More Than A Magazine, A Movement
The Senate is feverishly debating the president’s $106 billion supplemental budget, which includes requests for additional aid to Ukraine and Israel, measures to counter China’s influence, significant humanitarian assistance funds, and border security.
Republican negotiators have chosen to use the urgency of the foreign aid requests to squeeze concessions from the administration and Democratic senators around the asylum process itself.
In every issue of Ms., we track research on our progress in the fight for equality, catalogue can’t-miss quotes from feminist voices and keep tabs on the feminist movement’s many milestones. We’re Keeping Score online, too—in this biweekly roundup.
This week: Federal judge weakens the Voting Rights Act; Congress fails to fully fund WIC; Attorney General Merrick Garland defends women traveling to receive abortion care; Jill Biden launches an Initiative of Women’s Health Research; American women are living six years longer than men.
The Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has allowed Saifullah Kahn, a student accused of sexual assault, to sue his accuser for defamation, relying on a Connecticut Supreme Court opinion finding that the accuser was not entitled to absolute immunity for statements she made during a Title IX proceeding.
This decision will have a chilling effect on sexual assault survivors’ willingness to come forward, as they are now vulnerable to defamation and other civil suits, which are increasingly used to silence and intimidate victims. But the ruling also could impact how schools conduct future Title IX proceedings, and influence proposed new Title IX regulations, which the Biden administration has been working on since 2020.
November 30 marks Native American Women’s Equal Pay Day, spotlighting that those working full- or part-time are still earning only 55 cents for every $1 paid to non-Latino white men. Only Latinas have a wider gap. But 55 cents is, in many ways, an incomplete figure.
There is much that is unknown about the nuances of the pay gap for Native American women. For years, the United States has failed to invest in data collection on Indigenous communities, making it difficult to reliably track wage gaps among the 574 federally recognized tribes.
Award-winning multimedia journalist Maya Golden’s searing but redemptive memoir, The Return Trip, takes readers on a harrowing journey. The book offers a no-holds-barred look into the sexual abuse that began when Golden was 5 and charts her course through a troubled adolescence and young adulthood. Along the way, she probes the long-term impact of repeated sexual violation and zeroes in on the ways religious institutions, educational systems, and familial denial continue to intersect and allow the perpetuation of violence.
Golden spoke to Ms. reporter Eleanor J. Bader before The Return Trip’s Nov. 14 release. Their wide-ranging conversation touched on the book as well as the work of the 1 in 3 Foundation, a group Golden founded to support survivors of sexual assault.
The New York Adult Survivors Act (ASA) expires on Nov. 23, 2023—yet the tens of thousands of patients of Dr. Robert Hadden have not been notified of his history of sexually assaulting women in his gynecology practice. Unless Columbia University urgently notifies these patients, survivors may miss the window to file civil suits.
Huang (Sophia) Xueqin’s reporting sparked a wave of #MeToo allegations against various high-ranking media personalities and professors in China. She described the censorship she faced as “severe.” The extreme backlash Huang faced for her reporting included an onslaught of threats, bullying on her personal pages, and intimidation from authorities—eventually leading to her arrest in September 2021.
As of this month, Huang has been jailed and almost entirely cut off from her friends, family and advocacy groups for over 750 days.
The Exorcist: Believer employs its Caribbean-based opening scene not to locate an “origin” for demonic possession, but to follow an actual blessing in the form of a protection spell over an unborn child. Given how Haiti has been traditionally demonized in Western culture, this representation already elevates this film as a counter-narrative.
In the end, the latest installment of The Exorcist does much to alter Black representations in the horror genre, giving them due reverence and centrality in a mainstream movie while also allowing them to survive.
The archdiocese of Baltimore filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Sept. 29 to preempt child sexual abuse lawsuits which were expected to be filed once a new Maryland law removing the statute of limitations took effect on Oct. 1.
The scheme allows the church to protect its assets, limit financial settlements, and stop civil lawsuits which would air unsavory information about decades of child sexual abuse and the church’s complicity.
Twenty-nine years ago, Congress passed the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), finally putting the full force of our federal government into efforts to stop domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault and stalking to help survivors. VAWA was transformative. In the years after it was enacted, domestic violence against adult women in the United States declined by more than 60 percent.
The pandemic set us back, and there’s much more work to do. We will keep working to improve VAWA, and to support the Biden administration’s National Plan to End Gender-Based Violence: Strategies for Action, a truly groundbreaking whole-of-government approach to addressing and preventing violence of all kinds.
