Category: rape

Why We Need the ERA!

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The ERA would end women’s second-class citizenship by finally giving women equal standing in the federal CONSTITUTION, thus would ensure women’s equal TREATMENT under all laws, regulations, and policies of state and federal governments.

The ERA would afford women equal treatment under the DUE PROCESS CLAUSE and the EQUAL PROTECTION CLAUSE, which affect all other rights including everything from obtaining a dog license to the First Amendment, LIBERTY, etc. These fundamental constitutional rights ensure that all people enjoy the most basic freedoms: autonomy, self-determination, authority over the self,  bodily integrity, etc. Without the ERA, women cannot be assured that any rights will apply equally to them.

The ERA would require courts to use strict scrutiny when reviewing claims involving different treatment of women. Without the ERA, courts are allowed to use only intermediate scrutiny, which, unlike strict scrutiny, permits infringements on rights.

The ERA would protect abortion rights and literally save women’s lives by making it clear in the text of the Constitution, for the first time in history, that women are fully equal persons who can no longer be subjected to unequal treatment under any laws, including abortion laws.

The ERA would allow us to fight and reverse any sex discriminatory state or federal law, regulation or policy. The ERA specifically states that the Congress may pass legislation to enforce the ERA, which would mean Civil Rights laws would be amended to ensure women’s equal legal stature. Without the ERA women do not enjoy equal treatment under civil rights laws. For example, aside from employment, women are excluded from Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. ERA would fix this

Under the ERA and strict scrutiny, women would still enjoy separate spaces and sex-based preferences that serve a compelling state interest, such as a need to address a history of discrimination.

The ERA would allow women to sue the government for unequal enforcement of rape and domestic violence laws, bias against women in family court, and courts enforcing laws requiring equal pay for women would have to construe the word equal to mean actually equal. Without the ERA courts can interpret laws requiring equal treatment to mean something less than fully equal. The ERA would enable women to assert stronger legal arguments against the commodification of women by surrogacy, pornography, prostitution, and sex trafficking.  

According to Wendy Murphy, attorney for Equal Means Equal, “The ERA is more desperately needed in 2022 than ever before because of Dobbs” (the decision that overturned Roe). “Women’s pervasive status as second-class citizens enabled the Supreme Court to cavalierly take away all personhood rights of pregnant women. Women are literally the lifeblood of this nation, yet they are vulnerable to dystopian court rulings solely because they lack basic equality in the Constitution. The only solution is to fix the Constitution. The ERA does that.”

The ERA was ratified by the 38th state in January of 2020 and is now the law of the land, but, just like the Trump Administration, the Biden Administration is blocking the ERA from being published in the Constitution. Biden is also fighting against the ERA in federal court the same way Trump did.    #PublishERANow!

Four lawsuits are currently pending in NY, MI, RI and DC that seek to validate the ERA. The DC case is scheduled for oral arguments at:

DC Circuit Court of Appeals on September 28th.

WHAT YOU CAN DO: 

  • Come to DC and help us protest Joe Biden’s opposition to Women’s equality. WE DEMAND EQUALITY NOW!!
  • Call/text the White House Comment Line: 800-456-1111
  • Tweet #PublishERANow!  @SCOTUS and @JoeBiden
  • Call your Senators and urge them to demand Biden publish the ERA!!

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Chilean Women’s Protest

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 An extraordinary protest by our Chilean sisters– now also picked up in Brazil and in countries around the world!

And a translation posted on Monthly Review online:

Patriarchy is a judge
That judges us for being born
And our punishment
Is the violence you see

It is femicide
It is impunity for my killer
It is disappearances
It is rape

And the blame wasn’t mine
Or where I was
Or how I dressed

The rapist is you
They are the cops
The judges
The state
The president

The oppressive state is a macho rapist
The rapist is you
‘Sleep well innocent little girl, without worrying about bandits; your sweet dreams and smile will be watched over by the policemen who love you’.
The rapist is you

The context of the lyrics are explained further here in a post from the Radical History Review by Margaret Power.  The protest started in Santiago to commemorate the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women.  Power remarks,”In just a few short weeks, the powerful lyrics, catchy tune, and dramatic moves that comprise the hymn have become a global symbol of women’s anger and their repudiation of the misogynist violence and gendered discrimination that permeate the world. However, the performances do more than denounce male violence; the choreographed movements, chorus-like singing, and collective spirit also embody and promote women’s solidarity. They tell women they are not alone and alert the perpetrators to beware – they will not escape the fury of women’s justified outrage.”

Why Do Young Women Today Like This 47 Year Old Book?

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That a novel by Alix Kates Shulman, first published in 1972 is being embraced by young women today seems to suggest that we’ve made little progress on the issues like sexual harassment, job discrimination, the sexual double standard, rape, abortion the beauty standard and the impact of marriage and motherhood on women. Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen was a controversial book, excoriated by reviewers of the mainstream media when it first came out. Although much of the terrain covered is now well understood, young women today are chuckling with recognition of the same struggles that the protagonist waged in the 1950s.

Some victories haven’t been reversed but the backlash has whittled away at many women’s rights, according to Shulman in this interview on National Public Radio’s “All of It” https://www.wnyc.org/story/memoirs-ex-prom-queen-reissue/.

When Women’s Liberationists Could Imagine Fighting Violence Against Women Without Relying on the Prison System

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The new book, All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing and the Feminist Fight to End Violence ““is a history of activism by, for, and about incarcerated domestic violence survivors, criminalized rape resisters, and dissident women prisoners in the 1970s and early 1980s.”

How Feminists Resisted Prisons and Policing in the 1970s

“Anticarceral feminist politics grew in the cracks of prison walls and at the interfaces between numerous social movements, including those for racial and economic justice, prisoners’ and psychiatric patients’ rights, and gender and sexual liberation. Through the process of building coalitions that transected these social justice struggles, the activists at the center of this study produced a broad and layered understanding of ‘violence against women’ that encompassed the structural violence of social inequalities, the violence of state institutions and agents, and interpersonal forms of violence, including rape, battering, and sexual coercion. This expansive analysis directly clashed with the “tough-on-crime” ethos of the 1970s and the mainstream women’s movement’s increasing embrace of criminalization as a frontline solution to interpersonal violence.”

All Our Trials shows how the focus on the lives of marginalized women demonstrated that incarceration was a source of further harm rather than justice and safety.  The book is well worth a read.

Legislative Alert!

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HR5, the “Equality Act” is currently in the Judiciary Committee in the U. S. Senate.  FIST is developing a response to this bill.  Please stay tuned for proposed amendments.  To contact the members of the Judiciary Committee, go to:  https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/about/members

SB 132 – A bill in the California legislature, “an act to add Sections 2605 and 2606 to the Penal Code, relating to corrections,” would allow males who identify as transgender to be housed with the female population if it passes. It has already passed in the California Senate and is currently in the state Assembly, where it will be reviewed in the Public Safety Committee. This bill if enacted is particularly dangerous for women since the passage of SB 179 in October 2017 has allowed “. . . a person to submit to the State Registrar an application to change gender on the birth certificate . . . to conform the person’s legal gender to the person’s gender identity.” So any man may declare himself a woman and change his birth certificate, with no requirements or oversight and in total disregard of biological reality, opening the door for sexual predators of various types, from voyeurs to rapists, to reinvent themselves as female by taking on female names and identities. Add to this the reality that the majority of female prisoners have been molested, raped, sexually assaulted, trafficked, coerced or forced into pornography and/or prostitution, and the potential harm to incarcerated women and girls is greatly increased if SB 132 also passes.

FIST strenuously opposes the passage of this bill and asks everyone to call the members of the California Assembly Public Safety Committee and urge them to not allow it onto the floor for a vote as it poses a grave risk to actual women, who comprise 52% of the general population and a growing percentage of the prison population, and therefore to public safety. Also if you are in California, please contact your Assembly representative and urge her or him to oppose it as well. Here is a link to the list of the Public Safety Committee members and their phone numbers: https://apsf.assembly.ca.gov/membersstaff

Failing to get Favorable Court Rulings, Gender Activists Go After Vancouver Rape Relief’s Funding

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Feminists In Struggle urges all supporters of feminism and of democracy to support Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter in their continuing fight to preserve spaces for natal women alone.  According to VRR, gender activists have now convinced the city to discriminate against women in the name of inclusivity.  In the defense of their woman-only policy they raise some interesting comparisons to indigenous, ethnic, disability and other struggles. In their statement they note that many grants by the city of Vancouver are given to other organizations that serve other specific groups, but that “rightfully, none of these groups have been challenged with the demand that they demonstrate “accommodation, welcomeness and openness to people of all ages, abilities… and ethnicities,” as it would undermine their mission. However, this is precisely what they are doing in the case of VRR. The Vancouver City Council is ignoring previous court decisions affirming VRR’s right to offer some services to only natal females and attempting to force them to change this policy.  For more information on what has happened, go to their statement.

The Collective of Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter