All content tagged with: Violence Against Women

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  • The Enemy is the Knife: Native Americans, Medical Genocide, and the Prohibition of Nonconsensual Sterilizations

    This Article describes the legal history of how, twenty years after the sterilizations began, the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, in 1978, finally created regulations that prohibited the sterilizations. It tells the heroic story of Connie Redbird Uri, a Native American physician and lawyer, who discovered the secret program of government sterilizations, and created a movement that pressured the government to codify provisions that ended the program. It discusses the shocking revelation by several Tribal Nations that doctors at the IHS hospitals had sterilized at least 25 percent of Native American women of childbearing age around the country. Most of the women were sterilized without their knowledge or without giving valid consent. It explains the obstacles that Connie Redbird Uri and other Native activists faced when confronting the sterilizations, including the widespread acceptance of eugenic sterilizations, federal legislation that gave doctors economic incentives to perform the procedures, and paternalistic views about the reproductive choices of women, and especially women of color. Finally, this Article describes the long-lasting impacts of the federally-sponsored sterilization of Native women. The sterilizations devastated many women, reduced tribal populations, and terminated the bloodlines of some Tribal Nations.

  • Sexual Violence as Genocide: The Developing Law of the International Criminal Tribunals and the International Criminal Court

    This note will explore the treatment of the two primary violent sexual acts, rape and forced pregnancy, in modern international criminal law; more specifically in its treatment as genocide. The woman as an individual is the primary sufferer of sexual violence during armed conflict, however sexual violence is a calculated means by which perpetrators seek to destroy an entire ethnic group. Sexual violence is both an attack against the woman and an attack against the ethnic group, and should be prosecuted as such. While crimes against individuals are best prosecuted as crimes against humanity or under domestic law, crimes committed against ethnic groups, separate from the individual underlying act, should be prosecuted as genocide.

  • Seeking Redress for Gender-Based Bias Crimes- Charting New Ground in Familiar Legal Territory

    This Essay will analyze how courts have defined gender-motivation, focusing on the Civil Rights Remedy cases decided before the law was struck down, in an attempt to cull from those cases the standards federal courts have used to assess gender-motivation. The article will first provide an overview of existing and proposed laws that offer some form of redress for gender-motivated crimes. It will then analyze cases decided under the Civil Rights Remedy, focusing on two key issues that have arisen as policymakers struggle with whether and how gender-based bias crimes fit in the rubric of hate crimes legislation. The first of these issues is how courts have assessed whether claims of domestic violence reflect discriminatory motivation, and what type of evidence they have found useful in that context. The second issue is how courts treated VAWA civil rights claims based on allegations of sexual assault, and what, if any, evidence, in addition to allegations of sexual assault, they found to indicate gender-motivation.