Women s Rights: Issues for the Coming Decades

Transcription

1 September 24, 2010 Suzanne B. Goldberg Columbia Law School Remarks for the International Conference on the Protection of Women s Rights Women s Rights: Issues for the Coming Decades I am delighted to be here with such an esteemed group of colleagues and audience members. Thank you for having me. I begin my remarks from the basic view that we all want, in ten years, to have a different conversation from the one we are having now. This is not to say that today s problems will disappear, but rather that we will make enough dents in them that we will be standing in a different place in If there is one thing we have learned from academic literature about gender and feminism, as well as from life experience, it is quite complicated even to understand who women are as a category of people, let alone how best to secure the protection of women s rights. Indeed, as we know, some of the early projects designed to protect women s rights wound up benefiting some women, but doing nothing for others, and, in some cases, even causing harm to still other groups of women. Yet, as we also know, from both advocates and those who study the status of women, it is also vitally important to take steps, even in this complex world, because the currents of inequality and violence against women run deep and cause daily harm. So we have a tension between the need to act and the complications of acting in a way that is effective. In my remarks, I want to offer some ideas about how to deal with this tension. I will do this in two parts. First, I will step back from the specific problems that we have begun to discuss, and will continue to discuss this afternoon, and offer two broad frames we for thinking about women s rights projects during the next decade. And second, I will talk about how those frames can be useful in thinking about concrete steps toward greater protection of women s rights. So, to the frames. My focus is on two major frames one is location; the other is identity that can help us wrestle with the tension I just mentioned between the need to act and the complications associated with taking actions. (There are surely other frames as well but in my limited time, I will talk just about these two.) By location, I mean being aware of the varied settings both physical and not in which women experience discrimination and violence as a consequence of their sex and gender. And by 1

2 identity, I mean the ways in which different aspects of women s identities shape our experiences in these different locations. More specifically, by location, I mean the obvious, physical locations of workplace, home, public spaces, and healthcare and educational environments, as well as refugee camps as well as geographic location where on the globe women live but also the locations that are less physical than conceptual; the ones we think about less often as presenting particular challenges for women ranging from scientific and healthcare research, to interactions with government agencies, and more. By identity, I mean to include what we often think about in terms of demographic categories race, age, religion, disability, sexual orientation, immigration status, nationality, and also other factors that we less often think about as aspects of identity but also fundamentally shape a woman s experiences including class, physical and mental health, occupation, marital status, parental status, and more. For example, the experience of a sex worker or a lawyer, or a young lesbian woman or an older woman of color even in the same public space or educational environment, for instance; even in the same medical care office, to be more specific may be very different and when there are problems, different types of responses will be often needed. I also want to pause to underscore one additional identity category that has an enormous impact on a woman s life experience the category of gender identity. Transgender women that is, women who are not born as anatomical girls but who experience themselves as female consistently face dramatic and pervasive violence and discrimination. For many, that violence and discrimination is coupled with extreme poverty because, in most places, they are unable to get jobs other than sex work. In my Sexuality & Gender Law Clinic, we recently represented a transgender woman seeking asylum in the US. Because she is transgender, she was brutalized at home, within her family, and then again at school. And, when she went to the police for protection after being brutalized in the streets, she was brutalized there too. We might even think of transgender women as a kind of canary in the coal mine meaning that they are a group of women who are especially at risk and especially likely to suffer along many dimensions when the rights of women are not protected. So, how do these frames help us as we think about protecting women s rights going forward? In part, they remind us of both the reach and limitations of our ability to bring about change. Put more positively, I believe these frames of identity and location can benefit our work and make it more effective if we keep them consistently in mind. That is, if we ask ourselves, over and over, to think about the locations that our analysis and projects aim to 2

3 reach, and about the ways in which our analysis and projects will reach some women and not others. I will offer an illustration from my own experience, both doing lesbian and gay rights litigation for many years and, now, directing a law school clinic in sexuality and gender law. In my advocacy work, I have repeatedly seen that some cases have mattered a great deal for some groups of gay people but also that no one case, however important, even at the US Supreme Court, has had the same impact across the diverse gay communities both in terms of location and identity. Just to take an example that has been in the news quite a lot recently having marriage can make a tremendous difference for some lesbian couples (and gay couples as well) both by providing legal protections for their families and by providing real economic benefits that often flow from being married. Yet, winning marriage will not mean the end to discrimination and violence against lesbian women. Indeed, for many lesbians, including those without partners and those without substantial financial resources, marriage may make relatively little difference in terms of the rights- protection that we are discussing today. But a law that forbids discrimination against lesbians in health care or by public agencies and meaningful enforcement of that law may have tremendous, life changing consequences. Or, to take a very different example: in the past year, my Sexuality & Gender Law Clinic has made two submissions to the European Court of Human Rights in trafficking cases. In one, the young woman had been forced into sex trafficking from Africa (Uganda) and had wound up in Europe. There was no doubt that she had been trafficked; the only question was about whether the country to which she had moved was required to allow her to remain for the long term. The other case involved intrafamilial trafficking and the trafficking was into domestic servitude within the family in a Somali refugee camp. There, too, the legal question related to the young woman s right to remain in the European country where she was living. But, although both cases fall under the broad label of trafficking, the differences in the women s identity specifically, in their family status made a tremendous difference in both judicial and public perceptions of what had happened and the remedies to which the young women might be entitled. And for those of us who advocate in this area, when we think more broadly about how best to secure and protect the rights of women who have been trafficked, these cases remind us that our responses like those we want from the court must take account of the way women s different locations and identities affect their vulnerability as well as what they need to move forward. 3

4 In this way, the frames of identity and location not only point out the limitations of our work but also can be productive and helpful in the design of advocacy projects, services, and policy analyses. Let me offer another example here, in connection with the ongoing discussion of the Millennium Development Goals at the United Nations. In Times Square, as you may know, Amnesty International posted a maternal death clock to show graphically that a woman dies every 90 seconds in childbirth somewhere in the world which relates directly to one of the UN s major development goals. This seem to me to be a striking and probably effective strategy for calling attention to a critical issue for the wellbeing of many women. Yet, when we think about how to implement a response to the problem, we must filter our responses to the general problem highlighted by the clock with nuanced consideration of location and identity. I can focus on the US here. In NY, for example, the maternal death rate is two times the national average for the US. Yet when we look more closely at the numbers, we see that most deaths are among women with serious health problems, women of color, and poor women and that these categories often overlap. This tells us, of course, that our strategies have to be tailored to the locations and identities of the populations we are trying to help, and that the public health strategy for NYC will probably be different than the strategy for addressing the problem in another part of the US, and certainly different from the strategies for addressing the problem in Southern Africa, Asia, and elsewhere in the world. Turning to yet another, quite different front, let us think about the European Commission s newly issued Strategy for Equality between Men and Women. In the Strategy, we see a number of goals related to economic independence, antidiscrimination, eradication of gender stereotypes and gender- based violence, and representation of women in decision- making, among others. And we see, I should add, a great variety of approaches to achieving the strategic goals ranging from ideas about greater transparency in pay to awareness- raising campaigns on a range of topics, including violence against women, to plans for enhancing the representation of women in decision- making bodies. Imagine if we were to take up these goals, thinking about location and identity from the outset. So that there would be no expectation that one message or plan will serve all women in any one of these areas. And that from the very early design stages through to implementation whether for messages, funding, programs, or policies and legislation decision makers would aim to find ways to shape the planned actions to the complex population of women whose lives they are trying to affect. We have, of course, seen some efforts and some success around domestic violence, for example, with service providers addressing particular needs related to immigration status and 4

5 poverty I should add, though, that we have seen much less success around addressing the impact of sexual orientation or gender identity, or the ways in which domestic violence shapes women s experiences in health care and in educational settings, among others. And often, when we move away from violence and crises, like maternal death, we see much less consistent responsiveness to location and identity altogether whether we are talking about eradicating employment discrimination or pay inequity or bias in courts or insuring the representation of women on decision- making bodies. We would, quite possibly, arrive at both a different set of programs and, hopefully, at a higher degree of effectiveness. Of course, in some ways, my point, in reminding us to pay attention to location and identity, is a long way of saying what many of us know so well from experience that life is complicated, and that our strategies for making life better need to be complicated as well. But, put that way, the task can sound unbearably difficult. Being more concrete and specific about the types of locations and identities in the mix can help break the task into somewhat smaller parts even if, as is always true, even these smaller parts will not match perfectly or even very well with our lived experiences. Also, to be sure, even if we do commit to thinking more concretely about the complications we face in bringing about change, and to taking steps at the outset to address the those complications, we will not eliminate the challenges to the health, welfare, and safety of all women. But we will, just as surely, find ourselves in a different conversation and with a different set of problems the next time we meet. 5