Gladys Ricart was murdered by a former abusive boyfriend on September 26, 1999, on the day she was to wed someone else. The annual event commemorating the anniversary started in 2001. According to New York Latinas Against Domestic Violence, the idea for the March was originated by Josie Ashton, a young Dominican woman from Florida, who was moved by the murder and outraged at the media and community’s insensitive response.

Josie resigned from her job and sacrificed more than three months of her life away from her family to walk, in a wedding gown, through several states down the East Coast ending in her home state of Florida, all in an attempt to draw attention to the horrors of domestic violence.
Several organizations in New York City, including the Dominican Women’s Development Center, the Violence Intervention Program (VIP), the Northern Manhattan Improvement Corporation, the Dominican Women’s Caucus and the National Latino Alliance for the Elimination of Domestic Violence, helped Josie organize the first March, which served as a send off for her 1,600-mile journey. They organized supporters in the New York metropolitan area, including the family and friend of Gladys, to join Josie on the first leg of her walk from Gladys home in New Jersey, to the Church in Queens were Gladys was to marry that September 26, 1999.

To date, thousands of women, men, and youth, among them members of the Ricart family and other families affected by domestic violence, along with elected officials, civic leaders, clergy, students, and scores of domestic violence advocates and survivors, gather every September 26, rain or shine, to memorialize Gladys and the many other victims who have also lost their lives to domestic violence, and raise awareness of the horrors of domestic violence.

The US National Committee for UNIFEM and the National Council for Research on Women Join Forces on a National Conference to Promote Efforts Aimed at Ending Violence against Women. The conference is a collaborative initiative between two preeminent organizations working towards ending this global pandemic.

The US National Committee for the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM USNC), and the National Council for Research on Women (NCRW) have announced plans for a joint-effort to raise awareness about violence against women and girls as well as the latest thinking and strategies on how to confront it. Together the two organizations will produce a national conference, Strategic Imperatives for Ending Violence Against Women: Creating Linkages to Education, Economic Security, and Health, hosted by The Women and Gender Studies Program at Hunter College, CUNY (The City University of New York) in New York City, to take place June 11-12, 2010.

The conference will gather experts and advocates connecting and strategizing to overcome violence against women. By convening leaders from business, academia, philanthropy, advocacy, nonprofit and policy communities, the partners will offer an environment where participants can create action plans while gaining a better understanding of both UNIFEM’s work and the NCRW network’s groundbreaking research. A variety of experts will explore strategies to reduce gender-based violence and their intersections with social investments.

“The most compelling means of demonstrating the immediacy of ending violence against women are the soaring recent statistics on this issue. When 70% of women worldwide are affected by gender-based violence, we must take action.” said Carol Poteat-Buchanan, President of the US National Committee for UNIFEM. “Our upcoming national conference will create a forum for ideas and action plans to enhance our work to end violence against women.”

“We need to look at the myriad circumstances that fuel violence and cultures of violence, including political and economic insecurity, inadequate education, and social inequality,” said Linda Basch, President of the National Council for Research on Women. “In this conference, we want to identify and develop solutions that address these challenges.”

The conference is open to the public. More information as well as online registration can be found later this month on the US National Committee for UNIFEM’s website.

About the partners:

The US National Committee for UNIFEM (UNIFEM USNC) is one of 18 national committees that support the mission of UNIFEM. Chartered in 1983, the US National Committee expands support and raises funds within the United States for UNIFEM. Through the help of the Board of Directors, Advisory Council, local chapters and members, the UNIFEM USNC proudly supports UNIFEM projects in over 100 countries around the globe. Local chapters promote advocacy and education through planned events focused on gaining a broader understanding of issues facing women on a global scale, providing advocacy in the US for issues facing women, and raising funds to support UNIFEM and USNC.

The United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) provides financial and technical assistance to innovative programs and strategies to foster women’s empowerment and gender equality. Placing the advancement of women’s human rights at the center of all of its efforts, UNIFEM focuses its activities in four strategic areas: (1) reducing feminized poverty, (2) ending violence against women, (3) reversing the spread of HIV/AIDS among women and girls, and (4) achieving gender equality in democratic governance in times of peace as well as war.

The National Council for Research on Women (NCRW) is a network of 120 leading research, policy, and advocacy centers committed to improving the lives of women and girls. Harnessing the power of more than 2,000 experts in the United States and among its international affiliates, NCRW provides the latest research and information to stimulate fully informed debates, effective policies and inclusive practices. With a Corporate Circle of major companies and a Presidents Circle of leaders in higher education, the Council works in partnership with business, academic, non-profit and philanthropic organizations, to generate transformative change, both nationally and globally.

By DORCHEN LEIDHOLDT and JANE MANNING

NEW YORKERS have heard a stream of grave accusations this week that our governor tried to obstruct a domestic assault case against his aide David Johnson. But one element of this story has received less attention than it deserves: After Mr. Johnson’s girlfriend called 911 and reported that he had ripped off her clothes, thrown her against a dresser and choked her, Mr. Johnson was not even arrested.

In this, Mr. Johnson did not receive preferential treatment; the police response would likely have been the same for any defendant, whether he worked for the governor or not. The police wrote up the incident as “harassment in the second degree,” which is not even a misdemeanor but a violation, a trivial charge comparable to disorderly conduct. Incredibly, in New York, choking by compressing someone’s neck is not considered assault unless there is evidence that the victim suffered physical injury.

Advocates for battered women have been working for years to change this. Cutting off someone’s air supply is an agonizing, terrifying and life-threatening form of abuse, and New York needs a statute that makes it a crime to choke someone whether physical injury is evident or not.

Choking is often more dangerous than punching, shoving and other kinds of abuse. If an attacker applies 11 pounds of pressure for just 10 seconds, the victim can be rendered unconscious. With greater pressure, death can occur within minutes. And even after the attacker lets up, a victim can collapse and die hours or even days later because of underlying damage to the neck, or to the brain due to lack of oxygen. Ten percent of violent deaths in the United States are strangulations.
And yet choking very often leaves few or no visible signs. In a study of 100 cases of strangulation, the San Diego District Attorney’s office found that in 62 of them, police officers reported no visible injuries, and in 22 others, signs like redness or scratch marks on the neck were too minor to photograph. The study also found that when a victim’s injuries were not visible or consisted of faint redness, the police treated the attacks as trivial.

About half the states in the country have laws specifically addressing choking. But in states that have not enacted such laws, including New York, batterers have an incentive to choose choking and suffocation over other forms of attack. They often escape criminal charges and, perhaps emboldened by their impunity, choke their victims again. A 2008 study of 310 homicides in 11 American cities, published in The Journal of Emergency Medicine, found that 43 percent of women who were murdered by intimate partners had experienced at least one episode of choking before their killing.

This tragic statistic, at least, contains a kernel of hope: If we can change our criminal justice system to take choking seriously, we may be able to head off fatal attacks.
On Wednesday, State Senator Eric Schneiderman introduced legislation that would criminalize intentional choking and suffocation in our state. Under this law, choking someone into unconsciousness would be a violent felony. Abusers who terrorize their victims through choking or suffocation without causing unconsciousness or physical injury would face a lower-level felony charge.

New Yorkers looking for some good to come of the latest disgrace in our state capital can find it in Senator Schneiderman’s bill. If enacted, it would ensure that when a victim of choking calls 911, the police can arrest the attacker on serious charges befitting a vicious and dangerous crime.

Dorchen Leidholdt is the director of Sanctuary for Families’ Center for Battered Women’s Legal Services. Jane Manning is the president of the New York City chapter of the National Organization for Women.

Feminist Radio And Beyond…..

Sexual Harassment
Women’s Rights attorney and women’s rights in the workplace advocate Jack Tuckner debates the issues.

Writer Barbara Berg talks Sexism in America: Alive, Well, And Ruining Our Future. What went wrong with the women’s movement and how to fix it.

And…The Colorado Sisters of the Women’s Collective perform indigenous storytelling about females in the struggle.
The Women’s Collective covers the entire spectrum of political, cultural and intellectual issues crucial to women’s lives, from feminism and revolutionary global sisterhood to critical aspects of movement building, the mind, body and men.

As though such numbers are not already enough, the grim economic condition has contributed in worsening the crisis. Victims of domestic violence find it increasingly difficult to take steps in the right direction under this period of financial hardship.

Governor’s new Program Bill #14 R of 2009 aims to redress the situation to some extent. The Act aims to amend the “family court act, in relation to requiring attorneys for children to receive training or education in domestic violence prevention; to amend the domestic relations law, in relation to requiring the court to state on the record the domestic violence and child abuse factored into their award of custody or visitation; to amend the criminal procedure law and the family court act, in relation to orders of protection; and to amend the criminal procedure law, in relation to reporting domestic violence incidents to the supervising probation department or the division of parole.”

The new bill has six purposes. The bill would:
1. require education and training on the effects of domestic violence for court-appointed attorneys for children;
2. require courts to state on the record how established incidents of domestic violence and child abuse factored into determinations of visitation or custody;
3. authorize concurrent jurisdiction in family court for certain sex offenses;
4. provide for transmission of domestic violence incident reports involving probationers or parolees to the relevant agency as soon as practicable;
5. provide that records be made available to law enforcement when there is a conviction of the violation of harassment in the second degree against a member of the same family or household; and
6. provide for extending of an order of protection during a period of incarceration.

By Saswat Pattanayak

As job losses increasingly become a norm, so does domestic violence. For the men who lose jobs what results is frustrations targeted at family; for women, it is dual oppression – at workplace and at home.

Bad economy is simply not bad for the country, it is sad for the family members who struggle to make ends meet in an increasingly controlled state of affairs in the country – a nation left at the mercy of private capital monopolists whose latest alibis for discriminations revolve around economic depression.

With the governments at both state and federal level washing their hands off from the responsibilities by sending funds across to the very same private concerns that are at the root cause of the greatest financial debacle of recent times, people have been rendered hapless, and clueless. Their anger unable to find an organized outlet (what with lack of employee unions or emancipated communities) is more than ever being misdirected towards the people they must support: their family. And as is the unwritten rule in households in a country increasingly sexist in conduct, the women are bound to bear the most grunt.

Women form the majority of employees who lose jobs routinely, and as a result, they also fall victim to their male counterparts at work, and home. The increasing number of domestic violence cases is alarming, to say the least. Speaking to KCTV 5, Candie Daniels, director of the Rose Brooks Center, said, “Women seeking (domestic violence) services has just skyrocketed in the last three months compared to this time last year.” If ten years ago the average cases of DV charges in Kansas City was 5,000 it is more than 10,000 now.

Similarly, in Rhode Island, the situation is worsening. Rhode Island Coalition Against Domestic Violence is facing economic hardships even as the felony cases have been increasing steadily. From their 2006 data, there has been an increase of 89 percent in recent years. In 2007 there were 169 felony domestic violence cases, in 2008 the number became 208. Annually, the combined total victims of domestic violence with criminal and restraining order cases hover around 7,700.

In Oshkosh, Wisconsin, the situation is quite similar. Christine Anne Domestic Abuse Services has witnessed the average length of stay for survivors in the shelter grow from 26 days in 2008 to 35 days in 2009. In the first quarter of this year, the agency has provided 259 clients with 1,515 hours of help compared to 235 clients with 1,254 hours in the first quarter of 2008. Within last year alone (since April 2008), 1,443 possible acts of domestic violence were reported. Police responded only to 448 of those. District Attorney’s office filed charges in 666 of these case. Yet another alarming trend in just one of the many cities.

Such trends can be easily duplicated everywhere in the country. And yet, the administration is virtually silent over the issue. Instead of treating domestic violence on women as a criminal issue deeply rooted with socio-economic problems afflicting the country, what we have been hearing over the years is a chorus of sympathetic waves towards the victims. Instead of conducting bloody wars with an aim to prevent future imaginative assaults on the power structure of America, the administration will do well to look inwards and notice the war within where the male powerfuls are continuously defeating the female initiatives. At work, and at home.

You’ll soon be seeing some new billboards aimed at raising teens’ awareness about domestic violence.
The campaign put together by the state Office for the Prevention of Domestic Violence is called Coaching Boys into Men, with the purpose of getting parents to talk to their adolescent sons about respecting women.

It features a boy in a hooded sweatshirt that reads “Awaiting Instructions” — and it says “He’s watching. He’s waiting. He’ll listen.”

A total of 40 billboards will be going up around the Capital Region in the coming days.

Officials say Texas is a major destination for victims of human trafficking.

“Human trafficking is taking place everywhere in the United States,” said Walter Nguyen, executive director of Mosaic Family Services, based in Dallas. “However, Texas — and North Texas in particular — has had a disproportionate share of these cases.”

Human trafficking is defined as the enslavement of a person by another through force, fraud, coercion and abuse. The U.S. Department of State estimates that 14,500 to 17,500 people are trafficked into the country each year.

Since 2001, more than 20 percent of the identified human trafficking cases in the U.S. were located in the state of Texas, according to the Office of Refugee Resettlement.

Officials estimate that Texas is one of four states in the nation that lead the nation in human trafficking. The others states are New York, California and Florida.

The reason for the high number of known victims in Texas may be due to the state’s location and the successful law enforcement investigations of these cases, said Mr. Nguyen.

Many victims are identified as a result of raids or investigations into businesses that work with people involved in human trafficking. A number of the victims are arrested as prostitutes or illegal workers.

There is also a high rate number of domestic violence among immigrants. Some immigrant women may feel helpless because they lack communication skills, or their husbands may hold their passports.

“Domestic violence takes place in all communities, regardless of economic or social status, but those in newly arrived communities are more reluctant to report this crime for many reasons. Our outreach to these groups hopes to make people aware that they can get help,” said Mr. Nguyen.

Mosaic Family Services is a nonprofit organization dedicated to giving hope and power to immigrant survivors of domestic violence and human trafficking through legal case management, counseling and housing services.

But before this organization can help these survivors, it needs the community’s help. he needs your help.

To that end, Ebby Halliday and Mosaic Family Services will hold a 2008 Night of Hope Kickoff at 6 p.m. Jan. 26 2008 at the Idle Rich Pub, 2614 McKinney Ave. in Dallas.

This event begins the annual fundraising drive for Mosaic Family Services Inc. Tickets for the kickoff event are $50, which will be deducted from the purchase of a $150 ticket to the Night of Hope gala. The annual gala will be April 26 held at the Richardson Hotel on April 26, 2008.

For more information about the Jan. 26 kickoff or the April 26 gala, please visit www.mosaicservices.org or call Mosaic Family Services at 214-821-5383.

The keynote speaker at the Night of Hope gala in April will be Mildred Muohammad, who was once married to John Allen Muohammad, who is perhaps better known as the D.C. sniper. In 2002, John Mohammad Mr. Muhammad killed 17 allegedly killed as many as 17 people in the Washington, D.C., area and beyond in what is believed to have been a part of a plan to murder Mildred.

in what she believes was part of a plan to murder her. She will speak about her own terrifying experiences as her ex-husband’s massacre killing spree played out in the media across the nation. CHANGES OKd BY TINA. hp

“Her case is an excellent example of how extremely dangerous domestic violence abusers can be when a woman decides to leave,” Mr. Nguyen said.

“Every day in the United States, four women are murdered by their abusers. Mildred survived and has become an advocate for this issue.”

Mr. Nguyen’s organization serves between 200 and 250??conflicts w. figure below?? survivors of domestic violence from refugee and immigrant communities each year.

According to the executive director:

North Texas has one of the largest metropolitan concentrations of immigrant communities in the nation, according to DFW International, and compared to other metropolitan areas, the North Texas area lags behind in support services for these populations.

The U.S. Census reports that 1 in 5 residents of Dallas County and 1 in 6 residents of Collin County are foreign-born. The number of foreign-born residents has increased by 509% in Collin County and 152% in Dallas County between 1990 and 2003. The Asian population increased by 600% in Collin County and by 90% in Dallas County.

Domestic violence within immigrant and refugee groups is as prevalent as in the majority community, where more than 40,000 family violence reports were made in Dallas, Collin, Denton, Tarrant and Rockwall Counties in 2005.

The Texas Health and Human Services Commission reports that in 2006, 636 victims were denied family violence services due to lack of space, and 7,474 victims accessed services in the Dallas area.

According to Jennifer Perry, development associate at Mosaic, residents served by the agency at Mosaic House are primarily immigrants from Asia, Eastern Europe, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East.

Of the women and children served by the agency in 2007, In 2007, the program served 171 women and children — of whom 32 percent were African, 31 percent Hispanic, 21 percent Asian, 15 percent European/Caucasian and 1 percent Middle Eastern.

Seven of these residents were victims of human trafficking.

“The number of residents increased by 17 percent in the past year,” according to Mr. Nguyen, “and more community support is needed to meet the demand for our services.”

“Most [but not all] of the human trafficking cases in this region have involved people from either Asia or Central America,” said Mr. Nguyen.

There is no substantive reason for this, other than the victims that have been found in the area just happen to be from those regions.

However, Mr. Nguyen said there is currently a great deal of research being conducted in an attempt to learn from which countries trafficking is taking place, and the reasons for this.

“The cases that have been prosecuted thus far are not sufficient to give a clear indication of this,” said Mr. Nguyen.

“In general, those who have been trafficked are from many different areas. Mosaic is working closely with federal and local law enforcement agencies in these trafficking cases.”

LOS ANGELES — Web sites that promise to give the dirt on prospective dates abound. A guy has a roving eye? Look him up on DontDateHimGirl.com.

But a California lawmaker says the background checks can be far more serious. The lawmaker, Assemblywoman Fiona Ma, the San Francisco Democrat who is the majority whip, introduced a bill last week to create an online database of men and women convicted of domestic violence in California.

Other states like Florida have databases used by law enforcement officials. Her proposal, Ms. Ma said, would be the first available to the public.

“If you’re online, Googling and looking for information on someone you met in a bar or on MySpace, this would provide a tool for people to go and look to see if someone who is suspicious and a little creepy has a history of violence,” Ms. Ma said.

The database would log the names of domestic violence offenders convicted of a felony or two misdemeanors, dates of birth, locations of convictions and other information. Unlike public registers of sex offenders, the database would not list addresses. It would, however, indicate how to obtain a restraining order.

“The site gives people knowledge,” said Jim Hammer, a former San Francisco prosecutor who worked with Ms. Ma on the bill. “To enable people to get restraining orders is giving them the power to do something about it.”

Mr. Hammer took the database idea to Ms. Ma last year. It came to him in the late ’90s, he said, after he prosecuted Ronnie Earl Seymour in the killing of Nadga Schexnayder and her mother during a domestic dispute in 1995.

Ms. Schexnayder’s parents had suspicions about Mr. Seymour, with whom she had a child, but they did not have the tools to check his background, Mr. Hammer said. Mr. Seymour had three felony convictions for attacks on former girlfriends when he killed the two women. He was sentenced to life in prison.

“They didn’t have the means to hire a private investigator to go to courthouses and pull documents,” Mr. Hammer said. “They had feelings, but no evidence.”

The bill would impose higher fines on domestic violence offenders to pay for the Web site, which the attorney general’s office would run. Ms. Ma said that she was optimistic about its prospects for passage, but that it was too early to gauge support in the Legislature.

Ms. Ma said the measure singled out domestic violence offenses because national statistics indicated that those crimes had a high rate of recidivism.

“Domestic violence is a cycle, and it’s hard to break,” she said. “But knowledge is power, and this is public information that’s already out there. This site would make it easily accessible.”

The National Law Journal updates readers about Adriana Becerril, who has alleged perpetration of domestic violence by her ex-husband the night before she joined a new job. She is being represented by Tuckner, Sipser, Weinstock & Sipser, LLP. The article follows:

Battered workers press for rights to time off: States are passing laws mandating leave; more liability for employers.

Tresa Baldas / Staff reporter
October 8, 2007

A battered workers’ rights movement is gaining ground in the workplace, exposing employers to more liability and mandating that they do a better job to accommodate domestic abuse victims.

Lawsuits over failing to give victims time off to heal, or firing them for missing work due to domestic violence, are popping up in courts, along with a growing legislative trend mandating that employers provide leave to victims who are trying to get their lives together.

This year, Florida and Oregon became the seventh and eighth states to pass laws mandating that employers provide leave to domestic abuse victims, and keep their jobs open. California and Maine were the first to do so in 1999. Since then, six states and New York City have followed suit.

On the litigation front, a New York woman is suing a daycare center for firing her after she sought time off to recover from an assault. She is using a city law that says employers must reasonably accommodate victims of domestic abuse. Becerril v. Graham Windham, No. 15169/07 (Bronx Co., N.Y., Sup. Ct.).

“These laws are certainly a step in the right direction,” said Jack Tuckner of New York’s Tuckner, Sipser, Weinstock & Sipser,the plaintiff’s lawyer in the daycare case who believes companies are not doing enough to help domestic violence victims.

Trouble in the Bronx

Tuckner is representing Adriana Becerril, who allegedly was beaten by her ex-husband the night before she was to start her new job as director of a preschool in the Bronx. She was hospitalized after having a flower pot thrown in her face, he said, so she requested four days off to convalesce.

“And that’s when they said, ‘Don’t bother,’ Tuckner said, noting that the woman was fired. “Here one of their own needed some compassion and they saw fit to just say, ‘Don’t let the door hit your butt on the way out.’ ”

Michael Frankel of Jackson Lewis’ White Plains, N.J., office, who is representing the daycare agency in the lawsuit, was unavailable for comment. The company declined comment.

Meanwhile, management-side attorneys defended employers and their commitment to helping victims of domestic abuse.

“The employers that we represent are very concerned with the well-being of their employees. Most of them are very sympathetic to people in these situations,” said Mark E. Zelek, managing partner of the Miami office of Morgan Lewis. “A lot of the employers we represent already have personal leave and sick leave and vacation leave in place. I’m not sure an additional law was necessary.”

Zelek is referring to Florida’s new domestic leave law, which took effect in July and applies to companies with 50 or more employees. It requires that employees be allowed three days off to care for anyone in their household who is a victim of domestic abuse — whether it is the employee, a child, a relative or a friend. Whether leave is paid or not has been left to the employer’s discretion. The law also prohibits discriminating or retaliating against employees for exercising their rights.

New protected class?

Zelek said the biggest concern for employers is that the measure creates a new protected class. He said the new law exposes employers to liability, such as lost wages, benefits and legal fees. And if a worker is fired and becomes re-employed in a job with lower pay or with fewer benefits, the prior employer can also be held liable for ongoing economic losses, he added.

Zelek noted, however, that employers can request that employees exhaust all their other leave before giving them the mandatory three days.

“A lot of employers in Florida are not aware of the law,” Zelek said. “We’re advising Florida clients that they should take account of this in their handbooks and in their policies.”

In recent years, the courts have issued several opinions on the rights of domestic abuse victims in the workplace.

In Iowa, for example, a new law was established last year when a federal court ruled that an employee had the right to sue her employer for firing her the day after she obtained a protective order against her abusive boyfriend. The woman claimed she was retaliated against for obtaining the order. The case has been resolved. Greer v. Beck’s Pub & Grille, No. C03-2070 LRR (N.D. Iowa).

But a federal court in Ohio last year ruled that an employer did not have a duty to keep a job open for a woman who had to transfer to a facility in a different state to get away from an abusive partner. The court ruled that the woman was an at-will employee. Melott v. ACC Operations Inc., No. 2:05-CV-063 (S.D. Ohio).