Tag Archives: sexual assault

Standing with the Missing: Tucson Hosts the REDress Project

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Tree at the Piikani Nation, Alberta, Canada. Photo: voyagevixen2

Last year, on March 11, red shirts and dresses filled the Arizona House of Representatives. Activists wore the color in support of HB 2570, a bill introduced by Rep. Jennifer Jermaine, D-Chandler, to address an ongoing crisis in Arizona’s Native American communities.

That crisis, and that visual statement in response to it, is also the theme of the REDress Project, a traveling exhibition by Métis artist Jaime Black, whose work opens at the Tucson Desert Art Museum on January 10. Black, who is based in Winnipeg, Canada, began the project in 2009, collecting and displaying dresses to “call in the energy of the women who are lost.”

Honoring the many lost throughout North America, the REDress Project will be on exhibit at the Tucson Desert Art Museum.

The red of those dresses has become a symbol — and the letters MMIW the shorthand — for missing and murdered indigenous women. In Native American communities, domestic abuse, kidnapping, and other forms of violence have put many victims on difficult paths to justice, often leading nowhere.

Gaps in jurisdiction, especially when the offender isn’t a tribal member, have been one barrier. Non-tribal suspects fall under federal jurisdiction, but a shortage of federal marshals has often meant that they can continue offending with impunity. In a report published last year, the Urban Indian Health Institute found that roughly half of perpetrators in MMIW cases were non-Native. Continue reading →

STD Awareness: Fighting STDs with Education

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Here in Arizona, Tucson Unified School District has been taking steps toward adopting a comprehensive, inclusive, age-appropriate, and medically accurate sex education program, but it’s been repeatedly delayed by a vocal minority. In September, a vote was put on hold after the superintendent recommended changing the proposed curriculum to focus on abstinence as the preferred method for avoiding STDs and unintended pregnancies.

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Additionally, many opponents of TUSD’s proposed curriculum believe its inclusiveness of LGBTQ kids is tantamount to “indoctrination,” that this type of education “sexualizes” children, and that discussions of gender identity will confuse students. LGBTQ kids have traditionally been ignored or demeaned in sex education programs, and their health matters too. Presenting medically accurate and age-appropriate information does not indoctrinate or sexualize children — it simply helps them make healthy decisions, no matter who they are. And these days, students need to be empowered with as much knowledge as possible to make decisions that protect their health.

Confronting the STD Epidemic

Last month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released its annual report on sexually transmitted diseases. It did not contain good news. For the fifth straight year, STD rates are climbing.

Continue reading →

Sentencing Survivors: The Trials of Joan Little and Cyntoia Brown

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Cyntoia Brown. Photo: Tennessee Department of Corrections

After spending almost half her life behind bars, Cyntoia Brown leaves prison this month, freed on the clemency she received in January. Brown was convicted in 2006, at age 18, for committing murder and robbery to escape an alleged sex trafficking scheme.

While it marks the beginning of freedom for Brown, this month also marks the anniversary of a pivotal event in the life of Joan Little, whose own escape from sexual violence — and its aftermath — have drawn comparisons to Brown’s.

A justice system that targets people of color makes Joan Little’s and Cyntoia Brown’s cases the exception rather than the rule.

The incidents that fractured their lives were separated in time by decades, but otherwise the details share numerous similarities. Both Brown and Little are women of color. Both lived in the South. And both gained strong public support from activists and celebrities who viewed them as women caught in a criminal justice system fraught with racism and sexism.

In the Hands of the People

The case of Joan (pronounced “Jo Ann”) Little represented a turning point in the way Black victims of sexual violence were treated in the courts. Throughout much of U.S. history, sexually degrading Black women has been part and parcel of maintaining the racial order in many communities — enough so that, as one Black newspaper observed in the 1950s, it was a “commonplace experience for many of our women … to be propositioned openly by white men. You can pick up accounts of these at a dime a dozen in almost any community.” Continue reading →

Victories and Vigilance

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If you are keeping count, last week saw the 100th day of our Arizona state legislative session. Some might say that the lack of any outright proposals to attack abortion during this legislative session should feel wonderful. It does.

But — although there has been a 63 percent increase in six-week abortion bans introduced in state legislatures across the country — Arizona has seen zero bills further reducing access to reproductive health care because Arizona is already one of the most over-regulated states in the country for abortion care. It does not mean progress has been achieved when it comes to gender equality.

Remaining Vigilant

Instead of introducing another ban on abortion, Center for Arizona Policy (CAP) decided to go after state funding for 2-1-1, a hotline that connects people with resources across Arizona, especially in times of need. Cathi Herrod, who leads CAP, is jeopardizing more than 900,000 Arizonans’ connection to critical social services for $33 worth of calls from people seeking information on their private, constitutionally protected right to abortion care. It is simply more proof that Arizonans’ health, safety, and practical needs are being dismissed for an extremist agenda at the expense of our collective well-being.

The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) failed to move forward and the efforts to pass it this session have been stopped in their tracks. Even with the groundswell of women who led in voting in the midterms, it is still an uphill battle to get the ERA passed and eventually ratified.

Celebrating Victories

These setbacks have not deterred our endorsed legislators, who piece by piece are getting protections and advancements for people’s rights to the governor’s desk. Continue reading →

Meet Our Candidates: January Contreras for Arizona Attorney General

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The time to fight back — and fight forward — for reproductive justice is fast approaching. The stakes are high in this year’s state election, with candidates for governor, secretary of state, attorney general, and other races on the ballot. The Arizona primary election will be held August 28, 2018, and voters need to be registered by July 30 to cast their ballots. Reproductive health has been under attack, both nationally and statewide, but Planned Parenthood Advocates of Arizona has endorsed candidates who put our health and our rights first. Get to know them now in our series of “Meet Our Candidates” interviews, and make your voice heard in 2018!

[A]lthough January Contreras has never run for an elected office prior to now, she has spent her career close to politics and devoted to public service. Her experience has included advising Gov. Janet Napolitano on health policy and serving on President Obama’s White House Council on Women and Girls.

Last year, Contreras announced her bid to become the next Arizona attorney general, a position that serves as the chief legal officer of the state of Arizona. The attorney general represents and provides legal advice to the state and defends Arizona’s people and businesses in cases involving financial, civil rights, and felony criminal violations.

“We are our best when we work to protect the well-being and rights of all of us.”

During Napolitano’s tenure as attorney general, Contreras worked in the office as an assistant attorney general, with a focus on prosecuting criminal fraud cases. More recently, Contreras set her sights on leading the office, because she felt the state was at a “very important crossroads.” As she told the Arizona Republic, “for too long, the special interests have treated the office as their personal law firm.” As attorney general, Contreras wants to serve working families and small businesses and, as she told the Washington office of The Guardian, “fight hard” for “people in vulnerable positions.”

Fighting on behalf of those at risk is a cause that has been close to Contreras’ heart. Contreras has served on the board of the Arizona Coalition to End Sexual and Domestic Violence and was instrumental in establishing the Council on Combating Violence Against Women for Obama’s Department of Homeland Security. More recently, she co-founded a legal aid organization for women and children who are victims of abuse, Arizona Legal Women and Youth Services (ALWAYS). In addition, Contreras has been a lawyer and advocate for youth in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which protects undocumented immigrants who arrived as children from facing deportation. Continue reading →

Brothers in Arms, Part 2: Race and Abortion from Roe to the Reagan Years

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This article is our second installment in a series that explores the historical and contemporary links between racial intolerance and opposition to abortion. Previously, this series examined how fears of immigration — and racist notions that associated abortion with the barbarism of so-called “savage” races — fueled the opposition to abortion that led to its prohibition in the late 1800s. This installment examines the social forces that helped racism and opposition to abortion converge again in the first years after Roe v. Wade.

Replica of a banner used at NAACP headquarters from 1920 to 1938

A principle of democracy holds that while majority rule should serve as the guiding force of government, at times it must be reconciled with the rights of individuals and minorities. It was an idea Thomas Jefferson captured in his inaugural speech of 1801:

All … will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail … that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect.

With that understanding, the framers wrote the Constitution to include provisions for a judicial branch, composed of judges whose lifetime appointments would free them from the pressures of elections and afford them greater independence in their decisions. The branch would serve as the nation’s highest judicial body, above state and local courts.

Before his obsession with abortion and Tinky Winky, Jerry Falwell fought civil rights and integration.

For much of U.S. history, local, state, and federal judicial systems existed alongside another judicial system, one far less formal and conceived not in the interest of protecting minorities, but often in meting out the harshest possible punishments for them. It was the vigilante justice of lynching, sometimes known as Lynch law. Named after the Virginia plantation owner Charles Lynch, it was a form of mob justice that took root in the Revolutionary War era, before an official court system was fully established. It came to mean quick trials that ended in public hangings.

Though lynching was initially used against British loyalists, eventually Southern blacks became the overwhelming majority of its victims. Many Native Americans, Asians, Jews, and Mexicans were also lynched. According to the NAACP, between 1882 and 1968, in the period of racial tension in the post-slavery and civil rights years, 4,743 lynchings took place, and 3,446 of its victims were black. Rather than taking place under the cover of night or in countryside seclusion, many lynchings were staged in broad daylight, even in front of courthouses, and they were often advertised beforehand in newspapers — a blunt assertion of their existence as a separate judicial system for people of color. Though associated with the South, they took place in the North as well. In fact, only a few states — Alaska, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island — had no lynchings between 1882 and 1968. Continue reading →

Consent and Sexual Entitlement: A Case for Truly Comprehensive Sexuality Education

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The following guest post comes to us from Catherine Sharp, a Tucson volunteer who worked for 10 years in finance and operations for an online media company. Catherine volunteers for Planned Parenthood as a Rapid Response administrator, a fundraiser committee member, and a speakers bureau trainee.

Let’s be clear, most men don’t leave for a night out with the intent of rape. They leave with hopes of a good time and maybe getting lucky. Some men focus more on the getting lucky part since it is considered a trait of masculine success.

During the summer of 1985 one such young man, I’ll call him Steve*, headed out to a party to have fun and maybe score. I happened to be in his path. I was 14 when I lost my virginity to Steve, a handsome 20-year-old introduced to me by my aunt. I thought Steve was cute and was flattered that he believed my aunt when she told him I was 16. As the night wore on and I drank the too-strong drinks my aunt gave me, I ended up asleep in her bed. I woke in the night to Steve in bed with me. He was naked, had undressed me, and had his hands all over me. I was groggy, shocked, scared, and confused. Before I knew it, he was on top of me attempting intercourse. I pushed against his chest, clenched my legs together as tight as I could, and repeatedly said no.

I did not possess the language to communicate what I was experiencing.

Apparently, this was not enough to send the message that I was not a willing participant. Somehow, he managed to force himself inside me, all while I was resisting. When he finished he said to me, “You would be pretty good if you relaxed a little.” Even in my state of shock I was incredulous. I couldn’t help but think, “What do you mean?! Relax a little?! I was using all my strength to stop this!”

Confused and outraged by his words, I did not know what to do. I was scared and ashamed that I “let this happen.” Of course, my 95-pound, 14-year-old self was no match for Steve, but I still felt responsible. Years of being told to ignore or brush off sexist comments, butt slaps, bra snaps, arm punches, and hair pulling led me to believe that my discomfort with Steve’s actions was my problem. Continue reading →