms about relationships are plausibly strong drivers of vulnerabilities to IPV.50 But many forms of hierarchy arise in relationships: there are also hierarchies of race, class, appearance, and ability, and these may be intersectional.51 Furthermore, vulnerabilities of access arise even in the absence of such hierarchies: two similarly situated friends with similar backgrounds living together become vulnerable to one another by sharing their space and access to their information, opening to each other emotionally, and sharing confidences. This will be the case even if they are evenly matched in position. Hierarchy, like economic dependency, exacerbates vulnerabilities of access, but it is distinct from them.

The very practices and physical and emotional circumstances of intimacy enable abuse. While vulnerabilities of access are exacerbated by financial dependence and hierarchy, some vulnerability is ineliminable in intimacy. This follows from the nature of intimate relationships. Intimate relationships, which by their nature extend over time, are the context for long-term, systematic violence, and intimate knowledge and access gained in such relationships provides opportunities for violence.

Intimate relationships distinctively create such vulnerabilities. They combine long-term physical and psychological access, emotional attachments, and social pressures and expectations regarding intimate relationships. While the conjunction of such conditions – intimacy, emotional involvement, and social pressures – may arise in atypical contexts (an emotionally close employer-employee relationship), it is in intimate personal relationships that they regularly arise, creating a context distinguished by these vulnerability-creating features. Of course, there are structural similarities in other domains, such as employer-employee relationships which involve economic dependency and some informational and physical access. But cases which involve not just dependency, but also intimate knowledge and emotional attachment, edge closer to intimate relationships, as when employer and employee become close friends. Although examples arise in other domains, it is the context of intimate personal relationships which regularly produces this particular conjunction of vulnerabilities created by intimacy, emotion, and social pressure, usually accompanied by some degree of economic or material dependency.

In sum, characteristic features of relationships (intimacy, emotion, social pressures and expectations) create vulnerabilities. The very same features which create vulnerabilities create challenges for criminal law intervention. Just as economic and material dependency creates difficulties for effective law enforcement intervention, so too vulnerabilities of access create difficulties for effective criminal law intervention by enabling retaliatory violence and pressure not to testify or to withdraw charges.52 They thus impede criminal prosecution by deterring reporting, charging, and testifying. As Victor Tadros writes, “Cases of domestic abuse are probably less likely to result in arrest. The victim is often less willing to see a prosecution go ahead or to testify if the prosecution does proceed than are victims of violence in non-domestic contexts.”53 Vulnerabilities of access also make victims vulnerable to retaliatory violence following criminal charges. Criminalization may temporarily remove the abuser from proximity to the victim, but it does not otherwise repair the vulnerabilities of access.

C. Addressing Vulnerabilities Effectively

Intimate relationships create security risks, and the mechanisms by which they do also impede efforts at enforcing criminal law, since victims may depend on their abusers economically or fear retaliation, and hence be deterred from pressing charges or testifying. Some recent critics of the criminal law approach to IPV have argued that it has limited effectiveness in deterring IPV for these reasons: Leigh Goodmark, for example, claims that “[t]he evidence that criminalizing” IPV has deterred IPV is “inconclusive.”54 Mandatory arrest and no-drop prosecutorial policies (prosecutorial policies not to drop domestic violence charges) are one strategy for protecting victims against such pressures.55 These policies are controversial, drawing criticism as leading to disproportionate enforcement against people of color, motivating retaliatory violence, deterring reporting, increasing false charges against the victim, and “revictimizing” victims who are compelled to testify and harshly cross-examined.56 Here, I do not address mandatory prosecution policies or the empirical question of whether such policies have reduced IPV. My point is that there is an alternate, and arguably more effective, approach to protecting security other than criminal law. This alternate approach is to install legal protections against the two types of vulnerabilities which enable IPV and impede enforcement of criminal law. Basic security is at risk in IPV, and so justice requires that the state take effective means to protect it.

To be clear, I am not arguing against criminalizing IPV or enforcing criminal law. Even if critics are correct that criminal law does not deter IPV, it also has important symbolic effects: expressing social disapproval and recognizing the rights of victims. But my arguments suggest that the provisions I defend may be required as stringently as criminalization and criminal law enforcement: if criminalization is justified on grounds of security (as Rawls, for one, suggests), so too are victim protections – and they may be even more justifiable, if more effective.

Not taking a stand on the empirical claims may seem to weaken my argument. If what is required is that the state take the most effective means, the objector might think, then the policies I defend will only be required in conditions when they are the most effective – which may be rarely, or never. However, only in an idealized epistemic state will we know exactly which policies will be most effective. As I argued above, the state should address threats to security throughout the basic structure, going beyond criminal justice to other areas of law. It should install streetlights in deserted areas, fund mental health programs likely to reduce violence, and regulate the sales of weapons. In real-world conditions, it will not be clear which policies are most effective. Given this, claims to security require that the state design institutions in ways which are likely to protect it. To return to previous examples, the state should address IPV through policies in multiple areas where there is evidence of effectiveness (taking into account countervailing costs): health, tax law, employment law, childcare, marriage and family law. As vulnerability emerges across many domains, addressing IPV requires interventions to protect victims across many domains of law. Considering how vulnerabilities arise suggests how we can protect security other than criminal law.

I should address, to set aside, one other possible solution. Someone might think that if intimate relationships produce risk, another solution would be to discourage intimate relationships. It is not clear how this could be done without intolerable intrusion into liberties (and ultimately security, if this would involve the use of force). Moreover, some of the characteristic features of such relationships are valuable; insofar as the state should support such goods, trying to eradicate them would arguably itself be unjust.57

D. Protective Policies

What do protective interventions other than criminal law enforcement look like? First, where law creates vulnerabilities of access (such as giving spouses legal access rights to a shared domicile) with no countervailing benefits, it can eliminate them. Second, law can constructively address some aspects of access which arise from economic and material dependency, intimacy, social pressure, and emotional attachment. I will now consider these in more detail.

First, if state policies create vulnerability to physical assault, such policies should be reformed to protect security, assuming there is no countervailing cost to security or another priority. Just as prison violence occurs in state institutions, so too violence in marriage and the family occurs in state institutions.58 Vulnerabilities created through law, such as legal access rights to a shared domicile, mitigations on assault within marriage or dating, difficult-to-exit “covenant marriage” or restrictions on divorce, and incentives for economic dependency should be eliminated.

Second, security interests require the state to enact effective policies mitigating vulnerability to violence, even if it has not created it (again, assuming there are not greater costs to doing so). Addressing the vulnerabilities which enable IPV means addressing economic and material dependency, creating exit options and creating protections against the vulnerabilities of access. Insofar as poverty and lack of housing, healthcare, and childcare are distributive injustices, the state should address these on other grounds. But my argument ratchets up the priority of this intervention: when their lack creates vulnerability to violence, thereby risking the basic security of the person, providing housing, support, and childcare falls under security. The payoff of my argument is that such policies are justified as a means of protecting security and thus at the highest level of priority.

It might be objected that this account will spread too far: insofar as lack of housing or poverty is a security threat, this account will entail that housing and resources be made available at the highest level of priority. But whether this is a reductio is debatable: if housing is necessary to protect security, as when unhoused people are regularly subject to violence, then its provision does seem the suitable basis for a claim of justice. (Shue argues that subsistence is a basic right.) But the objector should make sure they are targeting the objection correctly: the security account only demands protection against agential violence, and not non-agential conditions (such as illness or exposure). Moreover, we can distinguish the condition of poverty in general from the condition of being unable to leave a relationship due to lack of funds: it is the latter which I focus on here, in that it makes victims particularly vulnerable to violence because they cannot leave their abusers.

Beyond protecting exit options and addressing material and economic dependency, law can also constructively address the vulnerabilities of access. Special legal protections against vulnerabilities of access would entitle victims to specific accommodations at work and school to protect against retaliatory violence and end the access granted by relationships. These could include legal rights to schedule changes and location transfers at school or work and shifts away from public-facing work in order to prevent unwanted contact. They could also include restricted information and financial and technological access; financial and technology providers could be required to provide shortcuts to changing access in IPV cases. Effective measures will depend on the context, but legal protections against some vulnerabilities of access are feasible. These protections can be justified on security grounds when they remove opportunities for violence. But not all opportunities can be justly removed. For example, preventing people from dating or being alone together would be an intolerable restriction of liberty. What law can do – consistent with respecting liberties – is to remove opportunities for violence at the requests of victims.

Law can build legal safeguards into relationships which carry risk, so that entering such relationships (formally or informally) provides eligibility for protections. By analogy, compare employment. Vulnerability arising from economic dependency is not unique to IPV; employment too has opportunities for exploitation, retaliation, surveillance, and control. Law can justly structure employment to protect against vulnerabilities, e.g., requiring overtime pay, minimum wage, workplace safety regulations, and protection against harassment. Indeed, one category of workers has protective needs which overlap with victims of IPV: domestic workers, who face abuse and coercion within the home and the context of intimacy, and deserve legal protections as such.59 Likewise, legal protections could be built into intimate relationships.

One set of protections could be universal: entering relationships formally or informally could trigger a suite of legal entitlements to protect against vulnerabilities created by intimate relationships. These would protect exit through access to safe housing, childcare, financial support, and expedited immigration status in cases of abuse. These could also include the special legal protections against the vulnerabilities of access, to be triggered by the voluntary request of someone at risk of violence in an intimate relationship.

Another set of legal protections could be built into formal recognition of relationships (such as marriage); such recognition could be designed to prevent IPV. For example, marriage licensing (or any recognition of personal relationships, such as civil union or minimal marriage) could incorporate education with demonstrated effectiveness at preventing violence. More speculatively, a form of marriage contracting might reduce dependency: requiring prospective spouses to discuss financial terms for dissolution could caution partners against economic dependency before the dependency develops. In “Monogamy’s Law,” Elizabeth Emens recommends such a practice regarding expectations of monogamy; simply requiring prospective spouses to discuss the topic may force them to think through alternatives they would otherwise ignore.60 Similarly, non-binding discussions of expectations around economic dependency and marriage dissolution could be required when people seek marriage. Further, given that a hallmark of abuse is isolation, bringing more people into intimate relationships may guard against IPV. Marriage law recognizing care networks could make relationships more permeable and address amatonormative pressure into dyadic relationships.61 If the isolated couple form itself creates vulnerability to abuse, recognizing other relationship forms may be preventative.

Of these two approaches, universal legal protections for relationships should be prioritized over marriage reform. This is because equal protection of security requires taking into account how policies would affect differently situated groups. Given demographic differences in marriage rates, assigning legal protections through marriage will in effect exclude worse-off groups, who marry at lower rates. Annika Simpson argues that tying marital benefits to licensing could harm racialized groups by creating impediments to benefits.62 Universal protections would distribute security more equally. However, both sets of interventions could be required insofar as they are effective means of protecting security.

Before defending the compatibility of such interventions with liberty, I want to return to the distinction between direct and indirect measures, and note an additional distinction between immediate and long-term measures. Exit options which allow victims to remove themselves from danger (even if only temporarily) are direct and immediate protections. Being able to go to a safe house with one’s child directly and immediately protects the victim’s security by allowing her to escape violence. Longer-term preventative measures, such as relationship education incorporated into universal education or screening incorporated into universal healthcare,63 are still direct as they directly aim at reducing the incidence of violence. As policies become less direct and the protective effect more tenuous, such as addressing social determinants of IPV, they less clearly fall within protecting security. Direct and immediate protections such as enabling victims to get away from abusers are clearly required to effectively protect their security, and as such are higher-priority interventions than longer-term or indirect interventions.

Recognizing the security interests in relationships changes the priority of interventions. For example, a lesser interest might not justify special legal protections or access to exit options. But because protection of security is of the highest priority, and because its protection should be implemented, as effective, through legal institutions, identifying IPV as a security interest justifies such interventions.

III. LIMITS ON STATE INTERVENTION IN INTIMATE RELATIONSHIPS

In this section, I will address three objections: first, that effective interventions will be paternalistic and hence illiberal; second, that effective interventions will invoke a contested conception of the good relationship and hence be deemed illegitimate by liberals committed to neutrality; third, that effective interventions will conflict with the protected private sphere or protected liberties.

Concerns about state paternalism are found throughout contemporary legal literature on IPV. For example, Goodmark writes that mandatory arrest and no-drop policies deprive women “of the ability to determine whether and how the state will intervene in their relationships.”64 This suggests the objection that the strategies I propose are paternalistic, that they wrongly interfere in victims’ decision-making on the ground of what the state deems to be their good.

A first reply is that the protections I propose offer choices. Legal safeguards can be used or not, and entry into formal institutions is voluntary. These protections do not restrict but expand choice. However, the objector could pursue the point: such choice architecture interferes in choice by shaping options on paternalistic grounds. Designing marriage law on grounds of the participants’ own good appears to engage in paternalistic judgments. Likewise, offering ways to end intimate access within relationships in some cases (such as revoking access rights to a shared domicile or accounts) appears to substitute the state’s judgment of what is in the victim’s best interests for what she had previously chosen (and would otherwise be bound to). Seana Shiffrin makes such a point regarding unconscionability doctrine in contracts: “even some freedom-enhancing behavior can be paternalist,” she writes, when someone provides options for another, against that person’s expressed preferences or even before they have chosen, on grounds of that person’s best interests. For Shiffrin, paternalistic policies are those which substitute the paternalist’s judgment for that of the person affected, in an area in which the affected person has the authority to make their own decisions.65 This would seem to apply to designing marriage law, or offering protections which might override a victim’s earlier commitments.

However, Shiffrin’s defense of unconscionability doctrine provides a response to this worry.66 While a liberal state should not substitute its judgment of citizens’ best interests for their own in areas in which citizens have authority to choose, the state can refuse to recognize or enforce contracts which it find exploitative or morally objectionable. Recognizing citizens’ right to make certain decisions does not require the state to use its resources to enforce those decisions – particularly when this might amount to enabling “harmful, exploitative, or immoral” behavior. In such cases, Shiffrin writes, “metaphorically … the state refuses, for its own sake, to be a codependent.”67 Similarly, the state could justify policies such as I have described, not on the paternalist grounds that it knows better than citizens what is good for them, but on the self-regarding grounds that it refuses to enable and enforce opportunities for violence.

This (particularly the use of moral language) may prompt another concern for liberals committed to neutrality, namely that the choices offered reflect an illegitimate judgment by the state that certain relationships are undesirable or immoral. This could be framed as an objection on grounds of perfectionism, that the institutional choices offered wrongly invoke a contested conception of the good relationship. After all, the objector might urge, parties’ choosing a relationship involving consensual violence – such as BDSM – surely reflects a conception of the good with regard to which the state should be neutral.68 But this could extend to cases in which parties would consent to remain in an abusive relationship, say, on religious grounds.

Two examples will help clarify the worry.

Example 1: “Resolve To Stop the Violence” program. I have suggested effective programs be incorporated into marriage licensing or public education. The “Resolve To Stop the Violence” program, which challenges ideas about gender roles and relationships, is effective – more effective than anger-management programs – at reducing IPV.69 But beliefs about gender roles in relationships seem like paradigmatic cases of views with regard to which the state should remain neutral.

Example 2: Formal conditions on marriage. I have suggested using conditions on marriage to incorporate education effective in reducing IPV or to discourage entering relationships with limited exit options. But this might seem to use the coercive power of the state in service of a comprehensive conception of the ideal relationship as low-conflict and economically independent. (Of course, this assumes that existing marriage law is itself neutral, a questionable assumption which I set aside to consider the objection.70)

However, such interventions embedded in public education and marriage law can be justified by a neutral rationale. Basic security, as part of the content of justice and a logical precondition for it, is a neutral rationale, which can justify intervention.

Consider an analogy with public health campaigns: the state issues warnings about certain behaviors to promote health. If these warnings were grounded in a vision of human excellence as involving athleticism, say, they would be illegitimately perfectionist. But as grounded in the primary good of health, these warnings do not (on that count) violate the constraints of neutrality. Just so, warning about the security risks of relationships, or intervening in relationships to protect security, does not commit the state to a comprehensive conception of the good relationship. Protective state intervention against vulnerabilities arising in relationships can be justified to the neutral liberal on grounds of security.

A third, and perhaps the most difficult, problem is that effective interventions risk violating privacy. The history of IPV and privacy is thorny. Historically, the private sphere, construed as marriage and family, was shielded from justice.71 Echoes of this view can still be found in late 20th century philosophical writing on marriage, e.g., the idea that the valuable private sphere must be protected from external interference.72 But an assault in an intimate relationship or a marriage should not be mitigated just because it occurs in an intimate relationship or a marriage. The private sphere should not be shielded from justice as such. Historical justifications for the exclusion of the private sphere from justice – such as that married couples were one person and so could not wrong each other, or that affection would regulate families so there was no need for justice – face serious problems.73

Moreover, the notion of marriage and the family as a “private sphere” needs rethinking. The state intervenes in relationships in many ways, in structuring their terms (in marriage and family law) and flagging them as eligible for or liable to certain provisions (tax law, healthcare, zoning, employment, residency, housing policy). Law constructs the supposedly private sphere of intimacy and family and undergirds social norms and practices. It presents one family path as normative, with legal and social penalties for those who deviate: examples include bans on polygamy, same-sex marriage, and interracial marriage. The legal structure of intimate relationships (at least those formally recognized, such as marriage and family) is not itself private.

However, concern about the private sphere, construed as a zone of protected liberty around the person and in consensual relations, is abiding within feminism. In her landmark critique of privacy, Catharine MacKinnon wrote: “the very things feminism regards as central to the subjection of women … form the core of the privacy doctrine’s coverage …. The legal concept of privacy can and has shielded the place of battery, marital rape, and women’s exploited domestic labor.”74 The worry, then, is that privacy rights, or whatever liberties are construed as falling under the doctrine of privacy, prevent effective intervention by protecting choices which create vulnerability. This brings us back to the tradeoffs I noted above between protecting security and liberties (construed as part of the domain of privacy), particularly freedoms of speech, religion, and association. If socially created gender norms of dominance and entitlement produce IPV, then effective protection of security seems to require addressing gender norms (as the Resolve to Stop the Violence Program does).75 But effective interventions may be in tension with privacy.

These tensions are not easy to resolve, but I want to suggest how my account would handle them and how the priority of security might affect them. First, clearly security would not allow all kinds of interference with liberty, as I noted above. Freedom of association would protect the choice to associate, which entails that the state should not stop victims from returning to their abusers if they freely choose to (with real options to do otherwise).76 On the security approach, this seems right: there is no way to prevent association without restricting bodily movement, also imperiling security.

But the terms of intimate relationships are not completely shielded from interference, even if relationships are informal. Just as employer/employee relationships have defined protections built in law, so can intimate relationships (such as economic terms protecting exit). A couple may choose immersive, life-structuring forms of BDSM, living voluntarily in dominant and submissive roles, or as head of household and helpmeet, but their exit options should be protected and special legal protections against the vulnerabilities of access should be available to them. (Of course, a pressing concern well beyond the scope of this article is the transmission of such values to children.77)

Social pressures and expectations, as relayed and created through speech, media, religion, small associations, and so on, are another domain in which privacy, or liberties falling under privacy, seems to protect the creation of vulnerability. Many social and cultural products portray IPV in ways which normalize or even encourage it. Should parents be prevented from reading fairy tales which depict IPV to their children (we might be worried about Bluebeard, Beauty and the Beast, or Little Red Riding Hood, as well as much of Greek mythology)? Should violent pornography or video games be censored or otherwise regulated?78 Should the state intervene with ‘tradwife’ influencers who promote economic dependency for young women, potentially increasing their vulnerability to violence? And what of religious texts which depict domestic abuse as normal, and escape from it as against religious teachings? All of these could be construed as within the domain of privacy or protected liberties, yet all might seem to increase vulnerability to IPV.

The protected sphere of liberties will limit intrusions into speech and religion. But there is much the state can do consistent with respecting liberties. First, consider again the analogy of public health warnings about smoking. Intimate relationships create risk, and certain kinds create more risk. Public education can teach these risks, doctors can screen for risks, and the state can limit content (e.g. require warnings against children viewing content including images of smoking). The state can tax cigarettes and regulate their manufacturers, requiring warning labels. Recognizing the risk and disincentivizing risk-taking will affect behavior.

Second, protecting exit options (and providing protections against vulnerabilities of access) also affects decision-making. As noted above, women who have the means to leave are much more likely to leave abuse than women who do not, and economic dependency increases vulnerability to abuse. So it is at least prima facie plausible that even if social pressures lead women into abusive situations, if women have viable exit options, social pressures, including internalized gender norms, will not always keep them there. Obviously, the extent to which such interventions are effective is a vitally important empirical question. There is reason to believe that policies of the sort I am proposing would be effective in protecting security; whether they would be effective enough, and what should count as effective enough, are further questions.

In sum, not all state intervention in relationships is wrongful. The question is how the state should interfere, and why. On the account developed here, just as we have a claim to legal entitlements to protect us against the vulnerabilities which arise in employer-employee relationships, we also have a claim to legal entitlements to protect us against the vulnerabilities which arise in intimate relationships. As noted, similar vulnerabilities arise in employer-employee relationships: economic dependency, potential retaliation, surveillance, and control. The state should construct a secure context for intimate relationships, just as it should construct a secure context for employment. This need not be paternalistic, perfectionist, or privacy-violating.

IV. BENEFITS OF THIS APPROACH

The security-based argument for direct protections against violence has a number of benefits. Notably, because of the high priority of security, it justifies policies often defended on grounds of gender justice (because women are victims of IPV at higher rates) at a higher priority and with fewer controversial theoretical commitments than distributive arguments for similar policies (cf. Okin 1989, inter alia). These include policies such as subsidized childcare, financial and housing support on divorce or ending cohabitation, and access to health insurance independent of marriage.

As noted at the outset, interventions protecting against physical violence may also protect against emotional and other forms of abuse and control. Exit options and protections against vulnerabilities of access will protect victims of emotional abuse as well as physical abuse. Further, universal preventative interventions may improve the quality of existing relationships. Programs aimed at fostering lower-conflict relationships may improve the quality of existing relationships, thereby promoting goods of caring relationships which, arguably, the state should support.79

Indeed, this approach intervenes in recent debates over marriage law, particularly over marriage “abolition.”80 Clare Chambers, for example, has recently argued that the neutral state has no legitimate reason for recognizing intimate or caring relationships in marriage (or marriage-like) law.81 While I have previously argued that the value of such relationships can provide a reason for their recognition acceptable to the neutral liberal,82 this article provides a distinct line of argument for marriage recognition: marriage (or marriage-like law recognizing intimate relationships, such as civil unions or minimal marriage) serves to identify contexts of potential harm.

Intimate relationships are special sites of vulnerability to IPV. Thus, an institution recognizing and providing a legal framework for intimate relationships – like marriage – can flag these contexts of enhanced vulnerability. Legal recognition of contexts of vulnerability can be the basis for protective rights, as in employee-employer relationships. Likewise, marital status can flag these as sites for protective intervention. Security gives a neutral reason for recognizing marriage, or something like it, in law: because marriage is a site of violence, recognizing marriage flags sites of vulnerability for potential intervention. Basic security is a reason for recognizing relationships, because they are sites of vulnerability to violence.

One might worry that recognizing such relationships as a category will (illiberally) suggest their superiority and incentivize entry into them. Chambers writes that recognizing a status of relationships perpetuates a symbolic hierarchy: “the formalized, ceremonial act of naming some relationships and not others gives those named relationships a veneer of state-sanctioned respectability and approbation.”83 But recognizing relationships as sites of special vulnerability to violence does not endorse them – it is like adding red flags or warning labels to a dangerous activity. Presented thus, the status may urge caution, rather than incentivize forming highly vulnerable relationships.

Finally, the approach developed here coheres with non-carceral solutions to IPV proposed by anti-carceral feminists. Recent critics of “carceral feminism” have argued that criminal law enforcement disproportionately harms people of color, through police brutality, wrongful imprisonment, prison violence, and economic and political disenfranchisement.84 Anti-carceral feminists argue that mainstream feminists have wrongly turned to criminal law to protect women, in light of these harms and injustices.

Anti-carceral feminist arguments do not simply focus on the harm to alleged abusers in an often violent law enforcement system, but they also argue that criminalizing IPV and enforcing such law inadvertently harms victims of IPV, “disproportionately … women of color.”85 Such harms include victims being wrongly arrested, including for self-defense, wrongly incarcerated, being deprived of economic support by imprisoning their abusers, and suffering an increase in retaliatory violence.86 It is a benefit of my approach that its proposed interventions dovetail with concrete proposals made by anti-carceral feminists, such as shifting funding from law enforcement to support for victims.

Of course, my argument does not address the central issues in the debate over abolition. For prison abolitionists such as Angela Davis, the function of the prison system is to maintain white supremacy. Davis would argue that prison abolition is necessary to protect security: the carceral system creates vulnerability and exacerbates violence throughout society, including violence within prisons.87 As Erin Kelly writes in reply to Tommie Shelby’s defense of incarceration, for prison abolitionists such as Davis, arguments for reform do not grasp that its function is to maintain white supremacy, “mask[ing] and amplif[ying] the interaction of socioeconomic inequality, black poverty, and hostility toward black Americans by white Americans.”88 Prisons also produce IPV in prison in relationships of coerced sex for protection.89 So (the prison abolitionist reply would continue) we cannot effectively protect security without prison abolition. While I cannot address these arguments here, my argument for eliminating state-created vulnerability and protecting security throughout legal institutions extends to other security risks created by law and policy – such as brutality within the carceral system. Taking security seriously can help us rethink other areas of law and whether they adequately protect the security of all affected.

It is a benefit of my approach that my proposals dovetail with concrete proposals made by such non-ideal theorists, particularly abolitionist feminist proponents of transformative justice. Transformative justice, like restorative justice, aims at healing, reconciliation, and acknowledging the harm to the victim – but transformative justice also demands prison abolition.90 Shelby writes, “As abolition feminists emphasize, transformative justice is often a fitting response to domestic, gender, and sexual violence. In these cases, support for survivors, reconciliation, and healing from trauma are paramount, and penalizing those who caused the harm is secondary or sometimes counterproductive.”91

This article shows that elements of a restorative or transformative justice approach can be grounded within liberalism. I say “elements” of transformative justice, since transformative justice involves abolition. While I have not defended prison abolition, my approach to IPV incorporates restorative and transformative justice elements of support for victims and prevention of IPV. This is surprising, in part, because transformative justice emerges from radical views which are critical of liberal reformism.92 I have argued that the transformative justice goal of empowering victims – of protecting exit options and access to material conditions of security – is required by liberalism as a condition of the protection of basic liberties.

V. CONCLUSION

This article has asked how we would protect security if women’s security were taken seriously, making the kind of risks to which women are more vulnerable a focal point of security protections. Taking women’s security seriously has surprising implications. I have argued that intimate relationships create vulnerability to violence and as such are apt for intervention on grounds of security. In the context of IPV, prioritizing security has implications for an array of legal institutions, including marriage and family law, housing, healthcare, and education. The modest premise about basic security implies a set of reforms protecting victims’ exit options and protecting against vulnerabilities of access. This is what justice requires with regards to intimate partner violence.

Notes

  1. Snyder 2019, p. 6. [^]
  2. For an overview of the UN statistics, see UN 2025; see also Snyder 2019, p. 6. The UN notes IPV is likely underreported and that there are disparities among groups. For strikingly consistent US statistics, see CDC 2026. [^]
  3. Exceptions include work by Elizabeth Ben-Ishai (2009), Elizabeth Brake (2023), Marilea Bramer (2011), Claudia Card (1996, 2007), Michelle Madden Dempsey (2009), Marilyn Friedman (2003, 2014), Manne (2018), Macy Salzberger (2021, 2024), Areti Theofilopoulou (2022), and Victor Tadros (2005). [^]
  4. E.g. Dempsey 2009, Friedman 2003 and 2014, Tadros 2005; an exception is Ben-Ishai 2009. [^]
  5. Cf. Snyder 2019, pp. 16–17. [^]
  6. Locke 1963, p. 289. [^]
  7. Rawls 1993, p. 291 and Rawls 1999, p. 53, respectively. As James Nickel pointed out, security is not included in the basic liberties in the original version of Rawls’ Theory of Justice. Nickel argues that Rawls lacks “an adequate account of a government’s responsibility to protect security.” (Nickel 1994, p. 768) [^]
  8. Nozick 1974, p. ix, and see 7, ff. [^]
  9. Shue 2020, p. 20. [^]
  10. Shue 2020, p. 30. [^]
  11. Shue 2020, p. 32. [^]
  12. Shue 2020, p. 21. [^]
  13. For suggestive comments in this direction, see Rawls 1999, p. 6, pp. 211–212. [^]
  14. Nickel 1994, p. 768. [^]
  15. By ‘highest’, as I make clear below, I do not mean above all other priorities; there could be other equal priorities at the highest level. [^]
  16. Shue 2020, p. 34. [^]
  17. See Nickel 1994, p. 769. [^]
  18. Shue 2020, pp. 32–33. [^]
  19. Southwood and Goodin 2025, p. 178. [^]
  20. Southwood and Goodin 2025, p. 175. [^]
  21. Shue 2020, pp. 29–34. [^]
  22. On tradeoffs among risks, see Sunstein 2005, p. 366. [^]
  23. Srinivasan 2021, p. 161. [^]
  24. Stark 2007. [^]
  25. Card 2010, p. 142, fn. 22. [^]
  26. Card 2007, Friedman 2003, Tadros 2005, Tjaden and Thoennes 2000. [^]
  27. Tadros 2005, p. 996. [^]
  28. Brake 2023. [^]
  29. On some of these rationales, see, e.g., Kelly 2018, Chapter 5; Shelby 2022. [^]
  30. Rawls 1971, see 38, p. 211. These remarks are brief; Rawls does not give a full account of punishment because his ideal theory assumes strict compliance; punishment, like reparations, is needed when there has been non-compliance. [^]
  31. Goodmark 2018. [^]
  32. See Goodmark 2018 for a sustained argument to this effect. [^]
  33. E.g., Velleman 1999. [^]
  34. See Tsai 2016, Salzberger forthcoming. [^]
  35. E.g., Card 1996, Hampton 2002, MacKenzie, Rogers, and Dodds 2014, Okin 1989; on the state’s role in addressing vulnerability, see Goodin 1985, on which Okin 1989’s account of “vulnerability by marriage” draws. [^]
  36. Here I draw on the account of privacy in Allen 1988. [^]
  37. See Koldony 2003. [^]
  38. Okin 1989; see also Card 1996. [^]
  39. Eskow 1996, p. 688. [^]
  40. See Stark 2007, pp. 271 ff., Conner 2013–14, and Johnson, Chen, et al., 2022. [^]
  41. Dempsey 2009, Srinivasan 2021. [^]
  42. Goodmark 2018. [^]
  43. Srinivasan 2021, p. 160. [^]
  44. Johnson 2014. [^]
  45. Card, 1996, p. 8. [^]
  46. Kolodny 2003. [^]
  47. Brake 2012, pp. 90–94, Card 1996. [^]
  48. See, e.g., Chambers 2017, Chapter 1; Manne 2018. [^]
  49. E.g., Bartky 1990, MacKinnon 1989, Okin 1989. [^]
  50. E.g., Snyder 2019, p. 120. [^]
  51. Crenshaw 1989; the title essay of Srinivasan 2021 demonstrates how these intersectionalities play out. [^]
  52. See Dempsey 2009, pp. 17–20. [^]
  53. Tadros 2005, p. 991. [^]
  54. Goodmark 2018, p. 24. [^]
  55. Dempsey 2009, Friedman 2003, Hanna 1996. [^]
  56. Davis 2003, Goodmark 2018, Srinivasan 2021. [^]
  57. Brake 2012, Brighouse and Swift 2014, Brownlee 2020; see Gheaus 2018. [^]
  58. This paraphrases a remark in Dango 2024, which in turn draws on James Baldwin’s juxtaposition of prison and marital violence. [^]
  59. See Nadasen 2023. [^]
  60. Emens 2004. [^]
  61. On such pressures, see Brake 2012, Chapter 4; Card 1996. [^]
  62. Simpson 2025, Chapter 4. [^]
  63. See Goodmark 2018, pp. 53–54. [^]
  64. Goodmark 2018, 20; see related discussion in Ben-Ishai 2009, e.g. at p. 328, and Friedman 2003. [^]
  65. Shiffrin 2000, p. 214. [^]
  66. Thanks to Jon Quong for this point. [^]
  67. Shiffrin 2000, p. 224. [^]
  68. On neutrality, see Rawls 1971, Section 50, and Rawls 1993, pp. 190–195. I want to avoid the voluminous literature on state perfectionism and neutrality and related debate over political liberalism. I think it is plausible enough that some neutral or political liberals would object to the state’s perceived imposition of a conception of the good relationship suggested by these examples that such a potential objection is worth addressing. Some recent work by feminist political liberals has attempted to solve the perceived conflict between political liberalism and feminism, for instance by arguing that political liberalism is committed to feminism (Watson and Hartley 2018); see also Schouten 2019. [^]
  69. Snyder 2020, pp. 120 ff. [^]
  70. Brake 2012; Chambers 2017. [^]
  71. Okin 1979, Okin 1989. [^]
  72. Scruton 1986. [^]
  73. Okin 1979, Okin 1989. [^]
  74. MacKinnon 1989, pp. 193–194; on feminism and privacy, see also Allen 1988. [^]
  75. MacKinnon 1989, Manne 2018. [^]
  76. See also Friedman 2003, pp. 152–159. [^]
  77. For a sense of the difficulties, see Brighouse and Swift 2014; Chambers 2017, Chapter 6; Okin 1994. [^]
  78. Debates over pornography exemplify the tensions here; see Altman and Watson 2019. [^]
  79. Brake 2012; see Gheaus 2018. [^]
  80. Card 1996, Chambers 2017, Metz 2010, Simpson 2025. [^]
  81. Chambers 2017, Chapter 3. [^]
  82. Brake 2012. [^]
  83. Chambers 2017, 2.3.3. [^]
  84. Bernstein 2007, Srinivasan 2021. [^]
  85. Goodmark 2018, p. 21; for more general abolitionist arguments, see Davis 2003, Shelby 2022. See also related concerns about protective intervention in Roberts 2022. [^]
  86. Srinivasan 2021. [^]
  87. Davis 2003. [^]
  88. Kelly 2024, p. 542. [^]
  89. Dango 2024. [^]
  90. Goodmark 2018, p. 94, p. 142, Kaba 2021. For a classic early text in non-ideal theory, see Mills 2005. [^]
  91. Shelby 2022, p. 174. [^]
  92. Srinivasan 2021. [^]

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For helpful comments, thanks to Scott Altman, Scott Anderson, Richard Arneson, Amy Berg, Kimberley Brownlee, Teresa Bruno-Niño, Justin Clardy, Robert Goodin, Kate Manne, Tamara Metz, Hanna Pickard, Jon Quong, Annika Simpson, Emily Tilton, Lori Watson, and audience interlocutors at The Friday Group, the APA Pacific Division, Cal Poly at San Luis Obispo, Cornell University, Johns Hopkins University, Princeton Normative Ethics Workshop, Santa Clara University, the Society for Applied Philosophy Annual Conference, University of Southern California Center for Law and Philosophy, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Washington University, and anonymous reviewers for this journal.

COMPETING INTERESTS

The author declares that she has no competing interests.

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