Communities Must Face the True Consequences of Child Sexual Abuse

A response to the New York Times article, "Ultra-Orthodox Shun Their Own for Reporting Child Sexual Abuse":

Child sexual abuse is one of the last remaining taboos. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 1 in 4 grown women and 1 in 6 grown men were victims of child sexual abuse. However, even in light of such staggering rates, we have communities throughout the country that would rather sweep the issue under the rug than address the true costs of this abuse.

Whether you are talking about the Catholic Church, which is actively appealing a law that would extend the statute of limitations for victims reporting these crimes; Penn State officials, who were more interested in protecting the football program than the countless boys who were abused by its celebrity coach, Jerry Sandusky; or the members of the Ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn who are actively dissuading victims and families from reporting abuse to the authorities, communities across the nation are deciding to protect their reputation at the expense of their children.

My own experience in dealing with domestic violence in the Asian-American community - a community that prides itself on fostering the "model family," much like Ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities in New York - revealed that people were afraid to talk about violence and abuse because they feared tarnishing the community’s image. Only when the community addressed this violence openly and honestly could progress and change be achieved. We must display the same courage when it comes to child sexual abuse.

The statistics speak for themselves. We know that child sexual abuse is linked to so many social ills for survivors down the road, including re-victimization as adults, higher rates of domestic and sexual violence and increased rates of substance abuse and poverty. This is an issue that cannot and must not be ignored.

That is why the Ms. Foundation for Women is funding groups working across the country to bring this issue out of the shadows and into the light of day. Hiding it under the rug only serves to weaken our communities – and further endanger our children – but, if we have the courage and resolve to address it head-on, we can change the lives of thousands of children, strengthen our families and transform our communities.

Patricia Eng
Vice President, Grants and Capacity Building, Ms. Foundation for Women

Learn more about the Ms. Foundation and PreventConnect's "Ending Child Sexual Abuse" web conference series. 
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Women's Well-Being and Policy Solutions Must Drive Immigration Reform

On Sunday March 26, 2011, the New York Times published Anika Rahman's letter to the editor in response to its March 18 article, Immigrant Detentions Draw International Fire, that identified serious problems with US immigration policies. As we note in the text below, it is "long past time that...women's solutions for change, drive federal immigration reform."

To the Editor:

We were pleased to read that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has issued harsh criticism of United States immigration policies, specifically immigrant detention and 287(g), the dangerous program that puts immigration enforcement in the hands of local police.

We hope that international condemnation will finally compel lawmakers to halt 287(g) and end immigrant detention, a policy that has led to gross human rights violations in for-profit prisons run by corporations.

In particular, we urge the United States government to end human rights abuses of immigrant women and children. Our grantees, advocacy groups nationwide, tell us that women are especially vulnerable.

Women in detention are subjected to a litany of horrors, including rape and physical assault, being forced to give birth in shackles and losing their young children to foster care or an abusive partner.

Across the country, 287(g) programs instill such fear of local police that women, afraid of deportation, do not report domestic violence or other crimes, placing women, families and entire communities at risk.

Our current immigration policies are an international disgrace. It's long past time that women and children's well-being, and women's solutions for change, drive federal immigration reform.

Anika Rahman
President & CEO
Ms. Foundation for Women

Cruel and Clueless: Conservatives on Vacation

In case you missed it this weekend, take a moment right now to read Paul Krugman's latest column in the New York Times, which looks at the current situation with joblessness in America, and the cruelty -- and "cluelessness" -- implicit in Congress' unwillingness to extend unemployment benefits for the millions who now are living without paychecks.

As Krugman points out, when it comes to alleviating the dire impact the economic crisis has had on millions of Americans, the conservatives have gotten it dead wrong, espousing beliefs that are both heartless and confused. Leaving town, refusing to pass extended unemployment before vacationing -- whether these moves were the result of cynical political calculations or a consequence of being completely out of touch with the terrible reality that millions of Americans now face, conservatives have clearly lost their moral compass.

Krugman cites some simple truths, which most Americans understand intuitively. First, cutting off benefits to the unemployed may make them increasingly desperate for work -- but they can't take jobs that aren't there (at present, there are five unemployed workers for every one job opening in the US economy).

Moreover, in Krugman's estimation, the amount of money these extensions would add to our national debt amounts to what he calls "penny-pinching" relative to the other issues that that have sunk us so far in the hole (see wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to start).

All of this refusal on the part of conservative lawmakers, as most of us can surmise, has a great deal to do with the fact that there's an election season looming in the near future. And many conservatives may be betting that saying "no" to more spending will cast them as the good guys in voters' eyes. But as our recent Community Voices on the Economy poll with the Center for Community Change makes clear, the majority of Americans aren't really thinking about the deficit. They're thinking about how to put food on the table. Our polling [pdf] shows that Americans are less concerned about the federal budget issues than they are about rising health care costs, the lack of jobs with family-sustaining wages, and the affordability of everyday expenses like food and gas.

In other words, if lawmakers are really interested in pandering to voters, they'd be better served by helping them meet their daily needs rather than cutting them off from the only source of support many have left: government aid.

Continuing unemployment insurance is not only good for the economy, it's the right thing to do in a country that has too often been dominated by the "everyone for themselves" ethos (more than 90% of those polled rejected this mentality as being of value today). Clearing up lawmaker confusion about how to effectively treat a strained economy, as Krugman aims to do, is vitally important. But it's also critical that lawmakers and laypeople alike understand how little popular support there is for the hands-off approach conservative lawmakers are peddling. In these times, people both want and need a government that is willing to take a strong hand on the economic front; they want a government that can acknowledge that unemployment has been uneven in its effects (recent statistics put levels at 12.4 percent among African-American women and 10.3 percent for Latinas, but just 7.4% for white women), and that is willing to champion policies that create jobs with decent wages to the benefit of low-income communities.

Across party lines, our poll shows that Americans believe in the government's ability to influence the economy. And what most of us want, though we may differ in the details, is for the government to use that influence to shore up this nation's economic future. Leaving millions of jobless workers out in the cold while lawmakers quibble, and then head out on vacation without a resolution, does nothing to further that cause.

So enough already with the party lines; in the real world, families are at their wits' end. Americans want -- and deserve -- far better than this. It's high time lawmakers started delivering.

Sara K. Gould
President and Chief Executive Officer
Ms. Foundation for Women

Laws to Restrict Abortion: Sara K. Gould Responds to the New York Times

Today, The New York Times ran a Letter to the Editor by Ms. Foundation President and CEO, Sara K. Gould, responding to its June 3 article, Abortion Foes Advance Cause at State Level, and highlighting the Foundation's work to fighting state-based assaults on reproductive choice.

To the Editor:

Re “Abortion Foes Advance Cause at State Level” (news article, June 3):

It is no coincidence that “this is a good year” for restricting abortion access at the state level, as an opponent of abortion is quoted as saying. In an election year dominated by the Tea Party and legalized discrimination in Arizona, we now see conservative America’s familiar strategy of hijacking women’s bodies and personal safety for political gains.

The paternalism of laws that require ultrasounds — “though she may avert her eyes” — reveals that the battle for abortion rights is as much about maintaining inequality as it is about “saving babies.”

The Ms. Foundation has supported advocates working at the state level for comprehensive reproductive health for more than 20 years because we know that attempts to limit access to abortion are a step down the road to limits on other reproductive health freedoms and services, like access to contraception.

It is dangerous to women’s overall health and well-being to isolate abortion from the full range of health services every person deserves.


Sara K. Gould
President and Chief Executive Officer
Ms. Foundation for Women
Brooklyn, June 3, 2010

[Originally posted at The New York Times]

New York Times Editorial: Pass the Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights

An editorial in today's New York Times calls on Albany, which "has not been able to govern its way out of a paper bag" to "bestow some fundamental rights and protections on the invisible workers whose labors are a cornerstone of the New York economy."

Bringing domestic workers up to parity with employees in other industries is the just, responsible and long-overdue action for New York State. See our recent postings from the Ms. Foundation’s Outrageous Acts campaign and learn how to contact your legislators to ask that they vote in favor of the Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights, legislation that was drafted by our grantee, Domestic Workers United. There is currently a tremendous opportunity for victory: If New York State lawmakers can put aside their differences in time to pass the bill, Governor Patterson has pledged to sign it into law. The full text of the Times editorial follows.

The Rights of Domestic Workers
New York Times Editorial
June 15, 2009

There are more than 200,000 workplaces in New York State where fundamental labor standards do not apply, not even in theory. These are not sweatshops or salt mines. They are private homes, where housekeepers, nannies and caregivers for the elderly do work as important as it is isolated and unprotected.

The exclusion is a relic of the New Deal, when labor protections like overtime pay were written specifically to exclude domestic and farm labor. From exclusion it can be a short distance to abuse: to long hours, low pay, dehumanizing treatment, physical and sexual harassment.

Domestic workers and their advocates in New York have been pressing for reforms. They have been telling their stories in Albany and across the state and steadily gathering support for a Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights. The legislation, the first of its kind in the nation, would reform state labor law to provide basic protections like time-and-a-half pay for every hour over a 40-hour week; one day off a week; paid vacation and sick days; severance pay and health coverage — and a means of enforcing these standards in court.

Most other workers take these standards for granted. They don’t know what it’s like to have to show up for work sick rather than be fired, to be denied privacy and dignity, to be powerless to demand decent treatment from their employers.

Backers of the bill had been confident that this could finally be the year for a groundbreaking victory, at least before the recent power struggle brought the Capitol to new depths of shame, ridicule and paralysis.

If the Legislature decides to return to its senses and start passing meaningful legislation that improves New Yorkers’ lives, it should include the Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights. Albany, which has not been able to govern its way out of a paper bag, should at least be able to bestow some fundamental rights and protections on the invisible workers whose labors are a cornerstone of the New York economy.

Acts of Courage and Unwavering Commitment

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert shares his appreciation for the power of grassroots organizing as he reviews Pray the Devil Back to Hell and the campaign of women in Liberia to end the civil war and the reign of Charles Taylor. (The movie, which the Foundation presented in a special screening in October, was produced by Abigail Disney, a former Ms. Foundation board member.) Some choice excerpts (with my emphasis) from Herbert's column: "A Crazy Dream," describe the audacity of outrageous acts in creating change:

The movie, for me, was about much more than the tragic, and then ultimately uplifting events in Liberia. It was about the power of ordinary people to intervene in their own fate.

The filmmakers Abigail Disney and Gini Reticker show us how Ms. [Leymah] Gbowee not only rallied the women at her Lutheran church to pray for peace, but organized them into a full-blown, all-women peace initiative that spread to other Christian churches -- and then to women of the Muslim faith.

The moral authority of this movement that seemed to have arisen from nowhere had become one of the significant factors pushing the warring sides to the peace table. Peace talks were eventually held in Accra, the capital of Ghana, and when it looked as if they were about to break down, Ms. Gbowee and nearly 200 of her followers staged a sit-in at the site of the talks, demanding that the two sides stay put until an agreement was reached.

A tentative peace was established, and Mr. Taylor went into exile in Nigeria. The women continued their activism. Three years ago, on Jan. 16, 2006, in an absolutely thrilling triumph for the mothers and wives and sisters and aunts and grandmothers who had worked so courageously for peace, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf was sworn in as the president of Liberia -- the first woman ever elected president of a country in Africa.

Liberia is hardly the world's most stable society. But "Pray the Devil Back to Hell" reminds us of the incredible power available to the most ordinary of people if they are willing to act with courage and unwavering commitment.

Find screenings for "Pray the Devil Back to Hell."

[See also: Join the Ms. Foundation for a Special Showing of "Pray the Devil Back to Hell"]