Welcome to Re Pros, fight Back a podcast on all things related to sexual and reproductive health rights and justice. Hey, re pros, how's everybody doing? I'm your host Jenny Wetter and my pronouns are she her. So y'all, I am looking forward to a long weekend.
I'm recording this on Thursday before the holiday weekend because I was at a conference last weekend, so I'm taking an extra long weekend this weekend, but it like threw my whole week off.
Like I was convinced I was like a day off all week since the conference started on Sunday for me and then like I was like had something on Wednesday and I was like, it's Thursday and I just, it threw my whole schedule off, like just disaster. But I had so much fun, it was for Nira and I got to meet a ton of wonderful family planning providers and a bunch of listeners.
So hey, it was so great to meet some of you in person and welcome to any new listeners that I met at the conference. Uh , it really was wonderful to meet all of you and get to talk to you about the podcast and about the issues. It was wonderful to meet some of the wonderful teams from the US government that were there that are also listeners or new to the podcast.
Um , so just a big shout out to the huge team from OPA. I had so much fun talking to y'all , uh, and it was uh , great to meet some of you for the first time. So yeah, it was so much fun.
And then so after the conference like came back to work and like again my week was all thrown off on like what day it was, but then we had a staff outing to go to a national baseball game, which was so much fun if like super hot but we were able to like move up and sit in the shades then that made it better. But it was so great to go to a baseball game.
I hadn't been in a very long time and it was a lot of fun. I had like all these grand intentions of eating all of this ballpark food but I actually did not end up doing so I feel like it was hot and I just, the thought of like getting up and going and getting it, I was being lazy but that's okay. It was probably better. I didn't like go eat that bucket of cotton candy even though I was really tempted.
Let's see, what else, what else? Just really looking forward to the long weekend. I , uh, I , I have no plans. I am really exhausted after having to do three full days of in-person people and then had a really busy day today when I was just trying to get caught up on work but just like uh , had all these other things that had had meetings I had to have because I wasn't available the rest of the week.
So like it's just been a lot and I am very much looking forward to doing nothing all weekend. So probably do some reading, watch some movies, maybe spend a little time outside, but mostly just having some quiet introvert time and I am so excited for it. I think with that let's turn to this week's episode because I'm very, very excited for it y'all.
I have two just like amazing young researchers that are just gonna be, they're rising stars and I think we're gonna be seeing big things from them . Um, and I'm so excited that they're on the podcast. I get to work with them every day , well maybe not every day , but I get to work with them a lot.
Um, they work at Population Institute with me and they're just just so amazing and I'm so excited to talk to them about this wonderful report that they put out earlier this year called Behind Closed Doors. We'll have links to it in our show notes. Y'all should definitely read it. It's such a great read and really important read, but it's also just like stunningly beautiful.
The artwork in it is gorgeous, like it is just a gorgeous report front to back and has so much important information on it and I am so excited that I get to let them shine today on the podcast. So with that, let's go to my interview with Amani Nelson and Manza Habib , both with the Population Institute and two , like I said, rising star researchers that I am lucky enough to get to call colleagues.
Hi , I'm Amani and Manza . Thank you so much for being here today. Thank
You for having us. Yeah,
Thank you. This is very exciting.
I am so excited to have you two here, one because of your amazing report but also I love getting a chance to show off how smart you two are and all of the amazing work you're doing. So like it makes my heart happy to have you here. So thank you for doing it. So let's first before we dive into the report, I've been terrible at like I get excited and forget to ask people to introduce themselves.
So like let's not do that today. Let's have y'all introduce yourself. Mana , do you wanna go first?
Yeah , uh, my name is Manza Habib . I use she her pronouns and I am the research associate at Population Institute.
Yeah , um, my name is Amani Nelson. Uh , I use she her pronouns and I am a research fellow at Population Institute. So
Like I said, I'm so excited for the two of you to be here. The report you wrote is like first of y'all. It is gorgeous. You should make sure to look at it because like they worked with the designer to make just like this stunningly beautiful report but also it's a really important report and definitely worth a read, but I'm so excited to talk about it today.
Do we wanna do like a quick like overview because I think it's really good to like frame it a little bit before we get into the sections. Sure,
Yeah. Um , well behind closed doors, that's what the report is called. It's essentially a report that ties together different gender-based harms that we typically think of as foreign things that, things that don't happen in the United States.
So what we wanted to do is put these together and show how they impact a range of communities within the United States and therefore we can develop, you know, sustainable solutions to respond to them better. Um, and these different gender based harms that we include in the report are female general mutilation slash cutting or FGMC, child enforced Marriage Virginia testing and femicide.
Yeah, and our two main goals with this report were really about number one, impacting policy and policy makers . You know, we really feel like there's a need in the United States for policy makers to recognize the prevalence of uh, these kinds of gender-based harms and how much they really are rooted in American culture.
And then our second goal was really wanting to show that you can have a culturally competent and intersectional approach to addressing these kinds of harms. And so whether that's in the form of survivor led and focused initiatives, more robust research and analysis and just investment across multiple sectors, be them medical, religious, social or institutional.
But yeah, those were really our two main goals when we were making this report.
I think it's so great because like you said, it's all of these issues are ones I think people don't think of in a US context. Like the conversations are like bubbling up more, but it's in like specific spaces, right?
So like if you're not in kind of the gender conversation space, like on the ground, you may not be as familiar with how these harms are showing up in the US And so I , I think it's such important work to raise all of them because again, you may know about like specific ones, like if you're, you may know about child marriage if you're in that community and FGM if you're in that community, but not all of it
interconnected, which I think is such an important part of what this report does. Yeah,
Exactly that just to add on, like I feel like we just, when we don't recognize these gender-based harms, we're not recognizing the culture of toxic masculinity that exists within the United States. It's like very, very much present across the globe and we're, we're part of that conversation and we should be more part of it.
Great. Okay, so I think the first section we should touch on is the FGMC section. And you know, maybe like just like a quick step back of like maybe some people aren't as familiar with that. I know we haven't talked about it on the podcast a ton, but some good framing would be nice too. Yeah.
Um, well FGMC is essentially defined as the partial or total removal of the external female genitalia or any kind of injury to the female genital organs. For non-medical reasons, it has no health benefits, it's completely a human rights violation and it has a lot of harm that it carries. So typically individuals are cut between anytime between birth and 15 years of age, but it can happen at any time.
It's often carried out by traditional practitioners or birth attendants, a relative, sometimes healthcare professionals in medical settings. And it's often done for misguided reasons in preserving cultural identity or maintaining social status, promoting chastity and marriageability upkeep of cleanliness of beauty.
And then there are also just misconceptions about fertility associated with FGMC, but in the end of the day it doesn't do any of those things. It causes irreparable change to the FEMA genitalia which can cause like severe pain and excessive bleeding and can sometimes even lead to death.
So over 230 million women are impacted worldwide and over half a million women and girls are either at risk or have undergone FGMC just within the United States. And these NU numbers are based on limited small scale studies across the world and are definitely not exclusive inclusive of all who are impacted and within the United States. They're only based on indirect estimates based on who you are.
So it's leaving off a lot of cultures that might perform FGMC and overestimating for other cultures that also do perform FGMC but overestimating for those that live here.
Yeah and those numbers that minis I was mentioning, you know, I think for the United States our most recent data is from 2013. So there really is a need for further investment in finding out exactly how many women and girls in the United States are at risk because this is one of those issues that you know, is every conversation around it is almost exclusively outside the United States.
And the other thing we touched on in our report, which is kind of weaved throughout but we also have a special section for it , is um, how these gender based harms disproportionately affect the L-G-B-T-Q community. And a huge concern for L-G-B-T-Q activists is bodily autonomy and things like that .
Uh , female genital mutilation can sometimes be used as a way of suppressing or subverting someone's sexuality or gender expression. And so these issues disproportionately affect L-G-B-T-Q people as well.
I think that's so important to talk about and it's also just important to talk about that we do see FGM in the US and you know, one of the things I , when I, this was like big, like you said with the 2013 data, there was like a big push around it then was concerns over one starting to see the medicalization of it but also when people show up for delivery and like doctors being confronted with something they aren't
familiar with or like knowing how to deal with it. Like there are real impacts that like last throughout your life and like that healthcare professionals need to be aware of and the silence around it harms not only the survivors at the time and like allows the protect us to continue but then later in life when they may encounter the healthcare system in a different way.
Yeah, exactly. This like most healthcare providers are overwhelmingly unprepared to respond to the needs of survivors of FGMC and even like, you know, I've spoken to a few individuals, it's not always just about the care but even they're scared to go in and show because of the, the face that they'll see.
Like they're, they're just going to be a reaction and that reaction itself is traumatic and it reminds you of like how traumatizing your , your situation was and how you look different and all those things.
So there is just a need for more education, more awareness building of just you know , how not to make a face when when you see it 'cause you are more familiar with what it looks like and different things like that. So I think you really hit the nail on the head.
Yeah and that's one of those again sort of more survivor focused initiatives that um , we really tried to bring to light in this report because you know, you may look at something like FG and C in the United States and think oh well this is a policy issue, you know, we need more laws across more states that don't allow for vacation cutting or FGMC and things like that.
But that multi-sectoral approach with medical institutions medical ethics is an important component and that is something that perspective is something you really only get when you actually talk to survivors of this kind of thing and what they're facing in their day-to-day life.
And do we maybe take one quick second 'cause people may not be familiar. What is vacation cutting? Well
Vacation cutting is when individuals are taken out of the country to have FGMC done in a different country where the rules might be more lax or it's easier to get done and then they come back. So we do currently have the stop FGMC ACT of 2020 that does make vacation cutting illegal and makes FGMC illegal in the United States.
It does include education provisions for enforcement in communities and does make an attempt for more data collection. But a lot of these things aren't happening. There's not a lot of evaluation and monitoring of these things that were asked upon in the federal law. And there's also nine states and Washington DC that still don't have a ban on FGMC.
In addition to these survivor focus initiatives and these educational components, there is still a need for laws that strictly ban this to show that we are anti FGMC and then also put more funding towards like robust data collection and prevention and training programs because things like vacation cutting can still happen but we're not sure of it happening.
But at the end of the day we just have to prioritize the needs of those most vulnerable and those advocating for it within the community and really listen to what they're asking for. There are different coalitions within each state.
They're asking for very specific things but at the end of the day it's just about de-stigmatizing this dialogue around FGMC , recognizing that it's happening and then also knowing how to respond when it happens.
Yeah, silence really can just breed stigma around all of these issues we're gonna talk about today. So I think one of the next ones, and often you hear them kind of in concert together is child early enforced marriage, particularly on the global scale like that you often hear them together. But let's talk a little bit about how does that show up in the us ?
Well in the United States there was an estimated 300,000 married minors within the 2000 to 2018. And this is significant, you know, there shouldn't be one is what it is at the end of the day.
And while there have been some work to create more bans on child marriage within the United States and definitely globally, there are certain loopholes in state laws that allow minors to get married under certain circumstances such as like parental consent or court approval, different things like that. There's just a lack of uniformity across state laws.
So currently only 11 states have effectively banned child marriage beginning with Delaware and New Jersey just in 2018. So it's pretty recent development in the most recent state was Virginia just earlier this year. And we still have so many states that have so many loopholes, no laws at all and just many, many minors just falling through in the system.
And part of this is probably due to this type of American exceptionalism, which is this idea that America is superior like morally superior to the rest of the world and therefore we do not need those laws. That is not happening here.
So that coupled with this fear of threat to our sovereignty like state sovereignty and our sovereignty in discussions with the world on child , child marriage affects and impedes on our ability to protect vulnerable minors in the United States.
Yeah and um, you were talking about you know, these more recent laws, I believe there was a child marriage ban in Missouri that just died in legislature.
You know, they had the votes but they felt that it was too quote unquote controversial of a bill to bring forward at this time, which is just crazy when you're talking about literally things like child marriage and I think the fact that that something like that can't even get passed in the United States, you know, local legislatures evidence of the fact that this is a deep rooted American issue and child marriage forced
marriage is another one of those harmful gender based practices that we see can disproportionately affect L-G-B-T-Q people. It's again just on another way of sort of forcing conformity of gender and sexuality onto LGBTQ plus identifying individuals. And another um, issue that we talked about in this report that is closely tied to child marriage and female genital mutilation is virginity testing.
And for those who aren't familiar, virginity testing is essentially a pseudoscience where you would perform a gynecological inspection of female genitalia to assess one's virginity.
But there is no clinical basis that exists for the procedure but it is still something that occurs in the United States fairly often and is again just another issue that we don't think of as being deeply American but is just another way of sort of enforcing both a gender binary and traditional gender expression and ascribing morality to women and their sexual activities.
I mean Amani and I were just talking about the other day, the rapper ti just a few years ago was very publicly , uh, he claims this was a joke but talking about how he virginity tests his child every year. Yep .
God I totally forgot about that. Like totally black hole it that was , yes
It was absolutely ridiculous. So , um, you know , clearly it's present, clearly it's something that whether jokingly or not it's happening . So, and I think also just to add on child marriage is this unique issue where there's pushback on child marriage bans from both progressives and conservatives for different reasons.
You know, conservatives being this fear of a threat to religious freedom and the ability to exercise traditional religious values and then from from progressives there's this fear that it will impede on the sexual reproductive health and rights of young people.
But I think the main thing to go back to and recognize is that child marriage itself impedes on an individual's right to bodily autonomy and the freedom of choice of family planning decisions.
So young people need to be allowed to make decisions that affect their future and they need to be allowed to access SRHR services and not be, but also not be trapped in a legal contract that they do not have a power to end, which is what child marriage is.
Yeah, I'm so glad you brought that up because I think that is something that is, you know, we talk about the ability to consent, right? So that young people need to be able to consent to birth control, to healthcare, to, to various things. But entering into a legal contract that you are unable to get out of is very different than being able to consent to healthcare .
And I think that's a really important point to raise.
No, exactly. It's just, you know, ending child marriage just requires such careful consideration of the specific needs of married adolescents and at risk individuals too. And that includes being able to access sexual reproductive health services but also understanding that they may be entering into a legal contract, they cannot end or do not want to enter in the first place. So we need to provide protection for them .
So also just tackling this issue in general requires considering the root causes of gender inequality and exclusion that drive child marriage in the first place. There's just a lot that goes into just that idea of valuing or devaluing of a girl's sexuality, a woman's sexuality and thinking of it as a commodity. So protecting girls from that is of utmost importance.
I also thought it was important you raised the um , Missouri and how it got pulled.
You know, now I'm not gonna remember like when this happened 'cause it feels like forever ago, but like again time no meaning a number of years ago there was a bill in Congress around global child marriage that ha was like coasting along to like, I mean it was gonna easily pass and then all of a sudden it got flagged as an abortion related bill, which to be very clear was not even though like you said child marriage
has very clear implications for sexual and reproductive health and rights and it got pulled because they lost all of this support because it was said that it was an abortion related bill. And I do have like concerns as we're like seeing things become more and more like abortion and gender and getting flagged as as like expanding those areas that like you could slow down some of the progress you're seeing.
Okay. The next section you talk about femicide and I think that is definitely something that I have thought less, much less about in US context. So I was extra excited to see this in the report. Do you wanna talk a little bit about that section?
Yeah, definitely. So Femicide is essentially the killing of a woman or girl because of her gender or her perceived gender. And in the United States the rate of femicide is about 2.2 per 100,000 women or it was in 2021. And more than half of these, I believe more than half of intimate partner related femicides occur with a firearm.
And there is an upcoming Supreme Court case that is pending, it's called the United States versus Rahimi . And it could essentially loosen a loophole that allows people under domestic violence, restraining orders to obtain guns and on the theory that depriving them of guns is a violation of their second amendment rights.
Should, you know, these laws banning people with protective orders against 'em or um, other people convicted of intimate partner violence. These struck down we would see a huge increased risk for women and girls in the United States when it comes to femicide. And Femicide is also one of those harmful gender-based practices that we see very much disproportionately affects women of color.
I believe black women and girls are murdered at by men at almost three times the rate of white women. And I believe Native American and native Alaskan women and girls are have the second highest rate of femicide in the United States.
So it's one of those issues that again, far reaching, extremely prevalent, especially considering the United States relationship with firearms but not something that is talked about nearly often enough.
Yeah, and if you want to learn more about the Supreme Court case that we're waiting on the decision for, there is an episode of Repro Fight back where I talk to uh, Sabrina, oh no I forgot her last name, at the Center for American Progress, where we talk all about the case and its implications and originalism on the Supreme Court so you can do a deeper dive if you are interested in learning more about that case.
And yeah, this is such an important topic to talk about.
One intimate partner violence is one of those issues that's like near and dear to my heart, but also just again, seeing how black women and native women are so disproportionately impacted is always really important to raise those alarm bells, particularly if that this Supreme Court case could loosen the restrictions on people convicted of , um, domestic violence or under a restraining order for domestic violence from accessing
guns.
Yeah, I feel like it's one of those things kind of, you know, pattern with all the gender based harms that we're talking about. Just a reluctance to admit that it's happening and why it's happening.
So it's not survivor focused the way we approach this, the fact that we are even considering loosening the firearm policy for those that are under restraining orders, domestic violence restraining orders that is, is evidence of that. So currently we do have like the Violence Against Women Act, which is from 1994 and it has been reauthorized like four times in subsequent years.
And this has been effective in expanding federal criminal response to gender-based violence and creating grant programs increasing tribal power and adjusting violence and establishing protections for vulnerable populations.
But it has also been criticized for the disproportionate focus that it has on criminalization, which sometimes can just be harmful for those that are experiencing intimate partner violence or at risk of femicide and it can overshadow other effective strategies to combat femicide. And there's again that problem with monitoring evaluation.
There's some causal claims made about awas effectiveness on decreasing intimate partner violence, but there are no robust evaluation efforts to assert this claim.
But still the AWA remains a primary funding stream for agencies intervening and responding to issues of gender based violence, yet doesn't really have this attention and survivor led inform initiatives and community investments in addressing harmful gender based practices but rather more of a focus on policing and enforcement.
Yeah, and you really can't talk about this issue of, you know, femicide killing women and girls for gender or perceived gender without talking about how it affects trans women and particularly black trans women , um, in the United States because I believe right now I think the life expectancy for black trans women in the US is hovering somewhere around 33 years of age.
And that is largely due to the fact that they are murdered at disproportionate rates. And you know, that's why we specifically say for someone's gender or their perceived gender.
And that's because, you know, a lot of the kind of violence and harms that we're talking about are rooted in patriarchal society and L-G-B-T-Q individuals, particularly trans women, are often viewed as wrongly viewed as either a threat or as liars by men who kill for those, you know, again, deeply rooted patriarchal reasons. And that issue is also tied to firearms.
'cause in 2023, I think I believe 80% of homicides of transgender people were with a firearm. And so that's the kind of issue that again, there's a reluctance to like Manza said, to recognize this is happening and that is happening at such a alarming rate for such a vulnerable group of people.
And, but that's why the issue, you know, needs to be discussed and why we need to talk about issues beyond, you know, talk about solutions rather beyond criminalization, beyond, you know, just funding more money for police because there are oftentimes these most vulnerable groups are not going to be helped by those kinds of solutions. I
Think it's also really important to connect the things both of you said talking about vwa and then talking about the most vulnerable groups. You know, the last reauthorization, actually the last couple, I feel like Preauthorizations of V has been a big fight about expanding who is even covered under V and it was exactly those, right?
It was the most vulnerable groups, it was, whether it was around expanding it to native women, it was around expanding it to L-G-B-T-Q people and there was a real fight and then it really vwa got hung up and there was a really long lapse between um, when rath was needed and when it happened for including those more vulnerable groups in groups that were covered by Vwa .
And you're right, like we need to also be looking at preventative things clearly, right? There is a lot of work that needs to be done on that end to prevent this kind of violence from happening in the first place. Well I really enjoyed the conversation talking about the report and I love that you had solutions throughout. Is there something the audience can do to help around any of these things?
Like what actions can the audience take around all of these issues?
First and foremost, if you are interested in helping or advocating or , you know, around these issues is looking in your own backyard, looking in your state, in your city, what kind of policies and laws are in place. And you know, with the kinds of things we're talking about with child marriage and femicide, a lot of times we see oh, there's, you know, a ban on child marriage in this state. Excellent.
Well there may be loopholes, there may be, you know, other ways that things like that are happening.
So advocating for stronger state and federal policy frameworks and paying attention to, you know, when these kinds of things are in the news is, are people talking about this only internationally or, you know, other pieces coming out more from a domestic focus and educating yourself on these topics so that you're not using sort of those more harmful kind of language that we were trying to avoid.
Especially when talking about these more sensitive topics. You know, when we're talking about femicide, like we would never use the term honor killings even though just because that is deeply steeped in, you know, problematic and racist language that again is inherently like talking about this as a non-American issue.
And then just investing in community through, you know, further funding in research and advocating for those kinds of things. But also, again, the multi-sectoral approach that we're talking about from medical, religious, social institutions. Yeah,
Exactly that addressing like what are your biases? Like how can you address those? How do you contribute to this like unresponsive culture that we have? Like what are you ignoring in your community? Because even in your own job you're probably interacting with other people, you are responding to things, you have a certain mindset that you have when you go to your job and like, is it part of your job?
Like can you do something that can change the framing around this? And I feel like an important thing to remember is that anyone can get more involved with these like survivor focus and LED initiatives that we keep bringing up.
Like some of the collaborators on our project, which are organizations such as like , which work to end female general mutilation and Unchained at Loss , which is working to end child marriage in the United States. They do different activities, they go state to state advocate for stricter laws, promote more awareness for survivors and release survivor stories, different things like that.
So you can engage with these things and just educate yourself or you can read behind closed doors because that is also a resource that does that. And I think another really important thing we haven't really talked about too much is advocating for comprehensive sexuality education within your local community, within your schools.
'cause this type of early education can be like monumental and changing harmful attitudes towards sexuality of women and girls. And also anyone become more aware of gender diverse individuals just in general could be a cultural game changer for all of these gender based harms that we we've mentioned and kinda tackle toxic masculinity from the beginning.
So that's something that's super important that people in the audience can do.
Yeah, definitely. I think, you know, there's sexed, comprehensive sex education is something that's been in the news around, you know, the United States a bunch. It's kind of become a bit of a battleground in schools unfortunately. But I think a lot of times what Smith understood is exactly what goes into comprehensive sex education.
You know, when we're talking about CSE for kids as young as, you know, 5, 6, 7, we're not, people think like, oh, you're teaching children about sex. Like that's so wrong. It's like comprehensive sex. Sex education is about teaching kids what a harmful relationship looks like.
It is teaching kids about harmful gender roles, what those look like and the earlier and more widespread that kind of knowledge is the , like benza said, like that is when it becomes a cultural shift in terms of these issues of toxic masculinity, toxic and harmful gender-based practices.
That is really where they begin is when kids are, you know, these types of gender binaries and gender, you know, harmful gender based violence are, are taught early and taught at home. And so that's one of the reasons why comprehensive sex education is so, so vitally important, especially for young children.
Yeah, and you can, you can teach consent really early, right? Like, we're not talking about like consent to sex, but like I don't wanna hug this person or like touch and like there there's just very simple things that you can build up , um, over the course of teaching se comprehensive sexuality education from a young age and it makes a huge difference.
And teaching healthy relationships, like you said, huge difference in people's lives.
Exactly. I feel like the overwhelming response we get to a lot of these gender when we're talking about these gender based harms featured in behind closed doors is like, oh, that happens here. And the answer is yes, it does happen. And the second thing is yes, we have a responsibility to address them as a community and I feel like comprehensive sex ed is like a huge way to do that.
It's right there. manza , Imani , it was so delightful to get to talk to you today. I really enjoyed getting to show you off to my audience. I think you are two amazing researchers who are going to go a long ways. So thank you so much for being here. Thank
You so much for having us.
Yes , thank you so much. I , this has been amazing.
Okay, y'all, I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Imani and Manza . I had so much fun talking to them. I think they did such an outstanding job on the podcast. And like I said, I expect to see big things from them over the years. They, they're so smart and they're such wonderful researchers and just such thoughtful people. I, yeah, I am so excited to see what they do in the future.
And with that, I will see you all next week. If you have any questions, comments, or topics you would like us to cover, always feel free to shoot me an email. You can reach me at jenny jn n [email protected] or you can find us on social media. We're at Repro Fight back on Facebook and Twitter or repro FB on Instagram.
If you love our podcast and wanna make sure more people find it, take the time to rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform. Or if you wanna make sure to support the podcast, you can also donate on our website at re pros fight back.com . Thanks all.