Women Are Not Special

(Originally posted on the Huffington Post)

Women are not special. So if you are expecting another article about what the Obama-Biden administration should do for the constituency I claim to speak for (women), read no further. Women are not and should not have to be a special interest group. Policies that consistently ignore the needs of women are bad for men too.

To be sure, there is value in identifying policy areas in which women's needs and rights have been particularly neglected or scaled back during the past 8 years. Several individuals and groups have already called for action from the next administration, and the diligence with which the Obama transition team has been publishing these bodes well at least for their transparency and accountability. Most groups have identified maternal health, violence, and economic opportunities as priority issues for women.

These are not simply women's issues, though. They are issues of broad public concern. The question should not be whether "women" deserve more attention than "national security," "economic recovery," or any of a long list of other competing demands. The question is whether Americans can put food on the table and be safe as long as they treat concerns such as women's health, freedom from violence, and financial stability as separate side issues.

I say no. While generally billed as special interest concerns, women's rights must be addressed urgently if the new administration is to make inroads on other fronts. Allow me to illustrate.

Health. Using government data, the National Women's Law Center (a nongovernmental organization) publishes a report card on women's health. According to data from 2007, 18 percent of women between the ages of 18 and 64 have no health insurance, showing no change from 2004. Native American and Hispanic women are more than twice as likely to be without health insurance as white women.

The point has often been made that women are more likely to need regular health care because of their reproductive functions, and that health insurance for women therefore is a matter of prevention as much as of cure. And that is everyone's concern. Even though women carry out the physical function of giving birth, the whole family benefits. More generally, of working married women, 48 percent provide half or more of the household income.

Violence. A new US government report shows huge increases in reported cases of rape and sexual assault (25 percent ) and of violence by intimate partners against women (42 percent) between 2005 and 2007. Except for simple assault, which increased by 3 percent, the incidence of every other crime surveyed actually decreased. The country has long been enjoying a decline in violent crime, yet these new figures show a different, and very disturbing, story that should worry everyone.

Whether these figures represent an increase in actual crime or improved methodology, as the report's authors argue, they are alarming. Every American may have a family member or friend affected by these violent crimes. Children who witness domestic violence, even if they are not physically affected by it, may conclude that force is an acceptable way to solve conflicts. And while it is in everyone's interest to ensure that the law enforcement and justice systems respond adequately to violent crime, it should be noted that sexual violence is a category of violent crime that is seldom punished.

Economic opportunities. In the current economic climate, job security is a major concern for many Americans, men and women. But longstanding patterns of discrimination in the workplace exacerbate this situation for women. Despite significant progress, pay equity has still not been achieved -- women earn only 78 cents for every dollar earned by men. And basic labor protections exclude some professions that are dominated by women, such as domestic work or homecare. Keeping in mind the major contributions women make to family income, these inequities affect us all.

There are also important arguments to be made about the unrecognized value of female-dominated professions and the need for equal pay and equal rights for equal work. The failure to promote and protect women's economic opportunities affects what might rightfully be called "an average American family:" about a third of American families are single-parent households, and 89 percent of them are headed by women.

So in the new year, I am not going to advocate that the Obama-Biden administration prioritize women's needs and rights over other concerns. I am going to advocate for policies and programs that promote human rights for all: health, freedom from violence, and economic opportunities. And I will know that as women benefit and women's rights advance, we will all be better off.

Ending Impunity for Rape

(Originally published in the Washington Post)

I have a project for Joseph Biden and Hillary Clinton to work on together: ending impunity for rape. Rape-conviction rates are appallingly low across the globe. I don't mean only in countries that many would think of as lacking good justice systems: Conviction rates hover just above 10 percent of complaints filed in the United States and are a measly 6 percent in Britain. Because the vast majority of rape victims don't file complaints, it does not take precise studies or statistics to conclude that most sexual assaults in most parts of the world end without punishment for the perpetrators. 

Over the years, in the course of my work at Human Rights Watch, I have spoken with dozens of rape victims around the world, read rape-related court files from many countries and scrutinized legislation. Although most people agree that rape is bad, legislation and government action on sexual crimes are not always that clear. Indeed, rape seems to be graded on a scale from "unconscionable" through "bad luck" to "much deserved." Exactly where a particular incident falls on that scale often seems to depend on factors that include family status, sobriety and ethnicity. In all too many cases, laws and judicial systems have determined that forced sex is not really rape.

To understand this better, consider this short list of successful defenses:

It's not rape if she is my wife. Marriage is perhaps the most commonly used cover for rape, so internalized that many women themselves seem to accept it. When I asked a woman in the Dominican Republic in 2004 if her husband ever forced her to have sex, she shrugged and said: "I guess he is a bit violent. He rapes me at times." Unfortunately, this atrocity is often sanctioned by law. Some countries, such as Ethiopia and Indonesia, define rape as something that happens only outside of marriage. In many others, rape is defined more broadly but is interpreted by courts and police as excluding marital rape. The logic can be applied after the fact, too: Several countries, including Brazil and Libya, exonerate a perpetrator of rape if he agrees to marry the victim.

It's not rape if she is my daughter. Though unconscionable to many, incest is seen in some countries as either unfortunate or not all that forced. In Mexico, for example, the rape of a teenage girl by her father is defined as voluntary until it is proved otherwise. Under most state criminal codes in Mexico, incest is considered a crime against the family, not against the physical integrity of the victim, and the underage victim is initially considered as much a criminal as the adult perpetrator.

It's not rape if she was drunk. Over the years, Human Rights Watch and other organizations have documented how prosecutors and courts are likely to treat testimony by rape victims with more suspicion than testimony regarding other types of crimes. Routinely, women are aggressively questioned about whether the intercourse was really involuntary, whether the victim somehow provoked or deserved the assault, and whether the assault even occurred. The mistrust is particularly pronounced when the victim admits to being anything other than completely sober before or during the attack. The frenzied media coverage in England last year of a controversial proposal to change the burden of proof in rape cases appeared to perpetuate the belief, which seemed to be widely held, that a drunk rape victim "had it coming."

It's not rape if my culture mandates intercourse. When the presumed next president of South Africa, Jacob Zuma, stood trial on rape charges in 2006, he bolstered his defense with references to tradition and culture. Zuma testified that his accuser had signaled her arousal by wearing a knee-length skirt to his house and sitting with her legs crossed. He said that it is unacceptable in Zulu culture not to proceed to a sexual encounter once a woman is aroused. Zuma was acquitted, but regardless of the outcome, it is troubling that a high-level politician in any country, much less a country with epidemic levels of sexual violence, peddles the notion that women may mean yes even when they say no.

Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton can change this. During his time in the Senate, Biden has championed draft legislation that would make violence against women a foreign relations priority for the United States, through, for example, supporting legislative reform abroad and a victim-centered approach to violence. As a senator, Clinton supported this legislation. As vice president and secretary of state, Biden and Clinton could make central to U.S. foreign policy the fight against perpetrators' getting away with rape and other forms of violence against women. They should start by creating a coordinating office at the State Department to build on this work. Rape is bad no matter what country it takes place in, whatever the age or marital status of the victim. There is no other way to look at it.

Abortion Rights: Back in the Spotlight

(Originally posted on the Huffington Post)

Throughout a long election campaign, the future of abortion rights and the right to choose has remained a silent concern for many women and men as the higher-profile issues of the economy and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan dominated debate. But the question on Roe v. Wade put to the presidential candidates at the final debate on Wednesday moved the issue front and center once again. It is an intensely personal and relevant issue for women, and for most of us it is not an abstraction.

It became central to my life a couple of years back, when my primary physician refused my request to prescribe the morning-after-pill, citing medical reasons that made no sense to me. I was in a better position than most women in the United States. I was in a dual-income relationship and had a steady job that serendipitously afforded me all the information I needed to assess my situation.

I knew I had a number of options. I had the resources to seek out another health care provider, and I would be able to afford a safe abortion if it came to that. The only option I had ruled out was to carry a potential pregnancy to term: we simply would not be able to afford childcare and other expenses for a second child.

This, to me, is the real question of choice. As voters in California, Colorado, and South Dakota are asked to decide on proposals that would limit women's access to abortion and contraception, there is precious little public debate on whether actually having a child is necessarily a viable choice, financially and professionally.

For many, it is not. Federal law affords just 12 weeks of unpaid maternity or paternity leave, and only for those who are eligible, which excludes about 40 percent of American workers. There are no allowances for time off to breastfeed. There are few public child care options before primary school, and even private alternatives generally will not take children under 2.

Perhaps most disturbing in terms of lack of support, 8.7 million children in the United States currently have no health insurance. In the eyes of the law, it would seem, physically giving birth is the only consideration: you are afforded a short time to regain your strength after the delivery, but are otherwise on your own.

Some -- even advocates for choice -- would say that if you plan to depend on the government, you shouldn't have a child in the first place. But this argument also presumes that if there were public health care and childcare, and provisions for family support, birth rates would shoot through the roof, draining government coffers. Experience from countries with much better maternity and child protections shows otherwise. In my own country, Denmark, there are provisions that are generous by American standards - 52 weeks of paid parental leave, child care and public health care. But the birth rate also is quite low, 1.74 per woman in her lifetime, compared with 2.1 in the United States.

Support services are not the only factor in making a choice about parenthood, but clearly in the United States, from a purely economic point of view, fertility is not a matter of choice for everyone.

In the United States the lack of support for child care and parental benefits also coexists with serious legal or financial obstacles to accessing safe abortion services and even, at times, contraception. Since 1973, both state and federal legislators have limited access to legal abortion through burdensome regulation. Women with limited economic resources face additional obstacles because abortion services have been subject to a federal funding freeze since 1977 except in cases of rape, or incest or where the mother's life is in danger. Furthermore, the majority of states do not provide health care funding for abortion services that fall outside these exceptions.

In fact, fertility (and, by extension, choice) often comes down to a class issue. While the overall fertility rate has stayed the same, the number of children living in low-income families has steadily increased since 2000. The point is not that poor women shouldn't have children, but that all women should have a real choice - and that means access to information about contraception and abortion, and the support they need to raise children.

In my case, I ended up finding an alternative health care provider, who prescribed me the morning-after-pill.

For me, this is more than a personal issue. I have made a commitment to press for a real opportunity for choice for all women, including access to safe abortion services for poor, adolescent, or otherwise vulnerable women.

But choice also requires science-based sex education, contraception, maternity and paternity benefits, and access to child care and health care. The rationale behind polices such as Denmark's is that rearing a child is a service to all: reproduction, at its most basic, is the reproduction of society. Both the personal and the collective nature of that choice need to be protected by law and defended by the next president.

Access to Contraceptives Promotes Abortion?

(Originally posted on the Huffington Post)

In the last five years, I have interviewed hundreds of women in developing countries regarding their access to reproductive health care. To the best of my knowledge, President Bush has not.

I would expect to be in disagreement with his administration's often demonstrably unscientific approach to family planning. However, President Bush's claim this week that giving poor women access to contraceptives promotes abortion defies logic. In a policy statement released by the office of the president on June 19 the administration has declared the president's intent to veto a bill authorizing foreign aid for family planning programs, because, according to the statement, the bill would be contrary to the administration's Mexico City Policy (also known colloquially as the "Global Gag Rule").

The administration's analysis of this issue is not only fundamentally flawed, it is also dangerous. Here's why. The Global Gag Rule restricts U.S. foreign aid to non-U.S. based organizations that (with non-U.S. funds) provide legal voluntary abortion services or advocate for less restrictive abortion laws within their country.

The Global Gag Rule is not about whether U.S. foreign aid is used to fund legal abortion services directly -- such funding has been illegal since 1973. That is, the Global Gag Rule expressly denies funding to organizations who even with their own alternative funding refuse to be silent on the devastating consequences of the criminalization of abortion on the lives of women or who simply provide reproductive health services that are fully legal.

A brief history of the Global Gag Rule is that it was first enacted by the Reagan administration; was repealed by the Clinton administration in 1993; was reintroduced by Congress in the foreign aid appropriations act (with a waiver system) in 2000, and was fully reinstated by President Bush as one of his first acts of government in January 2001.

The local health providing organizations de-funded by the Global Gag Rule (those who refuse to be "gagged") often give services spanning the full spectrum of family planning: information on contraceptive methods, youth counseling to postpone sexual initiation and prevent adolescent pregnancies, as well as the provision of condoms, diaphragms, and hormonal contraception.

Rather than preventing abortion, the real effect of the Global Gag Rule has therefore been a drop in access to reproductive health services, information, and modern contraceptive methods. These are all services primarily to women that have been proven to bring down the number of crisis pregnancies, and therefore abortions.

In short, the Global Gag Rule is bad foreign policy and bad for women.

The foreign aid bill President Bush is now threatening to veto contains a provision stating that organizations who apply for U.S. foreign aid cannot be denied funding specifically destined for the provision of contraceptives solely on the basis of the Global Gag Rule.

With this provision, Congress seems to be saying that improving access to contraceptives might give poor women a better chance to avoid using-often unsafe-abortion as their only means of family planning.

With his promised veto, President Bush is saying the opposite: that contraceptives promote abortion.

President Bush should explain this twisted logic to the many women and adolescents who -- as a result of this administration's sustained war on family planning and scientifically based health information -- will face unsafe abortion, lasting health consequences from early pregnancies, and even possible death. President Bush would certainly benefit from contact with the millions of people his policies affect.

A Convincing Argument

(Originally posted on RH Reality Check)

I am now in Los Angeles, on the last leg of my road-trip through the United States and Canada with Verónica Cruz, founder and director of the Mexican grassroots advocacy group, Las Libres (The Free Women). Las Libres works for access to safe and legal abortion in the conservative Mexican state of Guanajuato, so it is not surprising that social change - how to create and sustain it - is high on Verónica's agenda.

What might be surprising is that her reflections are universally applicable. Also to the groups that try to generate this change.

"You can't ever afford to get complacent with your work," Verónica told me Tuesday as we left a meeting with community based women's organizations in East Los Angeles. "We must all evaluate the impact our work has on creating durable social change - that's the key factor for doing things right."

In fact, setting priorities and planning for real change has been our main conversation topic throughout the week, from the panel discussion with Verónica and Dolores Huerta (the legendary founder of United Farm Workers) at the Feminist Majority's offices, over our visit to a model Rape Crisis Center in Santa Monica, to our lunch-time strategy session with latina and chicana women in East Los Angeles.

And we have come to a few conclusions.

First, we agreed, change happens through three main vehicles: conviction, financial incentives, or political pressure.

In the case of ensuring access to safe abortion for all women, an example of each of these three arguments would be something like this:

1. Women have a right to decide over their bodies (conviction);
2. The criminalization of abortion leads to adverse health complications, in particular for poor women, and this carries financial implications for the public health system (financial incentives); and
3. Promoting access to legal abortion translates directly into votes (political pressure).

Secondly, we also had to admit, we, as a movement, often are trying too hard to convince the wrong people with the wrong arguments.

Few decision-makers agree to push for social change because we convinced them of the rightness of our cause - most respond better to financial or political pressure. But to build a durable movement, the logic is inverse: if you try to pressure or buy people to join your cause, your movement will disappear as soon as the incentives subside.

And yet so many groups we know - including political parties - do just the opposite: they use energy trying to convince decision-makers and resources trying to buy or pressure grassroots.

Third, change can be almost instantaneous if you start by really listening.

"We call it listening with all five senses," said Verónica. "That's what we try to do when we talk to women in the marginalized communities we work with. We say to them: let's see what problems you have, and what resources you have to overcome them. And that way, together, we can figure out a solution that is made possible by the women themselves."

No money, no enhanced infrastructure, not even access to any other education than just a basic understanding that women are human beings and that human being have certain inalienable rights.

Finally, durable social change can only come about through a movement.

Law and political changes are important and can create an impetus for deeper social change. But they can never be enough on their own. With regard to the issue of abortion, this - perhaps quite naïve - realization cuts both ways.

In South Dakota, for example, the movement behind the referendum to defeat the proposal to criminalize most abortions made it clear that a large group of convinced people can overcome a smaller group of decision-makers motivated by financial or political incentives. The legal change was not enough to change the mentality of the people of South Dakota, who knew that criminalizing abortion does not eliminate the need for it.

In Nicaragua, the financial and political incentives won out, at least for the moment. Despite a massive movement against the criminalization of abortion; despite countless letters and petitions to the Nicaraguan Congress; despite women already dying in hospitals because they cannot get access to a therapeutic abortion; despite all of this, Nicaraguan politicians virtually fell over each over to demonstrate that they were tougher then the next guy on sending women to prison for abortion. Why? Because in Nicaragua, it seems that it is more important to have the church and the commercial interests on your side in an election, than to do the right thing. (Money and pressure weigh out conviction).

Fortunately, this legal change will not create social change. The people of Nicaragua are likely to continue to protest the unjustness of the law. And through their mobilization and work, they will create the real, the durable, social change that women everywhere deserve.

"As long as people mobilize for social justice, there is hope. Then you know you are doing the right thing," Verónica said to this morning. Indeed.