Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) 2022, finally signed into law last month after delays that should never have occurred in the first place, promises to allocate more resources to historically underserved communities in order to address gender-based violence. VAWA 2022’s legal commitment to fund culturally-specific services must not be restricted to community self-flagellation, but rather support self-reflection and quests for self-empowerment.
Author: Mallika Kaur
Mallika Kaur is a writer, lawyer and organizer who focuses on gender and minority issues in the United States and South Asia and teaches at UC Berkeley School of Law. She is the author of “Faith, Gender, and Activism in the Punjab Conflict: The Wheat Fields Still Whisper,” Palgrave MacMillan (2019). She is also the co-founder and executive director of the Sikh Family Center, the only Sikh American organization focused on gender justice. Tweet her @mallikakaur.
Farmers Leading Protests in India—and the Young Feminists Camping With Them—Just Scored a Major Win. Will It Last?
As the world advocates for collective action toward the empowerment for all (including universal healthcare and tuition-free education), farmers and agrarian laborers from the states of Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh in India have finally pushed back with a massive movement. And after a year of unprecedented protests, an equally unprecedented victory has been won. To some readers, just to exist without immediate corporate control over agriculture may seem small—but these farmers are poised to change the whole game.
And undoubtedly, while the protest was majority male, the centrality of women’s contribution has been unquestionable.
Stopping Long Enough to Celebrate: Recent Win for Violence Survivor and Asylum-Seeker Holds Critical Lessons
The DOJ has granted asylum to Ms. A.B., a Salvadoran woman who fled domestic violence. The victory reaffirms: Violence in a home is not a private matter; marriage is not an excuse for rape; and gender-based violence is reason for urgent action.
I spoke with one of Ms. A.B.’s formidable attorneys, Blaine Bookey, from the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies, at U.C. Hastings, which took on the previous administration’s bullish attempts to push intimate partner violence back into the shadows.
Unprecedented Farmers Protests in India: Lest We Miss This Feminist Moment
Protesters in India are opposing new farm laws, passed during the din of the pandemic, that seem to hand over to the billionaires the keys of its agrarian sector. Women’s participation at the protest challenges the convenient narrative that the protest is only about angry men, dangerous and entirely unwilling to listen to reason
Victims Must Not Be Lost in Domestic Violence and Policing Debates
If this year is about exposing hard truths, here’s another: We have too easily outsourced our domestic violence problem. Instead of responding and taking a stand in our families and communities, we have, over time relegated it to police and government systems.
How does “defund the police” envision responding to domestic violence—currently the single largest category of calls received by police?
Virginia Woolf in Sangrur: A Stitching Center of One’s Own for Impoverished Farm Women
Expounding on “women and fiction” (and indeed the several fictions about women), Virginia Woolf’s brilliant long essay, A Room of One’s Own, was first published in 1929. Woolf underscored the dependence of literary genius on freedom of thought; of freedom of thought on the free availability of space; and of space on financial freedom that […]
Domestic Violence Survivors and Allies: We Won’t Be Silenced
In an unfortunate coincidence, Ross Mirkarimi, San Francisco’s sheriff who was convicted of a domestic violence-related offense and suspended from official duty–successfully argued for his reinstatement during Domestic Violence Awareness Month, which ends today. The commentary around the Mirkarimi case, as well as around the sheriff himself, misrepresents domestic violence agencies’ everyday work. The success […]
The “Half-Widows” of Kashmir
September 6: Residents of Indian-controlled Kashmir began a massive general strike today to demand the release of political prisoners. In the course of a decades-long dispute in Kashmir, the contested region between India and Pakistan, thousands of Kashmiris have been “disappeared.” A U.S. diplomatic cable released by Wikileaks last year suggests that detentions and torture […]