The United States steals $450 billion a year from elder caregivers

August 29, 2012 by Dan Moshenberg 2 Comments

Earlier this month, AARP launched a new ad campaign meant to address the situation of elder caregiving in the United States. The campaign is based on thousands of accounts, and on longstanding research, such as the report that AARP released last year, “Valuing the Invaluable: The Growing Contributions and Costs of Family Caregiving, 2011 Update.”

Much of that report is, sadly, unsurprising. Caregivers are largely unpaid, largely family members, generally overworked and overtaxed, isolated, at a loss, often confused emotionally as the stress mounts. As a consequence of all of this, and more, caregivers generally suffer declining and deteriorating health. The majority of these careworkers are women.

Here’s the news, and it’s staggering: “The estimated economic value of their unpaid contributions was approximately $450 billion in 2009, up from an estimated $375 billion in 2007.” As AARP poignantly notes, that’s not only a 21 percent increase in a mere two years. $450 billion is also “more than the total 2009 sales of Wal-Mart, America’s largest company, and more than the combined sales that year of the three largest publicly held auto companies (Toyota, Ford, Daimler).”

The stories told by individual caregivers are important, as are their lives. They are crucial, and we must listen to them and, even more, learn to act on what they’re saying and what we’re hearing. At the same time, those stories beg to be contextualized. In one year, the national economy stole $450 billion from US residents. Whether that labor was a labor of love or a labor of obligation, the value of that labor was stolen. And, as the years 2007 – 2009 demonstrate, it’s a growing market with a growing profit margin.

Caring Across Generations is one answer, an important and even crucial answer, to the problem. Of equal importance is re-creating a State that doesn’t regard its citizens and residents as clients and customers. In this year of high political rhetoric, one hears a great deal about the United States being `a wealthy nation.’ Wealth built on the predatory extraction of $45 billion dollars in a single year is not wealth. It’s poverty. Ask the women who care for their elders; ask the elders who are majority women as well. Ask yourself.

(Image Credit: AARP.org)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: AARP, caregivers, Dan Moshenberg, elder care, Haunts, poverty, United States, wealth, women

The political economy of vulnerable

August 9, 2012 by Dan Moshenberg 5 Comments

Around the world, women, children, men, are humiliated and abused as a matter of public policy and widespread practices. When the practices are finally reported, the women, children, men are described as `vulnerable,’ as if vulnerability were a state of being. It’s not. Vulnerability is an active verb, as is violence.

In the past week, in the United States, reports have shown that pregnant school girls are kicked out of school or refused schooling. Why? Across the country, children living with disabilities, and especially Black children living with disabilities, suffer extraordinarily high school suspension rates. Why? In New York City, it has been `discovered’ that the stop-and-frisk practices that target Black communities are particularly humiliating for Black women. Why do these policies exist? To produce vulnerable populations and individuals.

I thought of these as I read about Happiness Mbedzi. Happiness Mbedzi lived in Diepsloot, a “sprawling informal settlement north of Johannesburg”. Sprawling … and notorious for its desperate conditions as well as innumerable popular mobilizations and organizing efforts. Diepsloot: water-less, info-less, service-less … but not without hope?

In Diepsloot, Happiness Mbedzi tried to maintain her household, herself, her husband, her son. To do so, she took on debts. The debts had crushing interest rates. Happiness took out more loans to pay for the interest on her earlier loans. Finally, she borrowed money from her young son, went to the shops, bought poison, and killed herself.

This is described as a tale of the `vulnerable.’ Happiness Mbedzi was not vulnerable. She was under attack. Local banks, community stokvels, neighbors are all reportedly charging predatory rates. How is it that stokvels, which traditionally supported women like Happiness Mbedzi, are now as predatory as the banks, at least in Diepsloot? How is it that no neighbors are around who would lend money to a neighbor woman in desperate straits?

For Happiness Mbedzi, as for young women students, the Black students living with disabilities, the Black women of New York, institutions ostensibly designed to assist and even improve one’s situation have been transformed into lethal weapons. Schools target particular young women. Schools target particular Black women and men. Police target Black women. The result? Targeted impoverishment that goes under the name of development and the common good. And those who are assaulted, who are wounded simply because of whom they are, they are then reported as being `vulnerable.’ It was destiny that struck them.

Vulnerability is not a status nor a class nor a caste nor a rank. It is not a state of being nor is it synonymous with weakness. And vulnerability is not inevitable. Vulnerability is a political and economic power relationship. Individuals and populations are designated and then produced, and reproduced, as vulnerable. Happiness Mbedzi was not vulnerable and she was not part of a `most vulnerable population’. She was turned into a `vulnerable woman’ by public policy and by State practices that have constructed Diepsloot as inevitably `vulnerable.’ It’s not.

(Photo Credit: Daily Maverick / Reuters)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Dan Moshenberg, Diepsloot, disability, Happiness Mbedzi, Haunts, pregnant students, schools, South Africa, stop and frisk, United States, vulnerable

In the capital of the greatest incarcerating country in the world

April 10, 2012 by Brigitte Marti Leave a Comment

On March 28, Ruth Wilson Gilmore gave the annual Yulee Endowed Lecture, hosted by the Women’s Studies Program at the George Washington University. Her talk opened with a slide showing an NAACP billboard that said, against the Statue of Liberty as background,

Welcome to America home to
5% of the world’s people &
25% of the world’s prisoners.

This is the same America that is home to 5% of the world’s population and produces 27.8% of the world’s greenhouse gases from fossil fuel, according to the National Environment Trust.

Pollution and incarceration reveal a dreadful, man-made reality. For both prison and pollution, the United States tries to change its image rather than face up to the reality. The United States is the primary source of world pollution and of prison practices. A prison binge has been built on the disregard of women, of people of color, of the poor. High levels of pollution have been built on absurd consumerism passed off as a social good. Meanwhile, for many, these add up to a cruel reality.

United States administration after administration has produced more laws to incarcerate more people and more “Acts” to cover up the high level of emission of Green House gases and other pollutants. Images of poor people, especially of women of color, abusing the welfare became as visible as the images of the destruction of the “Commons” became invisible. What one hand giveth, the other taketh away.

In her lecture, Ruth Wilson Gilmore talked about the reality of incarceration. Her book, The Golden Gulag Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, started as a community project: a research for Mothers ROC (Mothers Reclaiming Our Children) in California, women who know too well the reality of and reasons for incarceration. They needed “a non-lawyer activist with research skills, access to university libraries, and a big vocabulary, to help them.” Gilmore fit the bill perfectly.

In her book, Gilmore relocates the two laws that sent the Mothers’ children to prison—the Street Terrorism Enforcement and Prevention Act and the “three strikes and you’re out” law—into their historical political economic context. Ruthie, as everyone calls her, presented on the particular history of capitalism in the United States, the story of opportunity fertilized with inequality and racism. Her lecture was called “What Would Harriet Do? Unfinished Liberation or the Dangers of Innocence”.

Harriet is Harriet Tubman.

Harriet Tubman’s story exemplifies the root of the social and racial American construction. For Gilmore, Tubman was a designer and a political artist. Tubman’s story of unwavering determination to bring slaves of the south to freedom speaks directly to today’s “zero tolerance.” As the false stories told of African and African-derived people helped to justify the slavery of thousands of women, men and children of African descent, so today’s false story of “zero tolerance” attacks African Americans. 65 million people are currently banned from employment because of previous convictions, and those people live in the communities that most need steady employment.

The following day Ruth Wilson Gilmore continued the conversation in Dan Moshenberg’s Seminar, “Women In and Beyond the Global Prison.”

Again, the discussion focused on the construction of images, from the witch-hunt that put women back in the “domus,” to the “Reaganomic” image of the welfare-queen that re-segregated poor and working African American women, thereby legitimating the re-appropriation of power and global capital. Welfare-queen became pathology. To unpack that pathology, we must learn to study “the genealogy of the phrase,” and thereby reinforce the importance of historical consciousness.

Gilmore brings to light the reality of the political economic project that requires mass incarceration. That project is genocidal, and that project of mass incarceration speaks directly to the situation of health care and reproductive rights in the United States.

Slavoj Žižek recently argued, “one of the strategies of totalitarian regimes is to have legal regulations (criminal laws) so severe that, if taken literally, everyone is guilty of something. But then their full enforcement is withdrawn… At the same time the regime wields the permanent threat of disciplining its subjects.”

I am not saying that we live in a true totalitarian regime. That is not the question. The question is whether we understand that these ‘all-guilty’ laws work to control and subjugate certain sections of the population, such as the African Americans, Native Americans, immigrants, and also women. Of course, women intersect with the other “guilty” populations. In many states, laws limiting women’s reproductive rights are blossoming, and punishment and incarceration await the women who try to secure or wield their rights. At the same time, the story of Trayvon Martin’s assassination fits this framework of being eternally guilty. His corpse was tested for drugs and alcohol. His shooter never had to be tested and is still alive and free.

There are many other stories that show that the current rule of law is an active political-economic tool. Ben Saperstein and May Young, two activists from North Carolina, attended the seminar with Gilmore and Moshenberg. They were there to learn and exchange ideas for their own struggle. They are involved with the Greensboro Legal Fund, which works to bring to light the fate of members of a Latino organization that has been wrongfully accused of racketeering, and has been incarcerated for political reasons.

The exchanges among activists and scholars from North Carolina, Washington, New York and beyond showed the importance of research working with activism. In this time of neoliberal surge, as Žižek remarked, “what unites us is the same struggle”. In this struggle, Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s inspirational work reminds us of the importance of excellent scholarship as a means of resistance.

(Image Credit: NAACP)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: African Americans, Ben Saperstein, Brigitte Marti, Dan Moshenberg, George Washington University, Greensboro Legal Fund, Harriet Tubman, health care, May Young, Mothers ROC, NAACP, prison, reproductive rights, Resistances, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Slavoj Žižek, United States, women, Women's Studies

The incarceration of a Black woman is ….”fun?”

March 10, 2012 by Cameron Bell Leave a Comment

Kemba Smith

We should listen to formerly incarcerated women when it comes to prison issues. After all, women, particularly Black women, are the fastest growing prison population in America.

For example, the recently held 2012 UCLA Law Symposium, entitled “Overpoliced and Underprotected: Women, Race, and Criminalization,” brought together renowned and influential thinkers and lawyers, as well as activists from non-profit organizations. All the panelists focused on incarceration, and many advocated for the creation of a “feminist, anti-racist, prison abolition coalition.”

On the first day, only two Black female panelists identified themselves as formerly incarcerated. One was Kemba Smith. She eloquently told her story. While in college, she began dating a drug dealer. Despite never having used, handled or sold crack/cocaine, Smith was sentenced to nearly 25 years in prison.

I did not catch the name of the other woman, who was filling in for the director of the non-profit where she worked. She did not tell her story, except to say that she had served time in prison. Instead, she shared the goals of her organization, and compelled conference attendees to help break the cycle of incarceration, with more urgency and less flair than Smith.

At the end of the night, I overheard a symposium attendee tell the second woman, “Your talk was really fun!” Weeks later, I’m still curious what about incarceration is “fun.”

I wish I had asked the attendee what she meant by her comment. I would guess that she was well-intentioned. Nevertheless, I wondered what it meant to call a presentation at an academic symposium “fun.” Did it serve as a compliment? Or, as it seemed to me, did it strip this woman’s narrative of legitimacy? Such a comment was not directed at Kemba Smith, the lighter-skinned Black woman who had straightened hair, and wore a suit. No, this comment was for the darker-skinned, “poorly-dressed” woman with thick braids.

How do our own perceptions of people inform our understanding of what they are qualified to say, and why we should (or shouldn’t) listen?

This conference repeatedly referenced Michel Foucault’s notions of power and surveillance, highlighted the historical legacy of slavery, reminded us of color politics and “the paper bag test,” and challenged the stereotypes that have shaped American laws and social policy. Still, we needed to revisit the basics of feminist standpoint theory and “relations between the production of knowledge and practices of power.” Standpoint theory emerged as a “way of empowering oppressed groups,” and “valuing their experiences”, but the second speaker’s experience and voice were not honored. By suggesting that this panelist’s talk was “fun,” one conference attendee discredited the panelist’s voice, merely reproducing the structures that confine and silence certain women.

Everywhere, we should welcome the voices of all women. When working towards a feminist, anti-racist, prison abolition coalition, we should especially try to include all formerly incarcerated Black women. Unfortunately, we don’t.

(Photo Credit: LA Progressive)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Black women, Cameron Bell, incarceration, Kemba Smith, Michel Foucault, paper bag test, power, prison, standpoint, United States, women

Expose the attacks on the undocumented and on women in France

March 4, 2012 by Brigitte Marti Leave a Comment

While in the United States, attempts to hurt, reduce and constrain women’s bodies are multiplying (as the recent bill in Virginia to impose vaginal sonogram on women who seek an abortion demonstrates), two recent developments in France show that the politics of constraint and control of the body and in particular of women’s bodies are also expanding in Europe.

In France, undocumented immigrants, “les sans-papiers” have access to health care, through “l’aide medicale d’Etat” or AME (State Medical Aid), if they have been in France for at least 3 months. While this seems to be better than many other places in the western world, some barriers that have been erected to divide and control immigrants and residents.

For example, it used to be that in order to register, people could go to any regular center of the national health coverage “les caisses d’assurance maladie,” and there were many of them. Recently, new rules have been introduced. Since the end of 2011, in Paris only two centers have been processing applications to be registered in AME. After two months, the Observatory of Foreigners’ Right to Health, ODSE, has reported a series of problems. These include long waiting lines, starting in the middle of the night, summary selection of applications, loss of applications, mounting administrative red tape. All these difficulties contribute to delaying indispensable coverage and access to health care for people who are already among the most vulnerable.

Another recent development directly affects women’s health and well being. In 2001, a bill was passed that gave women’s reproductive rights a great boost. The new law includes provisions for anonymous access to contraceptive and abortion services for minors and without parental consent. It also provides for an ambitious sexual education program, lately the distribution of money to enforce this law has been problematic. Recent reports have shown the importance of sexual education through school as well as free and easy access to centers where women and men can access information on the various questions related to sexuality.

The law itself is beyond repeal, but that does not mean it is safe from dilution. Although officially budgeted for the 2012 fiscal year and voted by the parliament, apparently, 500 000 Euros slotted sex ed programs has disappeared. The Sarkozy administration must have misplaced it!

So how are these two issues related? Both are about creating barriers for some women to access services that allow full social participation and meaningful exercise of their rights. They are about relegating to the back seat some selected populations who are excluded through constraining policies on their bodies, which are, thus, made invisible in body politics of the nation. The reshaping of existing social advances concerning reproductive rights, health care for all, has become the priority of neoliberal governments. It follows the pattern that has already been developed for emerging countries, cutting public services. It is important to identify policies that follow this pattern. It is important to expose them in order to lessen the impact of the US neoliberal transformation anywhere it is being exported.

(Photo Credit: Femmes En Lutte 93)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Brigitte Marti, France, health, health care system, neoliberal, public health systems, Resistances, undocumented immigrants, United States, women, women's health

Domestics: A Blessing?

February 13, 2012 by Tiffany Finck-Haynes Leave a Comment

I had no idea. Despite limited activity on Saturday and Sunday. Despite eating every weekend dinner with my aunt. Despite extra trips to the grocery store. Despite added stress and limited sleep, it wasn’t until I was much older, did I finally have an idea that my mom was a domestic worker.

Starting when I was five years old, my mom started working every Saturday and Sunday evening cooking for an elderly couple. From 5:00pm until 8:30pm she’d stay at their home, preparing, cooking and serving dinner and dessert. She helped occasionally for several months, until the weekend cook left and she agreed to take her position and started working Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights. She says she considered the job, “a blessing. I received good pay for what I did. They were good if I wanted to take time off. I could always switch things around with someone else that cooked. Also, they were in good health and I could prepare things for them before I left and they still had a nice meal the night I wasn’t there”.

When the wife passed away, my mom started working more evenings and by the time I went to college she was working five, sometimes even six nights a week. Then, “Everything was a different story. He took advantage of me and the other people helping him. I observed how he treated the woman that helps him during the day. He refused to buy her health insurance and he expanded her hours, but didn’t pay her for the extra time”, my mom said.

Often, the line between her personal space when she is or isn’t at his house is blurry. “Last week he called my office because he said he didn’t know where I was. He called simply because he thought he had a right to”, she says. “Sometimes he asks me to go early to spend extra time with him, but he never pays me the extra hours,” she says.

“Other times he’ll call me when he is in town and I’ll help him out with rides to where he needs to go. I feel like I’m doing him a favor because I’m fond of him, but then I realized he’d ask for help because he knew he didn’t have to pay us,” she explains.

Despite the fact they had a friendly relationship, when I asked her why she didn’t ask him for compensation for the additional work, she said, “I needed the job and I felt lucky to have it”.

He also makes her feel extremely guilty. “Sometimes he’ll make snotty comments. That’s stressful,” she explains. If she does something he doesn’t like he’ll “be quiet with me for weeks on end. I know he’s mad and not happy. It’s his way of staying in control. He’ll do anything to stay in control no matter what the impact is on our schedule, time or personal lives”, she explains.

Last Christmas my mom was with him on both Christmas Eve and Christmas night. “He’ll be thrilled I’ll be there Christmas Eve and he doesn’t care that I won’t be with my family”, she said. Although two of his grandchildren want to cook for him on Christmas Eve, his children decided my mom had to cook the holiday meal because they said she is a better cook. “Just because I’d be better, I can’t be with my family,” my mom says.

My mom’s employer is ninety-four. Contemplating the day he’s gone leaves my mom with many mixed emotions. “As frustrated as I’ve gotten, I think about him being gone and it makes me sad”, she says. She knows she’s going to miss him. “He’s the person I’ve had dinner with five days a week the past three years and for the past seventeen years we’ve eaten dinner together at least two nights a week” she says. On the other hand, “I’ll be relieved when he’s gone. I feel guilty about that”, she says as she begins to cry. “Knowing no one will yell at me or put demands on me will be nice,” she says.

When I asked her to express her general sentiments of being a domestic care worker. She says she never considered herself domestic help.

I just never thought about it. In my mind, I think of domestic help as taking place in a different time. I know I’m a caregiver, but I never put myself in the context of domestic care worker. I was always so quiet about the job and I just did what I did. I just felt like I was there to cook dinner and do odds and end things around the house. He needed so little care, that he was just looking for company. I think falling into the job and not considering it a profession made me never think of it that way. It was just an extra job, extra money.

Maybe I couldn’t identify my mother as a domestic care worker because she doesn’t identify as a domestic care worker. The work of care workers is defined as the relationships and activities involved in maintaining people on a daily basis and intergenerationally. It often involves emotional, physical and “community care”. Just as my mother and I didn’t know, I assume there are many other domestic care workers throughout the world unaware of the position they serve. In order to ensure all domestic care workers receive fair and just working conditions it is imperative that they accurately recognize the work they do.

(Image Credit: National Domestic Workers Alliance)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: daughters, domestic workers, Domestics, mothers, Tiffany Finck-Haynes, United States

Jakadrien Turner: there was no mistake

January 6, 2012 by Dan Moshenberg 3 Comments

Jakadrien Turner walks with grandmother Lorene Turner and mother Johnisa Turner

Jakadrien Turner is a United States citizen. She is fifteen years old. She speaks no Spanish. She is African American. Last year, she responded to the death of her grandfather and the divorce of her parents by running away from her home in Dallas. Her grandmother immediately started to search for her.

At some point, Jakadrien Turner was picked up by police in Houston, apparently for theft of some sort. She gave police a false name. Remember, Jakadrien was fourteen years old at the time. The name she gave turned out to be that of a Colombian undocumented resident.

And so, Jakadrien Turner, at the age of fourteen, speaking no Spanish and with no contacts in Colombia, was deported. Yes, she was.

Today, finally, Jakadrien Turner was returned to the United States and to her grandmother, Lorene Turner’s, custody.

The news media and the blogs all agree that Jakadrien Turner was “mistakenly deported”. From Colorlines to Feministing to CNN to local Texas media, they all say the same thing. Mistakenly deported.

There was no mistake.

A system that puts children in prison for life, a system that deports unaccompanied minors, a system that treats women and girls of color as just so much opportunity for private-prison profit and for abuse, that system always was designed to deport Jakadrien Turner.

This is the immigration system, which imprisons and deports thousands of United States citizens, and does so ferociously. There was no mistake. The immigration system did what it does, what it is designed to do. It deported a fourteen-year-old African American girl, this time named Jakadrien Turner, who spoke no Spanish, who had no contacts, who was unaccompanied, and is and was a United States citizen.

Deal with it. Occupy the immigration prison system. There was no mistake.

(Photo Credit: AP Photo/Mike Fuentes)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Colombia, Dan Moshenberg, Haunts, immigrant detention, Jakadrien Turner, Occupy, prison, United States

Women indignadas carry Tahrir Square and Spring, and occupy prison

January 5, 2012 by Dan Moshenberg Leave a Comment

Women occupy Yare Prison in Venezuela

In Nigeria this week, in response to fuel prices and, even more, to astronomical unemployment and crushing hopelessness among young people, protests, and more, have punctuated the landscape. Occupy Nigeria. Labor unions, women’s groups, farmers’ groups and others have joined, and to a certain extent followed, the lead of their younger comrades. In Kano, for example, the youth have established what they call “Tahrir Square”. Elsewhere, some say that an “Arab Spring” is coming to Sudan, to Zimbabwe, to a theater of engagement near you.

In Haiti, as in Chile as in the United Kingdom as in Spain, students are protesting the inequality of education and the crushing hopelessness it produces. As various forces attempt to privatize a university opening in Limonade, the students of the University of Haiti, l’Université d’Etat d’Haïti, have declared themselves indignés. Indignados.

We are all, or almost all, moving towards our own Tahrir Square; we are all, or almost all, indignés, indignados. Language, concepts, actions not only exceed the borders they cross, they redefine notions of nationhood, identity. Or such is the dream and hope. Indignados articulate with Zapatistas articulate with Arab Spring and Tahrir Square articulate with indigenous movements and keep sending out new feelers, new shoots, new threads that somehow link new and old into something possible, something happening right now.

And so in northern Venezuela this week, 800 women and 150 children occupied the Yare prison complex. They came to visit their loved ones, who suffer overcrowding and overly long waits for trials, as so many do in so many prisons around the world. Then, they simply refused to leave. They `self-kidnapped.’ They invaded and occupied the prison space with their indignation.

950 women and children looked at armed guards and said, “Nope, we’re not moving.” They invented Spring, the beginning of a kind of liberation.

You want to know what this Spring could mean? Ask the many immigrant women in US immigrant detention centers, women like Julie, who are told they have no right to legal representation, no right to due process, because, well, they’re not in `prison’. They’re in `detention.’ And so they sit, watched, and often sexually harassed and worse, by guards. Most of the detention centers are privately owned. Profit flows from the time women, mostly women of color, sit and wait.

Many of the women live with mental health illnesses. Actually, many are in crisis. Many of the women struggle with the consequences and scars of domestic violence. Many of the women know they are in `detention’ because their English `failed’ them, and because, though they lived in neighborhoods in which English was a second language, somehow the police only spoke English. Who’s failing whom here?

This week, the young women and men of Nigeria have urged us to occupy and liberate public policy. The young women and men of Haiti have urged us to occupy and liberate education. And the young women and children of Venezuela have called on us to occupy prison.

Occupy prison. We have been occupied by the global prison for far too long. Follow the lead of the women and children of Venezuela. Occupy prison. It’s time.

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Arab Spring, Benin City, Chile, Dan Moshenberg, Egypt, Haiti, Haunts, immigrant detention, immigrant women, indignados, Kano, Limonade, Nigeria, Occupy, prison, Tahrir Square, United Kingdom, United States, Venezuela, Yare Prison, Zapatistas

Young women refuse to be sacrifices

January 3, 2012 by Dan Moshenberg 4 Comments

Welcome to 2012. The Arab Spring, the Occupy Spring, the Indignado Spring continue. In Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Syria, Yemen, and beyond, women are on the move, on the march. In Saudi Arabia, women are on the drive as well. Young women.

Across the United States and Canada and beyond, young women are leading and expanding the Occupy movement. In Chile, women high school and university students are pushing to end the privatization of education, to open the schools to freedom, democracy, universal opportunity.

In India, young rural women are leading resistance campaigns to stop major land grabs. In Afghanistan, teams of young women athletes are punching their way through centuries-old as well as recently devised glass ceilings.

In Kenya, young women are entering into local electoral politics. In Mauritius as well.

Women everywhere are on the move, keeping on keeping on, filling spaces with their voices, their bodies, their energy, their aspirations, their collective and singular power.

At the same time, women struggle with a master narrative in which they only function as sacrifices. In India, two farmers sacrifice a seven-year-old girl, Lalita, in order to ensure good crops. In Afghanistan, a fifteen-year-old girl, Sahar Gul, struggles to survive, and to live with dignity, having fled the torture inflicted on her by her husband and his mother and sister. When she first fled, the State actually returned her to `the family.’

In the United States, girls like seventeen-year-old Nga Truong, are routinely forced into confessing crimes they didn’t commit and then are sent off to prison. In the United States, seventeen-year-old girls like Samantha L. are sent to prison for life, without possibility of parole.

In Australia, teen-age girls, like Danielle Troy, have to plead for compassion rather than punishment. Their crime? Being mothers.

And in South Africa, two teenage girls are attacked by a crowd of 50 or 60 `adult’ men. Why? Because one of them was wearing a mini-skirt. Four years ago, another young woman, Nwabisa Ngcukana, was stripped and assaulted for exactly the same `crime’, at exactly the same taxi rank.

From domestic violence to more general sexual violence to mob violence to State violence and beyond, the patriarchal story of young women is the story of being-sacrificed. If a man is told, by no less than God, to sacrifice his son, we are told that is a tragedy. A moral and ethical crisis. But where is the mother of that son in the story? And what if, instead, the father was told, by no less than God, to sacrifice his daughter? Would that too be considered a tragedy? An ethical and moral crisis?

Not by the patriarchs, it wouldn’t, as the Biblical tale of Abraham and Isaac so aptly demonstrates: “It is difficult not to be struck by the absence of woman… It is a story of father and son, of masculine figures, of hierarchies among men… Would the logic of sacrificial responsibility within the implacable universality of the law… be altered… if a woman were to intervene in some consequential manner? Does the system of this sacrificial responsibility and of the double `gift of death’ imply at its very basis an exclusion of woman or sacrifice of woman? A woman’s sacrifice or a sacrifice of woman? Let us leave the question in suspense.”

Women, and in particular young women, are saying, “No.” They reject the story that excludes them and the `suspense’ that reduces them. They are saying – with their bodies, voices, actions and deeds – women and girls are not to be sacrificed. If `the Law’ says they must be, the Law is wrong. Women are making a better Law, living out a better story, and creating a better world. Another, better world is possible.

(Video Credit: WBUR)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Abraham, Afghanistan, Arab Spring, Australia, Bahrain, Canada, Chile, Dan Moshenberg, Danielle Troy, Egypt, Haunts, India, Indignado, Isaac, Jacques Derrida, Kenya, Lalita, land grabs, Libya, Mauritania, Nga Truong, Nwabisa Ngcukana, Occupy, prison, sacrifice, Sahar Gul, Samantha L, Sarah, South Africa, Syria, Tunisia, United States, women, Yemen

We don’t burn children anymore. We send them to prison.

November 23, 2011 by Dan Moshenberg Leave a Comment

Monday, November 21, 2011, must have been Juvenile (In)Justice Day. Juvenile (In)Justice appeared everywhere, in the news.

In Kashmir, there’s juvenile (in)justice. Children charged with throwing stones are treated, formally, as terrorists. They can be jailed, caged, for up to two years without a trial. Children are placed in adult prisons, while awaiting trial and when convicted. And they will be convicted. Yes, there are laws that protect juveniles. But those laws don’t matter in a state of emergency. Children don’t matter in a state of emergency. They aren’t `juveniles’, and they aren’t `youth’. They’re children.

The state of emergency, the so-called public safety crisis, is always an alibi. States abuse children. In Kashmir, there’s juvenile (in)Justice, and the excuse is crisis. In Malawi, where there is no state of emergency, juvenile (in)justice is simply business as usual, the price of maintaining order. The law says children under 18 deserve special treatment and protection. In fact, children are tried in adult courts and then sent to overcrowded adult prisons. That is the rule of law… everywhere. Take children and maximize their vulnerability.

And then lie about it.

That’s what the United Kingdom has been doing, systematically lying about the abuse of children of asylum seekers and, worse, of asylum seeker children. Sexual abuse. Other forms of physical abuse. Psychological abuse. Spiritual abuse. Of course, there are no laws that address the crimes of breaking the spirit of a child. What’s going on in the United Kingdom is not `merely’ officials lying. It’s Official Lying. The State defines democracy by lying and then chants, “This is what democracy looks like.”

“The ministers lie, the professors lie, the television lies, the priests lie. . . .
These lies mean that the country wants to die.”

And then finally, in the name of security, stability, sovereignty, and, of course, peace, the State, in this instance the United States, proposes a budget that would gorge on prisons and gouge youth of resources, of hope, of life itself. Again, the youth, the juveniles, they’re children.

Meanwhile, cities, like New York, work on plans to increase the use of solitary confinement. It’s called “punitive segregation”, and it preys in particular on `juveniles’, those prisoners living with mental disabilities, and those awaiting trial. Maximize vulnerability. It’s a kind of efficiency that brings education, mental health care, and justice itself to a screaming, screeching halt.

None of this is new or news, of course. The abuse of children in prison is systemic. In the United States, for example, photographer Richard Ross has been exposing juvenile (in)justice for years, and it’s everywhere. It’s the fabric of national democracy. It’s today’s version of burning children, as Robert Bly wrote, some four decades ago:

“But if one of those children came near that we have set on fire,
came toward you like a gray barn, walking,
you would howl like a wind tunnel in a hurricane,
you would tear at your shirt with blue hands,
you would drive over your own child’s wagon trying to back up,
the pupils of your eyes would go wild—

If a child came by burning, you would dance on a lawn,
trying to leap into the air, digging into your cheeks,
you would ram your head against the wall of your bedroom
like a bull penned too long in his moody pen—
If one of those children came toward me with both hands
in the air, fire rising along both elbows,
I would suddenly go back to my animal brain,
I would drop on all fours, screaming,
my vocal chords would turn blue, so would yours,
it would be two days before I could play with my own children again.”

The news Monday was this. We don’t burn children anymore. We send them to prison.

(Image Credit: Open Democracy)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: asylum seekers, child asylum seekers, child prisoners, Dan Moshenberg, Haunts, India, juvenile justice, Kashmir, Malawi, Richard Ross, United Kingdom, United States, Yarl's Wood