Women With a Vision, Inc. is excited to be joining thousands of public health students and professionals from across the country at the American Public Health Association’s Annual Meeting & Exposition, which is being held in New Orleans from November 15-19, 2014. APHA’s Annual Meeting is where public health professionals convene, learn, network, and engage with peers.
WWAV’s Executive Director Deon Haywood will be speaking on a panel entitled, “Local and Global Strategies to Address All Forms of Violence Against Women” on Monday, November 15, 2014 from 8:30am-10:00am. This session will discuss the local and global strategies in place to address specific forms of violence against women and ways to empower women to assert their rights. This session will also discuss examples of various types of violence against women which have far reaching implication on their social and economic well being.
Deon’s presentation will explore the following:
“Cis and Trans Women of Color in the South: Intersectionality and Violence”
Women of color’s needs (both trans* and cis gendered) are distinct and unique in areas including HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention, intimate partner violence, reproductive justice, and health care. Even further, women of color in the South live in a different environment, where their bodies are policed and politicized. Understanding the unique ways that historical trauma and daily challenges and triumphs affect marginalized women is essential to providing appropriate care and being able to respectfully interact.
WWAV’s Director of Research & Evaluation Shaquita Borden and WWAV Board Member Laura McTighe will also present on the panel, “Pushing Public Health to the Margins: Critical Approaches to Aggressive Policing, Aging in Prison, and Gender-Based Criminalization” on Monday, November 17, 2014 from 9:30am-11:00am.
About the panel: A decade of innovative public health research and advocacy have achieved the impossible. There is now widespread understanding of the critical role that mass incarceration plays in shaping the health of entire communities, and states like New York have also been able to use evidence-based science to develop novel approaches to drug policy. Prisons are not only bad for the health of drug users; prisons are bad for the health of our society as a whole. In this this session, panelists are “Pushing Public Health to the Margins” to advance new models for addressing controversial criminal justice topics. Participants will explore how methods of public health, urban planning and participatory educational practices support families and communities in challenging widespread fragmentation due to aggressive policing and incapacitation; shine a light on aging people in New York State’s prisons, particularly those who are ineligible for parole because of violent convictions, to re-conceptualize tropes of “risk” and “community safety;” use the histories of 19th century moral reforms to analyze the translation of drug criminalization policies into sex work criminalization policies, and the implications of applying a disease model to “cure” prostitution; and draw on longitudinal data to explore how centering the unique vulnerabilities of lesbians and trans* women of color in the criminal justice system changes our understanding of the health politics of mass incarceration.
Shaquita’ s presentation will engage the following:
“Grassroots Advocacy: A Structural Intervention For Vulnerable Populations”
LGBT populations, and Lesbian women in particular, experience increased substance use and a myriad of other health disparities related to their sexuality. The socio-structural factors that propagate widespread discrimination against these populations contribute to such disparities. As a result, sexual minority and racial minority groups are subject to rabid criminalization and over-policing. One of the U.S.’s most significant efforts to police its citizens is the failed drug war. African-American Lesbian women face increased incarceration, given targeted surveillance in African-American communities and discriminatory policing of LGBT populations resulting from America’s drug war.
Transgender African-American women also face the consequences of criminalizing sexuality, as they are often arrested and jailed based on the assumption that they are involved in sex work. As the state with the highest incarceration rates in the world, Louisianans are presented with a unique set of challenges in trying to shift conversations and practice to health modalities instead of carceral solutions. Ongoing work housed at Women With a Vision in New Orleans, seeks to provide specific solutions to the health problems related to mass incarceration among Lesbian and Trans* women.
Vulnerable populations often hold the solutions to their own health problems but are excluded from discussions to develop and disseminate appropriate modalities. Grassroots advocacy is essential to encourage the inclusion of vulnerable populations and can be employed widely to inform changes in the current trend toward mass incarceration over health strategies.
Laura’s presentation will be on the following:
“Arrest, Divert, Retrain: The Implicit Health Biases in the New War on Sex Workers”
Public health has been a powerful force in the fight for sex workers’ rights across the globe. Yet, we are now witnessing the rise of a more insidious health discourse. Much like the 19th century moral reforms, which sanctioned indefinite detention to cure “whores and thieves of the worst kind” from vice, new prostitution policies have usurped public health language in the interest of “treating” sex workers. While “treatment not punishment” has been a powerful rallying cry for drug policy reformers, we must be cautious before celebrating its application to sex work. What is the “disease” being diagnosed? What does successful “treatment” look like?
Through a careful analysis of criminal justice practices in New York and New Orleans, I argue that even seemingly innovative strategies like New York City’s special court for prostitution “victims” implicitly rest on an antiquated moral medicalization model, in which sex work is a disease to be cured. Two trends have influenced its resurgence: First, a carceral turn in feminist advocacy, whereby a crime frame is increasingly being deployed to “save” women in the street-based economies; and Second, a gendered turn in criminalization policies, whereby the laws criminalizing drug users are increasingly being adapted and used against sex workers. Taken together, these trends have birthed an “Arrest, Divert, Retrain” approach, which is clearly at odds with best practices for promoting the health of vulnerable populations like sex workers. In conclusion, two innovative community-based strategies for unveiling and challenging such punitive forms of rescue will be discussed.