The Deaths by Welfare Project is transforming our understanding of welfare state violence. We evidence, explore and and open opportunities for families and survivors to organise and take action.
Deaths by Welfare uses the process of documenting evidence to build cross-movement solidarity through connecting people with lived experience of, and families bereaved by, different but connected forms of state violence. We hold with care and complexity people’s different dreams of justice. We are non-reformist because we know how harm is designed into systems – a feature not a bug.
Dr China Mills
15/09/2025
Timeline
The Deaths by Welfare timeline is a database of evidence, co-produced with disabled people, showing how the welfare system creates life-threatening policies that lead to people’s deaths, and documenting disabled people’s resistance. The timeline was co-created by China Mills and John Pring (a disabled journalist and the Editor of Disability News Service), and is based on over a decade of research and involvement in disabled people’s anti-austerity campaigning. The need for the timeline and its contents is deeply informed by disabled people’s expertise, knowledge, activism, and movements. The timeline is a tool for disability justice movement organising.
Resources
This resource series is rooted in the Deaths by Welfare project’s work since 2021. Our goal is to offer insights, evidence, and framing to support us to build power against welfare state violence. The resources are indebted to and oriented towards movement organising, activism and justice as a way to imagine welfare justice and create more life-affirming systems beyond the State.
Learn more through a panel conversation between Derica Shields, China Mills, Tumu Johnson, Stella Dadzie and Gargi Bhattacharyya that explores the welfare state as one thread connected to a wider tapestry of state violence, which produces the premature sickness and deaths of poor, racialised and disabled people. The panelists discuss how racial capitalism, eugenics and coloniality are designed into welfare state infrastructure, and why state violence is a feature of the welfare system, not a bug.
The panel was filmed at the Rehearsing Freedoms Festival in October 2023.
Podcasts
In collaboration with activists and scholars Stella Dadzie, Imogen Day, John Pring, and Rick Burgess, in this episode, China Mills describes the grinding bureaucratic crimes committed as the DWP sought to force disabled people into work. This painful story is also one of power. We’ll hear how disabled people and people of colour have fought tirelessly to expose the true scale of this crime – and get justice.
The knowledge and leadership of disabled people fighting fatal reforms is central to this work, and this podcast aims to bring some of these voices together to understand how policies designed in the name of ‘welfare’ can create the conditions for people’s deaths.
