This review assesses a law and criminal justice based approach to domestic violence from the vantage of recent reports from the advocacy movement in the United States (DasGupta, ‘Safety and justice for all’) and Amnesty International (It's in your hands: stop violence against women) and the work of legal scholar Linda Mills. The US movement is hardly alone in wrestling with how to reconcile the state's indispensable role in securing safety, support and liberty for victims with its equally undeniable role in perpetuating the patterns of sex, race and class inequality and privilege from which woman abuse stems and from which it continues to derive legitimacy.