S3 Ep18: Valena Beety: The Criminalization of Mothers and Motherhood

S3 Ep18: Valena Beety: The Criminalization of Mothers and Motherhood

Two weeks ago, I interviewed Justine van der Leun about criminalized survival, and why women so often end up in prison for “crimes” of self-defense. The truth is that women often end up in prison for behaviors that aren’t criminal at all—not just for self-defense or for killing. Today we are talking about the widespread victimization of women at the hands of the legal system.  Patriarchy specifically targets mothers, and women from oppressed groups, then weaponizes our identities. Sometimes it uses these identities to prosecute and incarcerate us. Attorney and activist Valena Beety has worked to overturn wrongful convictions, taught other lawyers about the injustices in the criminal justice system, and is now a powerful advocate for systemic change. She joined me on the podcast to discuss her new book, Pink Crime: Fighting Against the Criminalization of Motherhood, Pregnancy, and Queer Identity. [https://thenewpress.org/books/pink-crime/] * The ways our criminal justice system (and associated systems, like CPS) silence and control women.  * How motherhood creates unique vulnerabilities within the criminal justice system. * How women can end up in jail or prison even when they are innocent, and even when there was no crime at all.  * The criminalization of tragedies: stillbirth, infant and child deaths, and miscarriages.  * Prosecutions of abortions and miscarriages.  * How our fear promotes victim-blaming, and how victim-blaming revictimizes women who survive trauma.  * Criminalized victimization, and how the legal system weaponizes women’s trauma against them.  * Bias in prosecution, and how prosecutors get tunnel vision and decide a woman deserves punishment no matter what.  * The ways in which we criminalize and punish disabled mothers.  * How a coercive system weaponizes women’s trauma, and can easily induce false confessions.  Pink Crime is an incredible book. Read it. Buy it. Give it to your friends. Pre-orders matter greatly for the success of a book, and they show publishers the importance of feminist work. I hope you’ll consider pre-ordering it. Valena has graciously offered a coupon code for my readers, that you can use to buy her book here [https://thenewpress.org/books/pink-crime/]. Simply enter code  I’ve listed all of Valena’s books, as well as all of the books I mention on the podcast, at the Liberating Motherhood Bookshop [https://bookshop.org/shop/liberatingmotherhood].  The excellent paper by Valena that I reference in the podcast is here [https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5160665].  About Valena Beety A wrongful convictions litigator and former federal prosecutor, Valena Beety is the McKinney Professor of Law at Indiana University-Bloomington Maurer School of Law and a co-founder of the Indiana Innocence Project. Her book Manifesting Justice received a Gold Medal in Women’s Issues from the Independent Publishers Book Award, and her coursebook The Wrongful Convictions Reader is used in classrooms nationwide to teach about wrongful convictions. Her latest book, Pink Crime, examines the Criminalization of Motherhood, Pregnancy, and Queer Identity She lives in Indiana with her wife, daughter, and tripod dog.

S3 Ep17: Justine van der Leun: Criminalized Survival

In patriarchy, there is no sure escape from violent relationships. The courts and police may not help. Friends and family may turn their backs. And even when a woman’s life is in danger, she does not have the same right to self-defense as a man.  Journalist Justine van der Leun began researching this phenomenon when she learned about Nikki Addimando [https://westandwithnikki.com/], a woman who killed her abusive partner in self-defense. Thanks to a grassroots campaign and some great lawyers, Nikki has now been freed, but just a few years ago, Nikki was sentenced to 19 years to life.  Justine wondered how many other Nikkis were out there. Experts told her that jails and prisons are full of women just like Nikki. Her new book, Unreasonable Women, is about what we do to women who kill in self-defense, as well as the patriarchal norms that reinforce men’s right to violence—and women’s right only to die from men’s violence.  In this conversation, we confront the reality of criminalized survival, and patriarchy’s unquenchable desire to punish abuse victims. Some of the topics we cover include:  * Criminalized survival, and why our legal system ignores women’s right to self-defense.  * Why being in an abusive relationship is a risk factor for ending up in prison.  * The crime of surviving as an abuse victim.  * The common theme that government will spend few or no resources to help impoverished kids, abused kids, or battered women, but will quickly and competently put those same people in prison, expending massive resources to do so.  * The expectation that women being attacked by men will apply a perfect legal standard of self-defense, exert more self-control than we expect from trained police officers, and behave like perfect victims at all times.  * The concept of violence against women as regulated rather than illegal.  * Stories of three women who killed in self-defense, and how all three ended up incarcerated.  Unreasonable Women [https://www.harpercollins.com/products/unreasonable-women-justine-van-der-leun?variant=44287886753826] is out now. I hope you’ll buy it, since doing so supports feminist scholarship and shows publishers that we want more feminist work. You can find Justine’s book, as well as all books I mention on the podcast, along with several reading lists, at the Liberating Motherhood Bookshop [https://bookshop.org/shop/liberatingmotherhood]. About Justine van der Leun  Justine van der Leun [https://www.justinevdl.com/] is a journalist, author, and creator and host of the acclaimed podcast Believe Her [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/believe-her/id1588789400]. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, New York Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, and The Guardian. She has received fellowships from New America, the Emerson Collective, and PEN America, and more. Justine brings both deep investigative reporting and a thoughtful, engaging interview presence to conversations about violence, justice, and survival.

S3 Ep16: (Rerun) Loretta Ross: Calling In, Building Sustainable Activism, and Changing Minds

Rather than taking the summer entirely off, I’m reducing my podcasting frequency to every other week, and posting reruns of some of my favorite episodes during the off weeks. I’ll be back to full-time in the fall. In the meantime, I’ve made no secret that this one of my all-time favorite episodes, and that interviewing Loretta Ross is one of the most enjoyable things I’ve ever done. I hope you love this episode; it’s so important for us to cultivate the skills Loretta teaches.  Today we are going to be learning from the legendary reproductive justice activist Loretta Ross. Loretta is my feminist hero and role model, and I feel so lucky that she was willing to share some time with me.  How is it that a human rights movement rooted in the shared value and worth of every human being so often devolves into a toxic stew of abuse and hurt feelings? Anyone who participates in leftist political movements has seen small disagreements spiral into mutual attacks, psychological brutality, and worst of all, fractured and less powerful movements.  Lasting change requires us to build solidarity across difference. At the very least, we must be able to resolve small disagreements. Ideally, though, we have to bring more people into the fold—including people we really don’t like, including people with whom we have very significant moral disagreements.  I’ve often noted that the anti-choice movement succeeded by standing in lockstep with one another, no matter how much they hated each other. They built a movement for 50 years, and they succeeded. We can learn a lot from them. But leftist coalitions are diverse and highly principled. These are good things, but they can make it challenging to work together.  So I’ve been thinking a lot about how we can do this. And then I found Loretta Ross’s book, Calling In. It has helped me to consider my own role in toxic call-out culture, and to seize opportunities to build consensus and coalitions rather than elevating myself and my ego. This, I think, is the only way we move forward.  There’s lots of advice about how to be a better activist, what this moment means, and how to deal with people who disagree with us. I think the most useful advice comes from people who have actually succeeded at sustaining a lifetime of activism. Loretta has changed hearts and minds over and over, working with people many of us would never even want to talk to. She has done the work that progress demands, and now she’s here to teach us how to do it, too.  You’ll recognize some of what we discuss from my earlier episode about sustaining hope as an activist. I cannot over-emphasize how much Loretta’s work has shifted my consciousness and influenced my own work, and I hope you find her wisdom as valuable as I do.  Some of the topics we cover in this conversation include:  * Toxic call-out culture, and how it is destroying individual well-being as well as activist movements.  * How childhood wounds create toxic shame that we then foist onto our activist colleagues.  * How we build resilience and capacity to work across difference.  * Calling out vs. calling in, and how we know when to do each.  * Loretta’s experiences working with rapists and deprogramming white supremacist.  * How our egos can undermine our activism, and how we resist that temptation.  * The components of an effective call-in, and how to know when a call-in is likely to work.  * “When you ask people to give up hate, you must be prepared to be there for them when they do.”  * The concept of the victimized violator—the person who feels entitled to violate others because of their own victimization.  * How to respond to a call-out or call-in.  * Can we use calling in with ICE officers?  * How we can acknowledge the humanity of those doing harm without losing sight of their victims.  * How we sustain hope and avoid despair.  About Loretta Ross  Loretta J. Ross is a Professor at Smith College in Northampton, MA in the Program for the Study of Women and Gender. She teaches courses on white supremacy, human rights, and calling in the calling out culture. She has taught at Hampshire College and Arizona State University. She is a graduate of Agnes Scott College and holds an honorary Doctorate of Civil Law degree awarded in 2003 from Arcadia University and a second honorary doctorate degree awarded from Smith College in 2013. She also has credits towards a Ph.D. in Women’s Studies from Emory University. She serves as a consultant for Smith College, collecting oral histories of feminists of color for the Sophia Smith Collection, which also contains her personal archives [https://www.smith.edu/library/libs/ssc/pwv/pwv-ross.html]. Loretta also is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellow, Class of 2022 [https://www.macfound.org/fellows/class-of-2022/loretta-j-ross#searchresults], for her work as an advocate of Reproductive Justice and Human Rights, and an inductee into the 2024 National Women’s Hall of Fame. Loretta’s activism began when she was tear-gassed at a demonstration as a first-year student at Howard University in 1970. As a teenager, she was involved in anti-apartheid and anti-gentrification activism in Washington, DC as a founding member of the DC Study Group. As part of a 50-year history in social justice activism until her retirement from community organizing in 2012, she was the National Coordinator of the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective from 2005-2012 and co-created the theory of Reproductive Justice in 1994. Loretta was National Co-Director of April 25, 2004, March for Women’s Lives in Washington D.C., the largest protest march in U.S. history at that time with 1.15 million participants. She founded the National Center for Human Rights Education (NCHRE) in Atlanta, Georgia from 1996-2004. She launched the Women of Color Program for the National Organization for Women (NOW) in the 1980s and was the national program director of the National Black Women’s Health Project. Loretta was one of the first African American women to direct a rape crisis center in the 1970s, launching her career by pioneering work on violence against women, as the third Executive Director of the D.C. Rape Crisis Center. She is a member of the Women’s Media Center’s Progressive Women’s Voices. Watch Makers: Women Who Make America video [https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1286476171460704]. Loretta has co-written three books on reproductive justice: Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organize for Reproductive Justice in 2004; Reproductive Justice: An Introduction in March 2017; and Radical Reproductive Justice: Foundations, Theory, Practice, Critique in October 2017. Her newest book, Calling In: How to Start Making Change with Those You’d Rather Cancel [https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Calling-In/Loretta-J-Ross/9781982190798] is available now! Loretta is a rape survivor, forced to raise a child born of incest, and also a survivor of sterilization abuse at age 23. She is a model of how to survive and thrive despite the traumas that disproportionately affect low-income women of color. Loretta is a mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother. You can find all of Loretta’s books, as well as all books recommended on the podcast, at the Liberating Motherhood Bookshop page [https://bookshop.org/shop/liberatingmotherhood].

S3 Ep15: Dr. Elizabeth Dalgarno: Surviving Family Court and the Normalization of Abuse

“There is always a reason for people to hate on women.” — Elizabeth Dalgarno Why is it so hard for victims of coercive control, domestic violence, and other forms of abuse to be believed? This is the subject Elizabeth Dalgarno has devoted much of her work to. A leading researcher on coercive control, Dr. Dalgarno has written extensively on abusive relationships, including on how they affect children and why family court norms are so harmful for victims.  No matter where you live, the court system was never set up to protect women and children. So what do we do? How can we survive? Survival begins with understanding the severity of the problem.  In this podcast episode, Dr. Dalgarno and I talk about abuse as the normal state of heterosexual relationships, and how family court systems reinforce the abuse. Some of the topics we cover include:  * The myth of high-conflict divorce, and the reality of victims and perpetrators. * How family courts victimize women, and why so many women enter family court systems totally unprepared.  * How patriarchy has weaponized the notion of false memories. For decades, therapists of dubious skill and integrity induced false memories in their clients. This caused real harm that has continued for decades. But real abusers have weaponized the notion of false memories to silence people with very real, very true memories. This has even occurred in documented, proven cases of abuse, such as with Jeffrey Epstein.  * The false notion of parental alienation syndrome. The creator of this concept asserted that children “seduce” their fathers, and implied that pedophilia is “natural.”  * How trauma undermines the believeability of victim-survivors, and why victims rarely act the way we expect them to. * How gender norms create impossible mothering standards that then harm victims in family court.  * Why sexual abuse of children is so common.  * Why outcomes in family court are not women’s faults, and why the bad outcomes are the system working as intended.  * Strategies that may help in family court.  A quick note: Dr. Dalgarno’s discussion of the family court system addresses norms that pervade across legal systems, but the specific family court system she speaks about is the British system. Not all countries have private and public courts, but the general principles Dr. Dalgarno speaks to will apply everywhere.  About Elizabeth Dalgarno Dr. Elizabeth Dalgarno [https://www.drdalgarno.com/] is a world-leading coercive control researcher and advocate. She is the Director and Founder of SHERA Research Group [https://www.shera-research.com/team/dr-elizabeth-dalgarno], a global collective researching the harms to health and human rights violations against women and children in the family courts and other institutions. She is also a Lecturer at the University of Manchester, England. Elizabeth has worked in public and private health and social care for over 20 years specialising in challenging violence against women and children and systemic inequalities for all people in law, health and social care. You can read her incredible Substack here.  [https://substack.com/@drdalgarno]

S3 Ep14: Rerun: Kate Manne: Understanding the Logic of Misogyny

Exciting news: I’m writing a book. Less exciting news: This means I have a little less time right now. It’s also summer break, which means things are in a chronic state of chaos. Lots of podcasts take breaks over the summer, but I didn’t want to do that, especially since I have SO MANY amazing guests lined up for the summer. So instead, I’ll be mixing in some rerun podcasts this summer, to give myself a little more editing time and breathing room. You can expect a new podcast episode at least every other week, with reruns sprinkled in between. This chat with Kate Manne was one of my favorites, and I hope you love it too. Misogyny isn’t really about hating women. After all, if pure hate explained everything, wouldn’t that mean that only mean men abuse women, and that misogynists never seek relationships with women? Men are able to mistreat women they claim to love because of the internal logic of misogyny. They’re not irrational or unhinged; they’re following a set of rules rooted in entitlement. Kate Manne is a philosopher who focuses on understanding what’s behind the misogynistic behavior patriarchy creates and enables. She envisions misogyny as a sort of disciplinary tool for reinforcing gendered norms, and preserving men’s access to resources—especially the highly valuable resource of women’s labor. We cover a lot of ground in this podcast, including: * The reflexive denial in the media of misogyny. * Misogyny as a system for enforcing men’s entitlement to women’s labor. * Why misogyny is not random and not mental illness, but instead a set of corrupt moral values that reflect the values of the wider culture. * Misogyny as more than mere hatred of women, and why certain women may be more impacted by misogyny than others. * How not to hate your husband after children…or maybe you should just hate him. * The normalization of all forms of violence. * The parallels between misogyny and fascism. * Fatphobia [https://zawn.substack.com/p/my-parents-make-fatphobic-comments] as an inevitable byproduct of misogyny. About Kate Manne Kate Manne is an associate professor at the Sage School of philosophy at Cornell University. She specializes in moral, social, and feminist philosophy, and has written three books: DOWN GIRL: The Logic of Misogyny [https://academic.oup.com/book/27451] (Oxford University Press, 2018), ENTITLED: How Male Privilege Hurts Women [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/608442/entitled-by-kate-manne/] (Crown, 2020) and UNSHRINKING: How to Face Fatphobia [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/722318/unshrinking-by-kate-manne/] (Crown, 2024), a National Book Award finalist in non-fiction. In addition to academic work, she regularly writes opinion pieces and essays for a wider audience, including in outlets such as The New York Times, The Cut, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Nation, and Time. She writes a substack newsletter, More to Hate [https://katemanne.substack.com/], exploring misogyny, fatphobia, and their intersection. If you like this podcast or find my work valuable, I hope you’ll consider supporting it! Your paid support ensures I never have to take advertiser dollars, and am beholden only to my readership. You’ll also get access to one more podcast episode each month, eight additional pieces of written work, and membership in the Liberating Motherhood Community [https://www.liberatingmotherhood.org/community]. You can also support this podcast for free! Heart-reacting makes a huge difference, as does commenting and sharing on social media. If you listen to this podcast on a podcast platform, please leave a positive review; it makes a huge difference. Oh, and tell the people you love about this podcast too!