Poland: Policing Women, Policing Minorities

The departure point for this essay is the massive 2020 pro-choice protests following a ruling by Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal that restricted access to abortion. The essay analyzes police violence during these demonstrations, which was mostly directed at young, urban, middle-class women, and draws attention to changing Polish attitudes toward the police and their brutality vis-à-vis notions of class, gender, race, and ethnicity. In the preceding 30 years, there had been many cases of police brutality in Poland, mostly targeting minorities, migrants, and working-class men, but these had been ignored by the Polish public. Only after police violence was directed toward young, urban, middle-class women did the Polish public finally start to take notice.

The article is part of the monographic issue of Social Research: An International Quarterly, an organ of The New School for Social Research (publisher Johns Hopkins University Press), entitled Policing, more: https://www.socres.org/post/914-winter-2024-policing
Access to the article from computers at the University of Warsaw or through the University Library: https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/54137