8

Women against Violence

Jessica knocked softly on my dorm room door. “Can you talk?” I opened the door to let her in. Something was very wrong. Very, very wrong. Looking down at the floor, her face puffy from crying, Jessica stood in the doorway looking smaller than I’d ever seen her. “Can you take me to the police station?”

Jessica had been raped, tied to a chair, and held for hours.

The police station had linoleum floors and air that smelled like dust, defeat, and cleaning supplies all at the same time. Jessica was handed a seemingly endless amount of paperwork to fill out as the police questioned and questioned her again. The repeated questions were another torture in and of themselves.

Jessica’s experience was not uncommon. The police didn’t believe her. Jessica was a college student. He was her boyfriend. But Jessica isn’t the only victim police have dismissed, insulted, or turned away. This is an all-too-common experience for women who have been assaulted—so common that entire organizations and projects have been launched in order to deal with the crisis. Project Unbreakable was one of those projects. Founded by Grace Brown when she was nineteen years old, Project Unbreakable provided women with a forum to share what happened when reporting that they had been raped to the police:

“The investigating detective told me ‘If you don’t tell us how many people you’ve ever slept with, the Assistant District Attorney won’t even consider taking your case.’ I refused to answer and the interview was over.”

“A police officer scolded me, saying, ‘This is why we have underage drinking laws! This is your fault. If you hadn’t been drinking this wouldn’t have happened to you.’”

“Well, we asked him [her attacker] and he said he didn’t rape you, so there’s nothing we can do.”¹

There’s no excuse for any of this. None. Sexual assault, violence against women, police intransigence, rape culture, domestic abuse—there are many forms of violence against women and girls in our society. It all has to stop.

Right now sexual violence and domestic abuse, including rape and assault, happen all too often. One out of every three women experiences some form of sexual violence in her lifetime. Almost 23 million women have been victims of rape or attempted rape in our nation.²

Let’s pause and think about those numbers for a moment. Take some time to let them sink in. Then join me in asking how it is even possible that our country, and our culture, accepts this staggering level of terror. I feel sick just writing about it. Too many of us have experienced this form of violence. One of the ways to help end it is to talk, learn, write, and shine a spotlight on it; then we know we’re not alone and so we can march together, work together, and fight together for more accountability in the courts, streets, schools, workplaces, and in our communities, as well as for legislative and cultural change. There’s no other choice but to stand up. Violence against women is costly on so many levels, emotionally, physically, and psychologically. The costs in terms of dollars are staggering: According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the direct medical and mental health costs alone associated with intimate partner violence are roughly $4.1 billion annually.³ But the cost in terms of lives and serious health consequences is even more devastating.⁴

Change is needed yesterday, a decade ago, forever ago. Sadly, Jessica and the rest of us are all facing rape culture (where sexual assault and abuse are normalized) in America. We’re experiencing nothing short of an epidemic of violence against women—often perpetrated by those we know. Half of all female homicide victims, across all racial groups, are killed by their intimate partners, according to a 2017 CDC study.⁵ One-third of girls in the juvenile justice system have been sexually abused.⁶ And women who enlist in the military sign up to put their bodies on the line on the battlefield, not in the barracks where they sleep. But 3,192 cases of military sexual assault were reported in the year 2011 alone, and fewer than half of these were deemed “actionable” by military officials and fewer than 8 percent of these cases ever went to trial.⁷

Not an Imaginary Fear

As we march to stop violence against women, we can’t ever forget that there are often compounding impacts of violence on women of color. Take, for instance, what’s happening now in many Latina communities to people with families that include people of mixed immigration statuses. After Donald Trump was elected president in November 2016, significantly fewer Latina women reported sexual assault and domestic violence to the police. Reports of rape dropped by 40 percent in Houston alone in the first six months after President Trump was elected, and reports of sexual assault dropped by 25 percent in Los Angeles.⁸

To be clear, this doesn’t mean the instances of abuse went down. It means that with the increased ICE raids and amplified animosity toward immigrants by President Trump, many women, particularly women who are members of undocumented families, were worried that if they called the police, then someone in their community would end up being ripped apart from their family as collateral damage.

Jackie Vimo, an economic justice policy analyst at the National Immigration Law Center, shares details on how this happens: “When Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE] is sent into communities with threats of deportations, this makes people scared not just of ICE, but also of and for their partners. Some feel like they can’t get out of the relationship because if they do something about the domestic violence that they themselves are experiencing, then they or a loved one will be deported. Intersectionality exacerbates the impact for a lot of people and there is a ripple effect.”⁹

Being afraid of reporting assault isn’t an imaginary fear for women. After her boyfriend repeatedly assaulted her, Irvin Gonzalez needed a protective order. So Gonzalez, a transgender woman, went from the domestic violence shelter where she was staying to the local courthouse in El Paso, Texas, to get one. But when she arrived, an ICE officer was waiting to arrest her. ICE had been tipped off by Gonzalez’s abusive boyfriend that she was going in to report him. So at the same time as Gonzalez was granted the protection order by the judge, ICE arrested her, a person who was a victim of a crime who was in a courthouse for protection, for her immigration status.¹⁰

The experience that Gonzalez went through is nothing short of a human rights violation in the name of immigration enforcement. This is what the cage of violence against women looks like for some women in our nation. We can and must do better by and for women.

Locked In

Trapped. Controlled. Hit. Yelled at. Violence against women comes in many forms. One form of domestic violence that’s often overlooked is economic abuse, where one partner keeps funds in their sole control so the abused partner doesn’t have the funds to leave.

Kim Gandy, former president of the National Organization for Women and current president and CEO of the National Network to End Domestic Violence, shares: “Financial abuse is present in about 99 percent of all domestic violence cases. And, it is as effective as a lock and key in trapping a victim in an abusive situation. Financial abuse is the invisible hold.”

Kim dove into work as a women’s rights advocate when she was newly wed. Starting a new job in Louisiana, Kim ran straight into the kind of economic sexism that disempowers women and puts them in danger if they are tied to and in the grips of an abusive partner. On Kim’s first day on the job in her home state of Louisiana, she was given a stack of forms to fill out so she could use the health care and other benefits like retirement that came with her new job. Going through the forms, she stopped cold at one that said, “If you are a married woman, your husband must sign here.”

Kim remembers sitting in the chair, the forms in front of her on the table, thinking, “Why would I need my husband’s signature to get employment-related benefits on my job?”

So she asked that question—and then she subsequently found out that there was a “head and master” law in Louisiana that said the husband is the sole controller of all of the joint property in a marriage and can make decisions about joint property without the wife’s knowledge or consent. The legal subordination of wives to their husbands also meant that women had no right to claim that a husband had raped her.¹¹ What!? Also by that definition the wife’s income is part of the joint property of the marriage, so in Louisiana at the time the husband legally controlled the wife’s income and, therefore, could say whether or not the wife could do things like sign up for health care and put 3 percent of her pay into a retirement plan.

I’ve known Kim for over a decade now and can just imagine the smoke that came out of her ears when she learned about this law. In fact, what I imagined is pretty close to what actually happened: After finding out about the “head and master” law, Kim spent seven years working to get rid of it. She found some people who were already working on the issue and in her free time, outside of work, fought very hard to repeal that law and to pass a new law in Louisiana that provided for the equal management of community property by both spouses: the Equal Management Law in 1979.¹²

In other words: She won. And every other woman in Louisiana won, too.

It took seven long years to get that win, but Kim didn’t rest on her laurels. You see, while Kim was working on that issue, she discovered all kinds of other problems that also needed fixing. So Kim persisted and rose through multiple leadership roles and organizations, eventually becoming one of the driving forces for passing the Violence Against Women Act through Congress with President Bill Clinton signing it into law in 1994, and then was also the driving force as it was reauthorized again and again in 2000, 2005, and most recently 2013 after long legislative battles aimed at repealing it. Kim’s persistence not only was necessary, but eventually paid off—which happens often in this kind of legislative fights.

Of course, as Kim is always quick to point out, she didn’t do it alone. A strong coalition of organizations and women across the country raised their voices to make this win happen that Kim still celebrates today: “It was the first federal legislation that provided significant funding to combatting violence against women. It established the Office on Violence Against Women, created a community-based effort that brought together local domestic violence agencies with law enforcement and judges, training and education, and created what they called then a coordinated community response to domestic violence, which had never existed before, and has made a tremendous amount of change across the country.”

But it’s not just the big, headline-grabbing, federal-level legislative wins that make a difference. There are also wins happening locally right now helping women get out of situations of financial abuse. For instance, the National Network to End Domestic Violence has established the Independence Project to provide microloans to help survivors of domestic violence repair their credit.¹³ Even a small, $100, interest-free loan being paid back that’s reported to all of the credit bureaus every month can increase credit scores. Gandy notes that for a survivor who’s trying to flee a domestic violence situation, improving a credit score may be the difference between being able to get an apartment or having to return to her abuser. These days, with employers checking credit scores, being able to improve credit may also be the difference between getting a job or not getting a job, between getting out or remaining with an abuser. Every survivor who improves her credit score is a win, too. The little things are often overlooked.

Most Incarcerated Women Survived Domestic Violence

Marissa Alexander, a mother of three who had a Florida concealed-weapons license,¹⁴ fired a warning shot at the ceiling in 2012, harming no one, when her abusive ex-husband, whom she had a restraining order against, threatened to kill her. Florida has a “Stand Your Ground” law, passed in 2005, that allows lethal force in self-defense. But coverage under that law was denied to Marissa Alexander, a Black woman, and she was convicted of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. That crime in Florida, at the time, carried a mandatory minimum of twenty years.¹⁵

It’s critical to put what happened to Marissa in context. Studies show that the majority of women in prison are survivors of domestic violence, 82 percent of whom suffered serious physical or sexual abuse in their lifetime.¹⁶ Clearly, many of the laws of our nation are failing women.

Added to that is the chronic failure of our criminal justice system to offer Constitutional protection of equal justice under law. Consider another notorious Florida case, also in 2012, where George Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin, an unarmed young Black teenager. Zimmerman argued using the same Stand Your Ground law that was not applied in Marissa’s case and was cleared of all crimes by a jury.

Zimmerman walked free after he murdered a child when evidence showed that there was no threat to his life. Marissa, who harmed no one, served time for attempting to protect her life and the lives of her children. Speaking to the New York Times, one of Marissa’s lawyers, Bruce Zimet, pointed out the obvious: “Here is a Black woman who had a history of abuse against her and tried to use Stand Your Ground and ended up with a 20-year sentence.”¹⁷

Thanks to constant public pressure online via Twitter through the #FreeMarissa and #SelfiesForSelfDefense hashtags and also the efforts of Free Marissa Now,¹⁸ Survived and Punished, Sister Song, and other organizations who organized rallies, sent letters, spoke out to the media, and more, Marissa was released after serving three years in prison and an additional two years of home detention.

There wasn’t a day Marissa was in jail that her name wasn’t lifted up by other women leaders. That’s what it took to get her out of jail. Zimmerman, on the other hand, not only served zero time, but he received $200,000 in public donations for his legal defense.¹⁹

Now a leader in speaking out against domestic violence, Marissa is also working to make sure the uneven application of Stand Your Ground laws ends. And she’s making strides and changing the national conversation by speaking around the country. Though some laws in Florida are changing, Marissa also notes that there’s much more to do and is leading the way advocating for justice to this day.

Stand Up for Women’s Safety

Do you know what else is a women’s rights issue and part of the culture of violence against women in our nation?

Guns.

Women who are physically abused by current or former intimate partners are five times more likely to be murdered when one of the partners owns a firearm.²⁰ But current federal policy is not tight enough to effectively prevent all convicted perpetrators of domestic violence and other violent crimes from obtaining guns, nor do we have limits on high-capacity magazines that accompany military-style assault weapons. We also don’t have a federal gun trafficking statute. There are holes in our entire gun safety system that we need to close to protect the lives of women, children, families, and people in general. This isn’t to say that guns should be outlawed altogether, but that in a country where there are more guns than people,²¹ there should be safety parameters for the responsible purchase of firearms. The United States has the highest rates of gun ownership in the world,²² and we’re also the top exporter and top importer of “small arms and light weapons.”²³ And we also have very lax gun safety measures.

I’m not alone in the desire for increased gun safety. More than 80 percent of gun owners, including National Rifle Association (NRA) members, want stronger background checks on people buying guns.²⁴

The movement for increasing gun safety policies is growing, and with good reason. Women and children are frequently caught in the center of this violence. In fact, women in the United States are eleven times more likely to be murdered with guns than women in any other high-income country.²⁵ Gun violence is all too commonly a part of domestic violence and abuse.

Cassandra said, “One of my best friends, a successful career woman in her early forties, was almost fatally shot when she tried to break up with her abusive boyfriend. He got angry, drove to the nearest gun store, purchased a shotgun despite a record of depression and mental health issues, returned within thirty minutes, and shot her and himself in front of her two young sons. She barely survived, losing a lung and a kidney.”

Guns make domestic violence even deadlier. Guns are used to kill women in 53 percent of intimate partner homicides.²⁶ “I was sixteen years old when I first had a gun pointed at my head by a boyfriend,” said Marie. “I was leaving the country and he didn’t want me to go.” Marie’s boyfriend asked her to jump in a pond or be shot. She jumped in the pond immediately. She said, “You may say I was lucky that day. But what I had to endure for the next five years perhaps would have been easier if I had died that day out by the water.” It’s too easy for unstable people to possess a handgun, she concluded.

All told, 33,000 people in our nation lose their lives to gun violence every year, which on average means more than ninety people are killed by guns every day.²⁷ That’s not freedom. Freedom is the ability to live without the threat of violence on every corner. It’s safe to say that most of us, at heart, think our lives are a higher priority than unchecked access to firearms. Our country is losing sisters, brothers, moms, dads, sons, daughters, and other loved ones each day in preventable deaths due to gun violence.

This has got to stop.

The damage from unchecked gun violence especially touches mothers and children. Among U.S. children age seventeen and younger, firearms are the third leading cause of death and the second leading cause of injury.²⁸ The threat of gun violence terrorizes our communities.

Many of us have received a version of “that call” that no parent wants to get from their child’s school: a call saying the school is in lockdown because of a nearby confirmed armed threat. The first time I got that call there was a shooting at a nearby café²⁹ in Seattle. Five people lost their lives, and the gunman had fled on foot, running toward the school building where my children sat studying. The second time there was an armed bank robbery just blocks away.

Parents shouldn’t have to wonder whether our kids will be safe when we drop them off at school, the mall, a concert, or the movies. No one should have to worry about being the victim of gun violence. My daughter, Anna, long well aware of the threat of gun violence, reminded me of this after the second lockdown at her school in just a couple of months. She said, “Mom—remember: Both of our lockdowns happened because of guns.” I remember.

My son, like many others, has also long been aware of the situation. He tapped me on the shoulder once while we were driving from basketball practice many years ago to share this fact and ask an important question:³⁰ “In all the years since the assault weapon ban in Australia, there haven’t been any mass shootings. That was a big improvement. Why don’t we do that here?” And he’s right: After a mass murder that killed thirty-five people and wounded nineteen, Australia increased their gun safety policies by banning all rapid-fire long guns (this includes all semiautomatic rifles and all semiautomatic and pump-action shotguns) and requiring owners to sell them back at market price to the Australian government. At the same time, the government passed laws that created a national registry and tightened restrictions on purchasing guns.

There hasn’t been a single mass shooting in Australia since then.

Why can’t we do that, too?

Many people are asking that same question, and a movement for change is rising. Wins are happening in states all over the country. For example, in late 2015, MomsRising and the League of Women Voters in Florida came together to fight a bill that was winding its way through their state legislature that would legalize the open carry of guns in the Sunshine State. We knew parents would not want to bring their children and other loved ones to have fun in the sun where there could be guns everywhere, including on the beach or in line waiting to get on a ride at one of Florida’s world-class amusement parks. We also reasoned that Florida’s powerful tourism industry would also likely oppose open carry, and that we could support their efforts to fight it in a powerful way.

So MomsRising launched a petition against Florida open carry, urging the Florida tourism industry to do everything in its power to stop it if it wants to remain the world’s number one family vacation destination. More than thirty thousand MomsRising members signed that petition, and six thousand members submitted personal comments. The comments were strongly worded and sometimes deeply personal.

Donna from Missouri wrote: “I have no problem with responsible gun ownership, but open carry is an infringement upon the safety of my family. I won’t be bringing my grandkids to Florida.”

Elizabeth in New Jersey said, “As someone who has lost a loved one who was shot to death by a stranger, I will not put my family at risk by coming to any location in a state where anyone can carry a gun in the open.”

MomsRising distilled the most powerful comments selected from every state into a booklet. We then sent the petition signatures and booklet via special delivery to Florida’s major tourism stakeholders, including Disney World, Universal Studios, and the Florida Commission on Tourism. The League of Women Voters in Florida made sure that our champions in the Florida state house who were fighting open carry all had a copy of the booklet so they could incorporate the stories from our members during the policy debate. Other elements of the campaign included a robust media plan and several call-ins to Florida lawmakers with family members from across the country expressing their public safety concerns about open carry becoming law.

And we won! In February 2016, the Florida Senate officially tabled the open carry bill, killing it for the 2016 session. A key Florida senator, Miguel Díaz de la Portilla, later said that the potential impact of open carry on tourism and the safety concerns of moms was why the bill didn’t move forward.

Whole organizations are rising up to fight for gun safety, like Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, and win after win is advancing at the state level for gun safety. But that’s just the beginning. We’ve got to keep marching, raising our voices, voting, and moving more wins forward. The pressure is on. We’re up against a powerful force. You see, as important wins are advancing at the state level and a movement is growing, NRA leadership is spending millions on lobbying. In fact, NRA lobbying expenditures³¹ completely dwarf that of even the best-funded gun safety advocacy groups.³²

But this doesn’t mean the NRA automatically can buy their way into winning every legislative battle. They can’t. The voices of women can be more powerful than any corporate-funded gun lobbyist. I’ve seen it happen in the past, and together we will see it happen again.

Lucy McBath has seen it, too. A leading spokesperson for Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, Lucy lost her own son, Jordan Davis, in 2012 to gun violence. But Lucy is hopeful: “I know people across the country have become very disturbed by the rising gun culture and the nature of gun violence in this country. People have begun to say, ‘Enough is enough.’ I’ve never seen such a groundswell of people that are actively standing up and participating in gun violence prevention. So, there is always hope.”

It’s time for solutions. People are coming together to stand behind basic commonsense reforms that are straightforward and long overdue. These reforms include universal background checks for all gun purchases (including gun shows and on the Internet), an assault weapon ban (which also limits high-capacity magazines), a ban on “bump stocks” that turn guns into rapid-fire killing machines, limits on the use of gun silencers, and advancing a federal gun trafficking statute with real penalties to stop illegal sales of guns. We also need to advance gun violence restraining orders (also called extreme risk protection orders), like those enacted in California and Washington, which allow people to petition a court to remove a person’s access to guns if he or she poses an imminent danger to him- or herself or to others.³³

To be clear, the fight isn’t about banning all guns; it’s about advancing gun safety, community safety, women’s safety, and responsible gun ownership.

There are 85 million moms in our nation.³⁴ Together, we are a powerful force. And together we won’t let the leaders of our country forget that their job is to make sure that our families, all of those we love, and all of our nation’s children are safe from gun violence.

Stronger Together

We know which policies are needed to protect women from violence. Now we just have to raise grassroots voices and pressure elected leaders to move forward smart policies that save lives. Make no mistake: Our work to take back the night, the day, and all the moments in between is having an impact. Activism over the last forty years has had a significant impact: The rate of domestic violence decreased by more than 60 percent between 1994 and 2012.³⁵

Our work isn’t done, however. Domestic violence, sexual assault, and other forms of violence against women are still all-too-regular occurrences in the daily lives of women, and homicides of women remain stubbornly high.³⁶ Violence against women is not yet a thing of the past. We know that all violence against women has to stop. And we know that together, we are a powerful force to make that change happen.