We women will decide what to wear

August 1, 2018, Copenhagen, Denmark. Mads Claus Rasmussen—AFP/Getty Images

(Article riginally published in Danish in Politiken, July 19, 2021)

On 15 July, the European Court of Justice - the EU's highest court - ruled that EU-based companies are free to ban visible religious symbols and that EU countries can choose to enforce such bans as they see fit. Although the ruling is worded to apply to all religious symbols and dress, experience says it will be applied almost exclusively to Muslim women who want to cover their hair or face or both.

The ban on the wearing of religious symbols raises many red flags for those who care about human rights.

And they should be of great concern in Europe, where more and more countries are restricting the use of headscarves or face veils in public. A 2018 report commissioned by Open Society Foundations found that only six countries in the EU - Croatia, Cyprus, Greece, Poland, Portugal and Romania - have not banned headscarves or face veils in some form or discussed a proposal to do so.

France was the first European country to adopt a general ban on covering one's face in public; the ban came into force in 2011. Denmark joined this dubious European trend in 2018. While both the Danish and French laws are written in a neutral way - they prohibit all persons from covering their face in public unless for specific purposes - the debate and stated motivation for the law was, at least in part, to "liberate" women from the "imposition of the veil". It should be added that although some laws 'only' prohibit face veils while allowing headscarves, the underlying motivation and trend is the same, as evidenced by Thursday's ruling. It is about gradually banning any visual expression of Islam in European countries.

The obsession with headscarves and face veils in the name of tolerance and non-discrimination is deeply misleading.

Firstly, clothing is generally a matter of freedom of expression. If a government imposes its view on how everyone should dress, it interferes with our ability to express ourselves freely, whether this is expressed as a clothing ban ('you must not wear a headscarf') or a requirement ('you must').

Secondly, it also affects our human right to freely express our beliefs when the imposed or prohibited clothing is predominantly linked to a particular religion. UN experts on freedom of religion have repeatedly made it clear that although state religions (such as the Danish one) are allowed, majority religions cannot be imposed on those who do not share that faith. Banning clothing that has a particular meaning in a particular religion is ostensibly neutral, but it is a poor veil for overt discriminatory intent. It may be that everyone in Denmark is forbidden to cover their face in public, but only those for whom covering their face is an expression of their faith suffer from this.

Third, the alleged 'liberation intention' is particularly problematic in overcoming harmful stereotypes and discrimination. When a government says or implies through its policies and actions that most Muslim women who wear headscarves do so because they are 'oppressed', far from liberating each Muslim woman, it deprives her of any autonomy in terms of freedom of expression and freedom of religion. Moreover, if a government maintains the stereotype that all Muslim women are submissive and oppressed, this is not very conducive to integration and understanding in society at large. Moreover, it only affects women and therefore actively contributes to any gender discrimination that may already exist.

From a human rights perspective, all governments have a duty to combat gender inequality across the board. Where gender inequality is reinforced by social norms and religious arguments - whether based on Islam, Christianity, Judaism or another religion - the state must ensure access to information and resources to prevent discrimination and provide redress in cases of abuse.

Indeed, the most disturbing aspect of the headscarf ban is that misplaced 'liberation' policies can make very real problems invisible. Recent studies by Amnesty International show that the Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated already widespread violence against women in Europe. The victims of this violence are not all Muslims, and certainly not all of them cover their hair. These women need urgent state protection, but instead governments across Europe seem to prefer to spread myths and prejudice.

Thursday's ruling by the European Court of Justice on headscarves will make it easier for governments and businesses across Europe to continue this trend of divesting from real problems, such as gender-based and anti-Muslim violence, while claiming neutrality and tolerance.

But make no mistake, there is nothing neutral about it.

The continued obsession with headscarves and other symbols of Islam in Europe is inherently based on prejudice and will fuel further violence and abuse. The Danish government must take urgent steps to prevent and eliminate all forms of discrimination in the workplace, including discrimination based on religious stereotypes.

The Myth of Impossibility

A couple of weeks ago, my husband and I celebrated our wedding anniversary by spending a night in a hotel room overlooking Brooklyn Bridge Park. The view was spectacular and we spent most of the night watching barges and ferries going up and down the East River and people walking their dogs. It was indescribably beautiful and mesmerizing, and the main thought that emerged for me was, “I want to walk here at night,” immediately followed by “but that’s impossible,” and then “but is it really, though?.” 

Because what makes it feel impossible for me to walk in a semi-deserted park at night is not a physical barrier but rather a socially constructed one: I would not feel safe. Whether this is objectively true is not relevant. The point is that I intuitively articulated a key part of the world I want to live in - one where I am safe - and that it felt impossible to achieve.

This, at a much larger scale, is what is happening with our reactions to the deep structural inequalities the COVID pandemic has surfaced. 

In the United States, Black and latino individuals are up to twice as likely to die from a coronavirus infection as white people. This observable fact is linked to inequitable access to health care, as well as to stress-induced morbidity at least partially caused by underlying violence and hostility. Even when Black people do reach hospitals for care, they are sometimes distrusted and their subjective experience of their own bodies is ignored.

You don’t have to be a public health official or a policy expert to know what a better world would look like: one where access to health care is freely available, where everyone's experience can be heard, and which is prioritizing those who need it most. And yet, when we plan around even just one single health intervention - access to the COVID-vaccine - the people prioritized are those with money or in predominantly white neighborhoods.   

Another topic the pandemic has underlined is our collective misuse of natural resources, in particular in countries with high levels of personal car ownership and use. This is nothing new, of course, but the evidence highlighted by the near total worldwide stand-still of air and automobile traffic in March and April 2020 showed just how much we actually can control. Emissions picked up immediately as lockdowns lifted. Again, it is easy to imagine a more balanced world: one where we organize ourselves around collective modes of transportation and where local products - those that do not have to be flown in from abroad - are not only accessible but promoted and their exchange incentivized. And yet, one of the first things France’s President Macron did when the initial lockdown was lifted was to authorize massive governmental support for individual car-ownership in France, rather than investing that very same amount on an equally job-producing overhaul of the country’s infrastructure.

My point is that we already know what we need: a community where we are all safe, seen as our full selves, and in harmony with nature and the physical world we inhabit. But as we begin to envisage that world, we immediately revert to our current set-up. Sure, it is harmful and not sustainable, but the road to the alternative feels scary and unknown and therefore we dismiss it as impossible when really it is not.

I am not (excessively) naive. I know that there are people in power whose short term interests fuel the all-but-calcified status quo. I know that our regulatory systems often are set up to protect the interests of the powerful - observe the recent chaos and panic caused by individual speculators playing the stock market in a way that led to massive losses of established companies, when no panic ensued where the opposite was true. 

And yet, we have the tools to circumvent many of these structures: crypto-currency, collective community action, locally-grounded economies, and - yes - love. Because love is what is at the heart of the world we all know we want to live in. And the only thing standing between us and that world is the myth of impossibility.

The Day I Stopped Sewing

Earlier this year, two of my colleagues were killed in a car accident and I stopped sewing. I also stopped drinking for a while, which is odd in and of itself: I grew up in Denmark, and - like the Irish - we are known to drink to excess both in sadness and celebration. But it was the inability to sew that told me something was really wrong.

(A photo of my brother and me, probably the last year I wasn’t sewing. As you can see, however, we were really into coordinated outfits. I legit couldn’t say for sure which one is me and which one is my brother.)

Throughout my life, I have crafted items out of fabrics and yarn as a way to express and avoid emotions in equal measure.  During a painful breakup ten years ago, the first thing I did after that initial, disaster-defining, fight, was to dig out the most complicated pattern I could find and follow it to the letter, couture techniques and all. I still use the jacket I made - it is impeccably crafted, and it reminds me that beauty can grow out of pain.  When my estranged father tried to kill himself late last year, I moved in with my mother for a bit, and together we made a black-and-white quilt that mirrors the graphic oil paintings I remember from my childhood home. Every night I snuggle up in the soft cotton, knowing that home has meaning even when it is no longer there.

(OK, so this is not a quilt (in case you were wondering). This is a photo I found when I was looking through my father’s papers. This is my grandfather (the dude with the hat) and two queens. Except I think one might still have been a princess at the time.)

About five years ago, I discovered fabric design as an additional outlet. At the time, I was deeply unhappy in my job, a sentiment that translated into a temporary hatred of urbanity. The office was located in a particularly claustrophobic, downtrodden, and dingy part of New York City, and as a result I felt like I literally could only breathe when I was outdoors. I wanted to translate this feeling of relief - of life - into fabric, and so started printing flowers, snow, water, trees, pebbles, anything that helped me breathe, onto pieces of linen and cotton.

Before I knew it, the printing took on more importance than the sewing and design. My very first runway show was dominated by nature prints more so than coherent silhouettes. For a while, I didn’t make anything that didn’t carry my own prints. It felt like if I sewed anything with fabric I had not designed myself, it was somehow a cop-out, a lack of authenticity, a sadder, dimmer, carbon-copy of what I had imagined and felt.

In truth, for a short time there, fabric design and printing became the way I expressed pretty much anything, even petty spite and despair. When my father-in-law made hateful comments about immigrants (of which I am one) and immigrant children (of which I parent one), I translated my anger into marketable t-shirts and donated the proceeds in his name to a pro-immigrant organization. A miscarriage had me design another t-shirt with text expressing the flippancy I wanted to feel. The printing process prevented me from being a victim of the situation. I was doing something, and what I was doing had humor and grit. And then my colleagues died.

[Here’s a photo of my much missed colleague, Ana Paula, wearing one of Kær’s Kindness t-shirts. And one ofme wearing my miscarriage t-shirt.] I don’t know how to best explain that there is a clear before and after my colleagues’ deaths: there just is. And nowhere more so than in my creativity. It just went away. Sure, I sewed, but only realizing the vision of others. I made an impossibly romantic wedding gown for a friend’s friend, in a process that helped me focus love and loss in equal parts into tiny stitches of joy. I finally altered the many pants and jackets my husband long had begged me to outfit with zippers, hem, or otherwise make more useful. I raced through shirts I had promised my daughter to finish more than a year ago, but that somehow had been put on the backburner every time I had felt like realizing one of the colorful sketches that had been appearing in my mind.  Because after my colleagues died, the colorful sketches were just gone.

(Not everyone processes grief as loss of creativity. Here’s an amazing painting of our colleagues, Ana Paula and Sally, at a colleague organization in Honduras: Cattrachas.)

It’s been 8 months. This week I decided it was time. I pulled out a roll of fabric I designed years ago with oddly translucent cherry-red quince flowers on midnight blue. I picked a jacket pattern someone else made, complete with couture techniques and complicated twists. It will take weeks to make; the pockets alone took me a day. When I am done with the sewing, I will hand-wax it, transforming it from coarse linen into a leather-like shine. This process will also take days.  And when I am done, the sketches will come back. I know they will, because I can already see their shadows.

The birthplace of Kær: Samsø, the small island in the center of Denmark, where my mother lives and where I married the love of my life in 2014. This is where any creativity I have comes from: love

A culture of care: helping activists and their allies look after themselves

@ OpenDemocracy

Self-care is often the last thing on the minds of frontline human rights defenders. But it is the only thing that can make activism sustainable.

Last year at least 321 human rights defenders, in 27 countries, were killed, and frontline activists are increasingly also the targets of digital attacks and state oppression . The impacts of these threats transcend the activists’ work, rippling out to create fear and anxiety in their daily lives, for their families and within their communities. This lack of wellbeing is as paralysing as insecurity can be. Given this, self-care becomes a precondition for social justice work, and so – as feminist activist and writer Audre Lorde famously said – an act of political warfare.

People on the front line of that war need and deserve the support of donors and allies beyond their own communities. Many of those who we support at The Fund for Global Human Rights (the Fund), where I work, face steeply escalating security challenges and so we are in ongoing conversations with them about how we – as a donor and ally – can better, and over the long term, help lift the physical and emotional burden that insecurity places on them. From these conversations my colleagues and I have learned some important lessons about how to fund and support the security and well-being of frontline activists – but also about ourselves.

After the emergency

When we think of security risks and infringements of our wellbeing, it’s often acute dangers that come to mind: threats linked to a particular activity or event; the deep sadness that comes with the sudden death of friends. But the first lesson is that emergency help in response to an acute situation isn’t enough.

Within the human rights community, a focus on emergencies alone has encouraged the rise of ‘hard security’ experts and organisations, and emergency funds for the immediate evacuation of activists facing imminent risks. All these are great and necessary for responding to life-threatening security breaches. However, they do not address the long-term security and wellbeing needs of frontline activists or their communities once the emergency period has ended.

Right now, for example, the Fund is supporting the temporary relocation of four community leaders and their families. They were receiving threats because of their community’s resistance to a mining project that would destroy their land and jeopardise livelihoods. This relocation – and the accompanying strengthening of physical security for the community – can be absolutely necessary as a last resort. But it has consequences that last: disrupted learning for children, disrupted livelihoods for everyone, and ongoing guilt for placing one’s family in this position, to name a few.

Emergency help in response to an acute situation isn’t enough

Add to these long-term effects of acute danger the everyday risks of the work. Some are inherent in the pursuit of justice and equality itself, such as feeling powerless when campaigns fail or new injustices occur. Others are due to the specifics of the place where the work is done: war zones and humanitarian crisis areas are obvious examples, but women who work outside the home may be unable to escape the risks and stress of continuous sexual harassment even in their local neighbourhood.

In addition to being short-term, many security interventions fail to address the cumulative and insidious effects of day-to-day strains and frequent reminders that the world is unjust. To be effective, security and wellbeing measures require long-term relationships, flexible funding and a deep understanding of the specific work done by an organisation and its inherent risks.

For example, in two countries where the Fund operates – which cannot be named due to security risks – we have found that by helping activists to counter immediate physical threats we have won the trust needed to have deeper, more complicated conversations about wellbeing. These conversations address which day-to-day risks may be necessary or acceptable to get the work done; when pulling back from activism for a period could actually help sustain the work over the long term; and when colleagues need help to take a back seat. As a result of these deeper conversations, activists say they feel more open to ask for the additional wellbeing and security support they need: whether it is relocation, retreat space, support for medical bills, help to generate independent income sources, security cameras, psychosocial support or just flexibility to change what they are doing without affecting funding.

Through these conversations we have found that general, long-term funding makes it easier for frontline activists to openly share realities about emotional strain and security threats. This is because activists know they can adapt their work to changing circumstances without putting continued support in jeopardy.

It’s all relative

It is hard to feel well when you don’t feel safe and it is hard to feel safe when you don’t feel well. To complicate things still further, any individual’s idea of what ‘well’ or ‘safe’ feels like changes drastically depending on their environment and circumstances. Our second lesson at the Fund has been that wellbeing is relative and support must respect cultural differences.

A long-term grantee in Latin America recently went on a two-day meeting away from her country and told us that even this temporary respite from danger fostered deeper strategic thinking and longer-term resilience, simply because she could finally get a good night’s sleep.

The point here is not to force anyone into therapy or a daily yoga practice

At the same time, frontline activists often push back against suggestions that they might need to focus on their own or their colleagues’ wellbeing. There is a certain macho culture amongst many activists which labels psychosocial support as necessary only after a breakdown or for those who see themselves as victims. To many, thinking about wellbeing can feel frivolous and selfish: our communities are under attack as we speak, so what if we have nightmares and can’t relate to our kids?

The funder-grantee relationship itself can limit openness. As mentioned above, some frontline groups are reluctant to share emotional needs for fear their funder will yank support or believe they are incapable of delivering on a funded project – which may very well be the case where trauma is untreated.

For all these reasons, funders and allies of frontline activists must understand local stigma and practices around wellbeing. We should use our position to make suggestions, based on our experience with other partners – not impose pre-determined solutions. In many of the countries where the Fund works, counselling and mental health support are viewed with deep suspicion. The broader body-mind awareness culture that has gained popularity in the global north in the past couple of decades is seen as the refuge of those who just aren’t strong enough.

The point here is not to force anyone into therapy or a daily yoga practice, but rather to stimulate an ongoing conversation between activists, allies and funders which allows all to see the emotional strain of the work, makes seeking support normal and provides an assortment of possible mitigation strategies – which may be different across cultures and regions.

We are all in this together

In my two decades working for international human rights and social justice organisations, I have watched colleagues getting sick with worry, trauma and guilt, often with little more support than collegial compassion and a shared sense that this is just how it is. I myself remember calling peers late at night during my research or advocacy trips, from phone booths in bus stations and on deserted public squares (before affordable international cellphone service was available), to talk about what had just happened and how best to stay safe.

While these calls were soothing, the makeshift networks we cobbled together amounted to neither risk mitigation nor care. They were an expression of friendship: necessary but not enough. Some of this is changing, with more formal structures being put in place at the international level. But the recent crisis over alleged bullying and a toxic work environment at Amnesty International highlights just how far we still have to go.

Funders and other allies to frontline groups are not exempt from stress: we too have full workloads and exist in a culture that celebrates overwork and burnout as a badge of honour. In fact, a 2019 UK survey shows that 80 percent of charity workers have experienced workplace stress in the past 12 months. At the end of the day, if we are not willing to take our own security and wellbeing seriously, no one will trust we have theirs in mind.

Perhaps most importantly, we have learned that true security and wellbeing requires an ongoing culture of learning. It might even require a fundamental reboot of the way we work. Some funders are beginning to question the conceptual framing of holistic security and wellbeing: this is not just about being safe and feeling good, but rather about the sustainability of the work itself. Flexibility, collectiveness, inclusion, diversity, respect and self-awareness are strategies for achieving this, as well as being at the core of a world where human rights are defended.

Pregnancy, Drug Use, and Why Prison Is Not the Solution

@HuffPost

In New Hampshire, a bill to redefine opioid use or addiction in “custodial parents,” including pregnant women, as child abuse is making its way through the legislature, despite vocal objection from the state’s medical community. Much media treatment of this bill and similar bills in other states presumes women are not generally held criminally responsible for terminating—or losing—a pregnancy.

This illusion is increasingly hard to sustain.

In March 2015, Purvi Patel, a 33-year-old woman in Indiana, was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment for, prosecutors claim, inducing an abortion. Patel has maintained she had a miscarriage, and has never tested positive for any of the abortifacients the prosecution claims she took. In fact, the pathologist for the prosecution partially relied on the long discredited “lung test“ to determine if the recovered fetus had been born alive: a practice from the 17th century disproven as bad science over a century ago. Whether a miscarriage or an induced abortion, it is clear that Patel is in jail for not carrying a pregnancy to term.

Indeed, state legislators increasingly seek to hold women criminally responsible for not having healthy pregnancy outcomes. Since the beginning of this year, at least eight state legislatures have introduced bills to redefine legal personhood as starting at “fertilization” or “conception.” Though voters have generally rejected personhood measures when put to a vote—three times in Colorado alone—they keep resurfacing in new versions.

From a medical perspective, fetal personhood bills make no sense. “Conception“ is not a medical term and is interchangeably used to refer to the moment an ovum is fertilized and the moment a fertilized ovum implants in the uterine lining. “Fertilization“ is a medical term—referring to fusion of male and female gametes to form a zygote—but not all fertilized ova implant in the uterine lining (that is: not all result in a pregnancy), and the precise moment of both fertilization and implantation is hard to determine. As a result, the length of a pregnancy is usually calculated with reference to the pregnant woman’s last period—when she clearly was not pregnant yet—because that moment is an observable factor that can be defined.

There are also obvious logistical problems with fetal personhood bills. An estimated 10 to 20 percent of known pregnancies end in miscarriages, with the actual number likely much higher as many women miscarry before they know they are pregnant. In addition, the risk of miscarriage is higher for specific groups of women, such as older women, women with weight problems, women who have already miscarried, those who have contracted infections or who have immune response issues, and those who regularly use drugs, including alcohol and nicotine.

As a result, the implementation of fetal personhood laws would require unconstitutional discrimination and invasion of privacy. If a fertilized ovum has the same rights as a person after birth, each miscarriage (or failure to implant) would need to be scrutinized for intentional or reckless neglect. Detection would only be possible by registering all incidents of unprotected sex, and effective surveillance would require regular pregnancy testing, in particular of women at risk of miscarriage (think mandatory weekly pregnancy testing for women over 40 until they reach menopause). Of course, no one is advocating this.

Proponents of punitive pregnancy-related provisions have, however, successfully advocated for the growing surveillance of pregnant women from marginalized or stigmatized communities through social services, and in particular through medical providers. The organization National Advocates for Pregnant Women has documented the growing arsenal of state laws that treat drug use and addiction in pregnant women as a form of child abuse. Because health care providers in all states must report child abuse to the authorities, this reframing forces doctors and nurses to breach patient confidentiality for pregnant women who admit to struggling with drug use or addiction. The predictable result is a breakdown in the therapeutic relationship at best, and at worst, a reluctance to seek care at all for the women who arguably need it the most.

Many of these bills are pushed through without consulting the medical community, which is the case for the bill currently pending in New Hampshire. House hearings are under way, and both pediatricians and obstetric-gynecologists will testify to its predictably disastrous effects on the provision of addiction treatment and child welfare.

To be sure, both child abuse and drug addiction are serious matters, which require appropriate state support. Attempts to redefine drug use or addiction as child abuse in pregnant women, however, disregard the medical and psychological needs of both abused children and pregnant women. Advocates of such legislation are attempting to transform the fiction of fetal personhood into law by appropriating the problem of child abuse and punishing pregnant women in need of treatment for substance dependency or addiction.

A fetus is not a child and a women’s right to choose an elective abortion should not be circumvented by legislating punishment for women in need of treatment for substance use disorders. Legislators should listen to the medical community. Whether the conversation is about elective abortion, treatment for substance use disorder, or any other medical intervention, decisions about care are best made by the patient in private consultation with her doctor.