Tag: Black women

Police violence as a reproductive justice issue

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This post is a part of our Bioethics in the News series

By LeConté J. Dill, DrPH, MPH

In July 2017, Sacramento police officers raided Zityrua Abraham’s apartment during a no-knock warrant, and threw her to the ground, where she landed on her stomach. Ms. Abraham was eight months pregnant, and her one-year-old son was inside of the house. Furthermore, the police officers were at the wrong house. In May 2019, Phoenix police officers pointed guns at Dravon Ames, his pregnant fiancée, Iesha Harper, and their two young daughters, ages four and one, after their four-year-old accidentally took a doll from a Family Dollar store. Although Ms. Abraham, Ms. Harper, their unborn babies and their families “survived” their police encounters and were not murdered, we must also consider and more rigorously document the impacts of police violence on pregnant and parenting “survivors” and other witnesses.

How does police violence impact people’s reproductive decisions?

After the murder of Michael Brown in 2014 by police in Ferguson, Missouri, Imani Gandy, Rewire Senior Editor of Law and Policy, tweeted “I saw so many people on Twitter saying “I don’t want to have/raise Black children in this country.” That is a reproductive justice issue.” Since then, the intersections of police violence and reproductive justice have received more attention in the popular press. “Reproductive justice,” first coined in 1994 by a group of Black women, has spurned into a movement that supports “the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.” The U.S. does not foster “safe and sustainable communities” particularly for Black, Indigenous, and other people of color, and that lack of safety is perpetuated through disproportionate and excessive surveillance, policing, and punishment by law enforcement. Black people have flocked to social media to vent about how even the fear of police violence threatens their reproductive and parenting decisions. Writer and journalist Hannah Giorgis has remarked that “Any force that systematically and unapologetically turns unconsenting Black wombs into graveyards is a reproductive justice issue.”

Photo of a black child with their head and hand resting on the exposed pregnant belly of their parent.
Image description: a young Black child is lovingly resting their hand and head on the exposed pregnant belly of their parent, who is standing with their arm around their child. Image source: Anna Carolina Vieira Santos/Flickr Creative Commons.

How do pregnant people experience police violence?

In 2020, the state-sanctioned murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Tony McDade and other Black people raised the public consciousness of an all too pernicious, long cycle of racist state-sanctioned violence in the United States. Ongoing advocacy and activism efforts were bolstered, calling for decreased use of force by officers, demilitarization of law enforcement, divestment of police department funding and redistribution to social services, and abolition. Nevertheless, since the summer of 2020, law enforcement has continued to disproportionately harm Black people, including assaulting and arresting pregnant Black women. In a recent study, Dr. Rachel Hardeman and colleagues found an 83% increase in the odds of preterm birth among those who reside in neighborhoods with high levels of police exposure, contact, and activity relative to those in low police exposure neighborhoods. After Zityrua Abraham’s assault mentioned earlier, she was in physical pain and her pregnancy became high risk. Although Ms. Abraham’s contact with police did not end in her murder, such exposure to law enforcement and their technologies of surveillance is still violent—physically, mentally, and emotionally. This is a type of “slow death”—a cumulative trauma borne out of the daily round of living, and in this case, living while Black.

Bearing witness

It is also critical to acknowledge and address the mental, emotional, and physical ramifications of witnessing police violence. Darnella Frazier was 17-years-old when she filmed George Floyd being murdered by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. This footage helped to galvanize worldwide protests against police violence and became primary evidence in the conviction of Chauvin. Frazier has talked openly on social media and in news stories about the chronic post-traumatic stress that she has experienced from bearing witness to Floyd’s murder by police. Additionally, her then-nine-year-old cousin also witnessed the murder. Similarly, the children and other young family members of Korryn Gaines, Atatiana Jefferson, Philando Castile, and Jacob Blake witnessed or were in close proximity to the murders of their loved ones by law enforcement. Dr. Rhea Boyd’s research and advocacy acknowledges this, and she notes the glaring absence in the research literature of the impacts of young people who have witnessed their family members murdered by law enforcement. Ultimately, we must ask what are the consequences of witness and of survival; what coping practices exist and persist amidst chronic trauma; and will we ever be able to reproduce justice?

Photo of LeConté Dill

LeConté Dill, DrPH, MPH, is an Associate Professor in the Department of African American and African Studies at Michigan State University. In her work as a community-accountable scholar, educator, and poet, she listens to and shows up for urban Black girls and works to rigorously document their experiences of safety, resilience, resistance, and wellness.

Join the discussion! Your comments and responses to this commentary are welcomed. The author will respond to all comments made by Wednesday, November 24, 2021. With your participation, we hope to create discussions rich with insights from diverse perspectives.

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Counting Women of Color: Being angry about “missing white woman syndrome” is not enough

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This post is a part of our Bioethics in the News series

By Monica List, PhD

Gwen Ifill is credited with coining the term “missing white woman syndrome” at the “Unity: Journalists of Color” conference in 2004. She used it to describe the disproportionate attention garnered by criminal investigations in which white women are victims, and in some cases, perpetrators. Discussions of this phenomenon resurfaced in the wake of recent media attention to the case of Gabby Petito, a 22-year-old white woman from Long Island, NY, reported missing on September 11th—and whose death, confirmed on September 21st was determined to be a homicide, allegedly at the hands of her fiancé.

It is not the attention on these cases themselves that is the issue, but rather how they distract focus away from similar cases occurring at a much larger scale, such as the disappearance of Black and Indigenous women. According to NPR, in 2020 nearly 100,000 Black women and girls were reported missing in the United States. In 2019, more than 5,590 Indigenous women were reported missing, although this may be a gross underestimation given the lack of adequate reporting systems. Most of us would find it difficult to name a single one of them. Yet in the past weeks, our screens, newspapers and minds were filled with Gabby Petito’s name, her story, and her images. Petito’s death is undoubtedly a tragedy, and the fact that it has been so prominently reported is not problematic in of itself, but it is symptomatic of a deeper failure.

Image description: a puzzle of solid white puzzle pieces is assembled with one missing piece remaining in the center leaving a black empty space. Image source: Willi Heidelbach/Pixabay.

From a racial justice perspective, part of the issue is the entrenched racial stereotyping underlying the belief that women of color are somehow at fault for their own disappearances and any violent acts against them. According to Dr. Ashraf Esmail, Director of the Center for Racial Justice at Dillard University, there is a perception that risky lifestyles and personal choices are a license to shift the blame to the victim and diminish social responsibility for these cases. A report published by the Urban Indian Health Institute found that 38 percent of media articles reporting on murders and disappearances of Indigenous women and girls made references to drugs or alcohol. Narratives portraying women of color as angry or hypersexual are also part of this problematic perception, says Dr. Kaye Wise Whitehead, associate professor of Communications and African American Studies at Loyola University Maryland.

But this is not simply another failure of the justice system to respect and protect the lives of Black people and other people of color. In addition to being a racial justice issue it is a public health issue. As with other public health issues, the collection, interpretation and reporting of data can be both a problem and a solution. In this case, it is one of the deep roots of a complex, systemic problem. The title of a 2020 article on the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls summarizes it well: “They Disappear Not Once, but Three Times: In Life, In the Media, and In the Data”.

There are levels to how women and girls of color disappear in the data. First, the racial and ethnic breakdown of data categories unsurprisingly reflects the pervasive structural and systemic racism of our information management systems. The FBI’s missing person databases’ race categories are Asian, Black, Indian, unknown, and White. There is no category for Hispanic or other ethnicities, nor any subcategories for different Indigenous groups. Even within those limited categories, race misclassification is a common issue. The Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls Report found one instance in which a law enforcement agency still used an outdated coding system dating as far back as the 1960s, in which “N” was interchangeably used for “Negro” and “Native American.” This report also identified several police departments as including American Indians and Indian Americans in the same category. At least one of the databases (the FBI’s National Crime Information Center) does not allow data to be analyzed using race and gender combinations (e.g. “Black” and “woman”), making it difficult to obtain information on actual numbers of women of color reported missing.

Image description: a participant in the Greater Than Fear Rally & March in Rochester, Minnesota is shown wearing a grey knit hat, and they have a handprint on their face in red paint that covers their mouth. Image source: Lorie Shaull/Flickr Creative Commons.

Second, there is no national, unified system for the reporting of missing persons. In the United States, there are three federal missing person databases: the FBI’s National Crime Information Center (NCIC); the FBI’s National DNA Index System (NDIS), and the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs), administered by the Department of Justice. One failure of this setup is that data on missing individuals entered into one database does not automatically populate or transfer to other databases, and access varies. NCIC and NDIS can only be accessed by local, state and federal criminal justice agencies, while NamUs is public and can be accessed by families of missing persons, law enforcement, medical examiners, and victim advocates. While NamUs seems like a good resource, especially to those victims and families who fall through the cracks of law enforcement, it is not mandatory for criminal justice agencies to report to NamUs in all states. Additionally, while almost all law enforcement agencies use NCIC, only a small fraction are registered to use NamUs. In a country with well-documented systemic racism issues, leaving federal reporting up to the good will of local law enforcement is a losing game for women of color.

The final piece of the puzzle is a lack of inclusion of relevant socioeconomic data that would allow a contextualized analysis of cases. This would not only increase chances of recovery of missing women and girls of color, but also help plan and implement preventive strategies. A first step to achieving this is making the collection and analysis of missing persons data inclusive and intersectional. This includes efforts to decolonize data, which from a public health perspective means gathering the data that a community itself finds meaningful, in ways that align with their social structures and cultural practices. But to be clear, these solutions also need good allies outside of those communities. Tomorrow, another Black or Indigenous woman will go missing, and many of us will be sad and angry again. In the meantime, the systems that continue to render missing women of color invisible and uncountable remain unchanged.

Monica List, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Center for Bioethics and Social Justice in the Michigan State University College of Human Medicine; Dr. List is Head of Research and Animal Welfare for World Animal Protection, an international non-profit animal welfare organization.

Join the discussion! Your comments and responses to this commentary are welcomed. The author will respond to all comments made by Monday, November 8, 2021. With your participation, we hope to create discussions rich with insights from diverse perspectives.

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