How dare you dishonor the sacredness of our bodies.
Yet our bodies are constantly desecrated. Girls and women, in the US and abroad, between the ages of fifteen to forty-four are more likely to be maimed or die as a result of male violence than by cancer, malaria, traffic accidents and war combined. At least one out every three women has been beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused in her lifetime, here in the United States and worldwide. We are subject to honor killings, sex trafficking, and extreme violence, in our homes and communities. In places of conflict and war, our bodies are too often turned into killing fields of sexual violation and traumatic injury.
There are no borders or boundaries
that protect women and girls from gendered violence.
Here in the United States, where the privileges and constitutionally protected rights of freedom and equality define our history of struggle, American women and girls do not possess a freedom to live out our full potential -- unencumbered by violence. Despite the progress of America as a nation, American women and girls are still subject to sexual and physical violence that deprives us of our full personhood.
According to the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN), girls ages 16-19 are 4 times more likely than the general population to be victims of rape, attempted rape, or sexual assault. 7% of girls in grades 5-8 and 12% of girls in grades 9-12 report that they had been sexually abused. 1 in 3 girls by the time she reaches 18 will be sexually violated. Women who experienced childhood molestation are more vulnerable to mental health disorders, suicide, substance abuse, and obesity.
And how violence plays out in the lives of vulnerable women and girls is especially life-denying. When women and girls with economic privilege are subject to violence they are most likely to interact with the mental health system -- which is not necessarily a healing experience. But vulnerable women and girls hurt as a result of physical or sexual violence are tossed to the criminal justice system.
Sexual and physical violence is central to girls' journeys to detention and incarceration. A study on delinquent girls revealed that in California, 81 percent of chronically delinquent girls reported being physically abused and 56 percent were sexually abused. The overriding reasons for girls' arrests are for the gendered offenses of running away or prostitution. Many girls charged with runaway offenses are escaping from homes where there is sexual and or physical violence directed at them. Girls engaged in prostitution are often already victims of abuse and they comprise the majority of youth detained for prostitution.
Most women behind bars are there for non-violent drug felonies, and most are untreated addicts who are victims of violence. Their drug addiction is often connected to repeated injuries of sexual and physical violence. Women, especially mothers, struggling with addiction were first victims of violence: addiction to meth, crack-cocaine or marijuana is often a desperate attempt to self-medicate from the untreated trauma of repeated sexual and physical violence committed against them, often since their childhood years. According to the Bureau of Justice's research, half of the women in jails and half of the women in state and federal prisons experienced physical or sexual abuse before incarceration. In jails and prisons, women and mothers are forced to give birth in shackles and suffer the removal of their children.
These women and girls are left behind, the integrity of their bodies discarded and the need to heal from the searing injuries of violence disregarded. They are not perceived as victims of violence but instead criminals, whores, or girls who are out of control. But, they like so many other American women and girls, are victims of violence, for whom violence eclipses their basic rights to liberty and equality.
Freedom from sexual and physical
violence is a fundamental human right, and it is rooted in our Constitutional
narrative of individual rights. That the right to live free from gendered
violence still eludes American women and girls, especially in vulnerable
communities, must be addressed in the context of how our nation has
yet to fulfill its greatest promise to its citizens. As long as gendered
violence is accepted, tolerated, and construed as an inevitable consequence
of being female, the full promise of individual liberty and the equal
worth of every person will be denied to women and girls.
Since 1986, following the introduction of mandatory sentencing to the federal drug laws in the mid-1980s, and its adoption by many states at about the same time, the number of women in prison has risen 400 percent, according to a recent Department of Justice report, "Survey of State Prison Inmates;" for Black women, the figure is 800 percent. Most are mothers to minor children.
Many of these mothers are suffering from untreated addiction, and too many tried to find help but were turned away from the doors of treatment programs because they were pregnant or refused to leave their children behind (most treatment programs do not allow children to be part of the recovery process). Like most mothers struggling with addiction, their addiction to crack, meth, or heroin began with the need to self-medicate from the trauma of being subject to repeated incidents of sexual violence.
What does it mean then that most of our female prison population comprises mothers, and mothers with histories of sexual violence and addiction? How is it that our approach to maternal addiction and the trauma of gendered violence is circumscribed to criminalization and to the removal of children from their mothers? What are the implications for our children of being removed from their mothers, often at birth, because of the criminalization of mothers for untreated addiction? Where is the reproductive rights community in the overincarceration of mothers and the almost systematic severance in the mother and child relationship as a result of maternal incarceration?
These difficult questions regarding maternal addiction and incarceration are often allayed by constructing the women as unfit to mother, or casting them outside the magic circle of motherhood and the sacred mother-child bond. Nonetheless, generally, mothers suffering from addiction want to be good mothers, and their children want to be with them. Hence, when mothers are afforded access to family-based treatment services where they can heal with their children, their average success rates are 62% and rise as high 98% in model family treatment programs. The family heals, stabilizes, and thrives together as a whole family unit. Alternatively, when children are separated from their mothers, they are vulnerable to attachment disorder, substance abuse, and involvement in the criminal justice system. The child welfare system is laced with painful stories of children running away from their foster care placements to be with their mothers, or police being called by child welfare workers in order to physically remove children, sometimes through handcuffing them, from their mothers.
The difficult realities of mothers and children being torn apart from one another are especially traumatic in the context of maternal incarceration. Children are rarely able to visit their mothers behind bars since most female correctional facilities are located in isolated areas and kinship caregivers are unable to travel the distance, or child welfare workers are unwilling to make the strenuous journey. The children who are able to visit their mothers are often subject to excessive body searches and denied the chance to even touch their mothers during the visit.
The condition of mothers giving birth behind bars is equally difficult. Babies are removed from their mothers within a 24 hour period after their birth and placed into foster care. Babies born to mothers behind bars are often born to mothers who labored and gave birth to them while in shackles. In our federal prisons and most state prisons, restraints are routinely used on pregnant women when they are in labor and when they give birth. Only 2 states have legislation regulating the use of restraints on pregnant women: Illinois and California. In the other 48 other states, the District of Columbia and the Federal Bureau of Prisoners, no such laws exist. This routine use of restraints on pregnant women, particularly on women in labor and giving birth, constitutes a cruel, inhumane and degrading practice that rarely can be justified in terms of security concerns during the delivery process.
It shouldn't be this way.
Mothers and their children should have access to family-based treatment programs; alternative sentencing to therapeutic, family programs should be considered instead of maternal incarceration; and sentencing reform that recognizes the distinct conditions and responsibilities of mothers as the primary caretakers should displace the gender neutral sentencing guidelines that are, in part, responsible for the surge in mothers behind bars.
Our reproductive rights community has yet to be a voice for mothers behind bars, or a voice against the disproportional removal of vulnerable children from the care of their mothers. Whereas our mainstream reproductive movement has addressed women's right to choose what happens to our bodies and our right to choose when to be a mother, low-income women of color are routinely denied the basic right to be mothers. The parameters of reproductive health and rights discourse must be expanded to also include the very right to mother and to raise one's children with dignity and healing. Otherwise, we are in danger of playing out what we correctly criticize the pro-life community for doing -- only demonstrating concern for the fetus.
]]>Many girls in the foster care system have been bounced around, sometimes living in an average of 10 different foster homes and group home settings. They exist without the sacred ties to their mothers, to a safe and stable home where they can develop their full potential. Many of these girls have children in the hopes of creating for themselves the connections to love and family that they were denied. And so many teenage girls who exist at the grim margins, like girls everywhere, are subject to sexual violence.
For girls, the silent suffering of being violated, often by family, friends, or other persons who were to be trusted, dims girls' self-esteem and cuts down their belief in who they can become and what kind of relationships they deserve. They remain forever changed by the violation done to their bodies and spirits, and they are too often denied the supports they need to heal. Instead, girls--especially girls in vulnerable communities--are left to quietly endure the iniquity. These vulnerable girls who are left behind often become involved in, and re-traumatized by, the juvenile justice system.
There are unprecedented numbers of teenage girls entering the juvenile justice system--and they are outpacing boys in the rate of incarceration. Most are detained for the gendered offenses of prostitution or running away from abusive homes. Most have been sexually abused. In a study conducted by the Oregon Social Learning Center, chronically delinquent girls reported their first sexual encounter at the age of 6. Another study on delinquent girls revealed that in California, 81 percent of chronically delinquent girls reported being physically abused and 56 percent were sexually abused. Sexual or physical violence is more central to girls' pathways to detention than it is for boys.
Why aren't we talking about these girls and in this way--not in terms of simply lowering unintended pregnancies but in terms of the ways in which vulnerable girls experience sexual violence and how that diminishes their full potential, aspirations, and abilities? Why aren't we talking about sexual violence in the lives of girls and how they deserve to live free of fear and violence?
It's not just about how we talk about girls--it's also about which women and which mothers are claimed. At the corners of reproductive health conversations and agendas, are low-income mothers of color who are often denied the chance to choose motherhood and care for their own children. Most African American and Latina women behind bars, for example, are non-violent offenders who are mothers to young children. They are not violent murderers or major drug dealers, but untreated addicts suffering from an addiction that is often tied to unaddressed sexual violence and trauma. These mothers' ties to their children are severed as a result of their incarceration. Pregnant women behind bars are placed in the inherently violent condition of being restrained or shackled during labor and delivery--and then suffer the removal of their babies within a 24 hour period. The desires of incarcerated mothers to heal from addiction, sexual violence, and to be able to care for and love their children--their desire to mother--are not construed as necessarily relevant in reproductive health rights discourse.
It is not enough to talk about reducing the number of teenage pregnancies, or reducing the overall number of unintended pregnancies in general--although these are worthy goals. We need to bravely discuss the complexity of our lives as women and girls. We need to talk about gendered violence, poverty, mothering, and mothering with dignity. And we need to stop being afraid, leaving certain mothers out, and dodging the difficult questions.
For those of us who were born post-Roe, there is a need to re-craft the language of choice. Many of us have felt betrayed by the silence surrounding the pain of choosing an abortion--despite our belief in its necessity. We want to be able to give voice to that pain, without feeling that to do so jeopardizes Roe (and without having Justice Kennedy do it for us in a paternalistic and condescending tone). The post-Roe generation (like the post civil rights generation) must develop a new narrative that honors the complexity of our lives as women and frames choice within a narrative of women and mothering. We want to discuss abortion within the context of when, how, and if we want to be mothers.
A new reproductive health movement must also include language about mothering with dignity. Mothering with dignity means creating for children an environment in which they can feel safe, loved, and confident. For mothers to parent with dignity they must have access to health care, affordable daycare, comprehensive family leave polices, flexible work places and be free of violence. For vulnerable mothers, parenting with dignity also means opportunities to heal from sexual violence through comprehensive, family based treatment programs, improved and culturally competent child welfare practices, a living wage, access to quality education, and alternative sentencing to maternal incarceration and sentencing reform.
Certainly, the traditional terms, language, and approach of the reproductive health discourse is lacking resonance with so many Americans. Let us develop a new narrative that maintains a steely commitment to Roe yet pushes out the parameters of a discourse on choice that is becoming increasingly calcified and exclusive. It's time to make that new choice.
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