From one crisis to the next: examining the relationship between police crises and the British sexual violence sector’s “need” to improve the police

Within sexual violence support work an enduring paradox persists: despite knowing and experiencing the ways in which the carceral systems largely cannot provide justice to survivors of sexual violence, feminist sexual violence support services continue to seek to improve the police. Through engagement with Lauren Berlant’s (2010) work on crisis, this chapter contends that – when it comes to the topic of sexual violence and justice – police crises do not merely encourage a desire for reform. Instead, they are part of what Berlant would call an ongoing crisis ordinariness that makes “getting justice” both feel and seem impossible. In attending to the affective work of crisis, this chapter calls for the importance of interventions that reckon with the complexity of feminist attachments in the present.