“This is yet another anti-women policy that kills women,” Terry O’Neill, president of the National Organization for Women (NOW), told Healthline. “It is really awful and it is very, very dangerous.”
Women make up the fastest-growing segment of incarcerated people in the U.S., and about half are in jails, where people are held before their trials, after violating the terms of their parole, or after being sentenced to less than a year in lock-up. Between 1970 and 2014, the country saw a 14-fold increase of the population of women in jails, mostly for low-level drug offenses, loitering, and other crimes associated with broken-windows policing. More than 8 in 10 women in jail have survived sexual violence; nearly as many have experienced domestic abuse. About one-third of women in jail are living with severe mental illnesses, more than twice the rate of men in jail.
Cindy Southworth, the executive vice president of the National Network to End Domestic Violence, tells Bustle that there are many factors at play in these high murder rates. “Institutional racism and the over-policing of people of color adds a significant barrier to survivors reaching out for help from the justice system,” she says, “putting women of color at heightened risk of homicide.
Their worlds often resist the container of politicized terminology that is often the exclusive province of college-educated people. But working-class women have seen the most devastating outcomes of gender inequality. Impoverished mothers with hungry children, abused wives too poor and rural to access the legal system, work that is not only undervalued and underpaid but makes their fingers bleed.
The truth is: The LGBTQIA+ movement could have never come to visibility if it weren’t for the active participation, resistance, resilience, and pushback spearheaded by trans, gender non-conforming, and non-binary leaders of color.
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