Janine Jackson interviewed Jane Manning about gender-based violence for the October 1, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Gabby Petito
Janine Jackson: Among many disturbing things about the story of Gabby Petito, the young woman whose disappearance and murder captured widespread attention, was the indication that Utah police had not taken seriously an incident in which Petito’s fiancé was reported slapping and shoving her. The police department says they’re investigating.
The FBI, too, says it’s investigating its actions in the grievous mishandling of the Larry Nassar case, of which the Justice Department has just delivered a damning account. Nassar being the Olympic gymnast team doctor who sexually abused numerous young women, dozens of them after multiple women had reported him to authorities.
The theme is hard to miss. Survivors of sexual assault are dismissed, dehumanized and denied at every turn, not just by individuals but by, as Simone Biles noted, entire systems.
Our next guest works on the frontlines of this set of issues. Jane Manning is director of the Women’s Equal Justice Project, which helps survivors of sexual assault navigate the criminal justice system. She joins us now by phone from the Bronx. Welcome to CounterSpin, Jane Manning.
Jane Manning: Thank you so much, Janine.
New York Times (9/27/21)
JJ: The Larry Nassar case, which you wrote about for the September 27 New York Times, seems emblematic, in that people might think the agency “dragged their feet,” or “didn’t do all they might have.” But it’s not just negligence. And then, also, a decision not to do something is an action, is a choice—and one that seems to get made again and again.
JM: You’re so right about that. I love the way you just put that, Janine, that the decision not to do anything is a choice. That’s right.
I mean, we live in a legal regime, right? So the state has what’s called a monopoly of force, so if you’re raped or battered, you’re not allowed to take a gun and go settle the score for yourself, right? We look to the justice system to provide accountability and justice for survivors, and also to provide protection to the rest of society from future violent offenses.
And so when the justice system refuses to act in cases of gender-based violence—sexual assault, domestic violence, stalking, human trafficking—they are effectively depriving women and other groups that are targeted for gender-based violence, LGBTQ survivors and other marginalized groups, they are effectively depriving us of safety and of the equal protection of the law.
JJ: The fact that mishandling of assault cases and gender-based crime cases so often pairs with mistreatment or demeaning treatment of survivors, that just highlights the depth of the problem in the system.
JM: That’s exactly right. One of the survivors who came to me for help told me that when she went in to be interviewed by a detective after she was raped, the detective’s first question to her was, “How often have you cheated on your husband?”
JJ: Oh my God.
JM: Another survivor said to me that her detective said to her, “Are you really sure you want this guy arrested? Who knows, you could end up dating this guy.” And the survivor said to me, “When I heard him say that, I asked myself, how can I possibly get an unbiased investigation from this detective?” And she was right. The detective went on to do a very shoddy, minimal investigation of her case, and then closed it down while there were a lot of investigative leads still unpursued.
So it’s both of these issues. It’s the demeaning treatment, but it’s also the failure to investigate, the failure to prosecute, the failure to take action. And both of those things really impact survivors.
Washington Post (5/27/21)
JJ: Another part of the Gabby Petito media phenomenon was folks calling out the relative inattention given to disappearances and even killings of Black and brown women, Native American women. In your piece for the Washington Post back in May, you noted how racism and sexism are intertwined here. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what those intersections can mean, can look like, in terms of criminal justice and sexual assault.
JM: That’s exactly right. So this kind of law enforcement inattention to gender-based violence cuts across various intersecting forms of inequality. So when police agencies refuse to investigate gender-based violence, sexual assault for example, that has a disproportionate impact on all women. It has a disproportionate impact on all LGBTQ communities.
But it has a particular impact for the most marginalized women, the most marginalized survivors. So women and girls and survivors in communities of color, in communities that are facing poverty, in Native and Indigenous communities, disabled survivors, all of these groups that face more than one form of social oppression. So gender and race, or gender and disability. Or survivor status and poverty. These intersecting forms of oppression often combine to make it even harder for a survivor to receive justice, or even to feel like that survivor can go to the system and report in the first place.
And one thing I just want to say about this, Janine, is that for so many of our communities, the level of frustration with policing has become so high that some people with the best of intentions are saying, you know what? Maybe we should forget about trying to fix the police response, and maybe we should just concentrate on healing and therapy for survivors.
And I just want to say very strongly that that is not the option that the survivors who come to me want. So the survivors of every race and class who come to my organization, they want a police response. They have experienced, on the most physical, firsthand level, the violence of gender-based assault, and they want those perpetrators held accountable criminally.
Jane Manning: “It is not too much to ask that we could have intersectional justice in the space where right now we have intersectional oppression.”
And what I want to say about that is that what those survivors want is not too much to ask, it is not too much to say that we deserve police and prosecutor agencies that do not engage in racial profiling, that do not deter survivors of color from coming forward because of justified fears of police brutality. But at the same time, that do take sexual assault and gender-based violence seriously, and will come to the aid of survivors who report those crimes. It is not too much to ask that we could have intersectional justice in the space where right now we have intersectional oppression.
JJ: I appreciate that. I would imagine that some proponents of restorative justice would say it’s a more expansive thing than just therapy for survivors, you know?
But, at the same time, I appreciate how you say this is the system we have and people have a right to expect this system to work for them the same way that it works for others. And in that Washington Post piece, you say there’s a trap for survivors of color who may fear that if they report assaults, they’re going to bring down profiling and excessive force on their own communities. And that’s a real, and as you say, justified concern.
JM: It’s a concern that deters many women of color, particularly Black women, from going to the police in the first place.
JJ: That piece in the Washington Post is about just the very fact of how over-policing and underprotection fit together, are of a piece. So if we can understand that fact, what could we change tomorrow that would push the system in the direction it needs to go, and maybe then what longer term work is needed?
JM: This is a great question. So the oppressions go together, and in many ways, the solutions can go together too. So I’m going to talk about a couple of things. I’m going to talk about training. I’m going to talk about funding. And I’m going to talk about the role of the Justice Department.
So in terms of training, we do need training that enables our police officers to engage the community in ways that are supportive and protective and not confrontational. So the current culture of almost a militarized approach to policing, that is not the inevitable face of policing. That is the consequence of the police being armed with military-style weapons and trained in military-style tactics by leadership that have chosen those approaches.
And a different approach is possible, one that prioritizes deescalation and a public service approach to policing. And that public service approach could also apply, and should also apply, to the way a rape survivor is met when she enters a police precinct, that this is not somebody to be seen as a burden and a hassle, that this is the very core of your mission as a police officer, is to respond to someone like this. So part of it is training and culture change.
But there also needs to be accountability for police officers who don’t live up to those cultural ideals. And that accountability has to start at the top. Here in New York City we have Police Commissioner Dermot Shea, who presided over just brutal crackdowns over last summer on peaceful protestors in the Black Lives Matter movement, but has also systematically understaffed and under-equipped the Special Victims Unit.
So we talk about how police are funded. We need to not just oversee how much the police get, but we also need to oversee what they do with the money that we give them. We need less police resources spent on arresting people for nonviolent crimes like loose cigarettes, and more police resources allocated to thorough and victim-centered investigations of rape.
So those are changes that we can make in the way that we oversee police agencies and the demands that we make of them.
And then, finally, I’ll just say that what my piece says is that the Biden administration’s Justice Department is investigating racial bias and excessive force in policing, and those investigations are much needed.
But one thing the Obama administration did was they incorporated into those investigations the intersecting issues faced by women and girls and survivors, often women and girls and survivors of color, who find that underprotection that goes right along with the over-policing and the excessive force.
For whatever reason, the Biden DoJ has not taken that intersectional approach to their Justice Department investigations. It’s a huge mistake, and part of why I wrote the piece is to call on them to bring that intersectional perspective into the Justice Department’s work.
CBC (11/18/11)
JJ: Believe it or not, I have a final question. Finally, years ago you might read a headline, “He Loved Her Too Much”—
JM: Yes.
JJ: —when a man killed his wife or girlfriend. I’m not sure you’d see that today. Today, asking what was she wearing in a rape case is considered a faux pas, you know? We like to think our understanding of sexual assault, in particular, has advanced culturally. And it has, but I don’t think a new day has really dawned.
JM: Yeah, that’s right.
JJ: In terms of media, which can so influence public opinion and public policy, are there still myths or misunderstandings about gender-based crimes and the criminal justice system that you see as obstructions?
JM: Oh, absolutely. And one of those is the idea that we have to choose between a criminal justice response and a holistic response. And you know what? I’ll take ownership of—you were right to call me a few minutes ago on dismissing restorative justice as just confined to therapy for the survivor. You’re right, it is a more holistic process than that. And at the same time, the survivors I know would be the first to say, or many of them would be the first to say, it is not appropriate for every offender, and it is not a therapeutic process for every survivor. So you’re—there’s so much more to say about the restorative justice process—
JJ: Of course.
JM: —than what I just said. And yet, for those survivors who want a criminal justice response, we can do both. We can have holistic approaches that pursue therapy and healing and prevention within our communities, and at the same time, we can demand that for those cases that require a criminal justice response, it be a competent and skillful and diligent and victim-centered one.
JJ: I’d like to thank you very much. We’ve been speaking with Jane Manning of the Women’s Equal Justice Project. Jane Manning, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
JM: Thank you, Janine.
The post ‘It’s the Demeaning Treatment, but Also the Failure to Take Action’ appeared first on FAIR.
This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.
Janine Jackson | Radio Free (2021-10-08T20:30:59+00:00) ‘It’s the Demeaning Treatment, but Also the Failure to Take Action’. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2021/10/08/its-the-demeaning-treatment-but-also-the-failure-to-take-action/
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