Category Archives: Abolition Of Work

It was a difficult decision not to run again, Mayor Don Iveson told city council on September 7 while attending his last meeting.

Iveson announced back in November 2020 that he would not be running for a third term as mayor, leaving us with a 14-year legacy. Over the last decade and a half, Iveson has made a great impact on our city, though whether Edmonton will continue to follow the path Iveson has set remains to be seen. Lets take a look over the highlights of his career.

Don Iveson initially ran for council back in 2007. He ran in Ward 5 against incumbents Bryan Anderson and Mike Nickel. Despite the advantage the incumbents had, Iveson won the second seat available for Ward 5, beating out Nickel by nearly 2,000 votes. Early into his time as councillor, Iveson started working on Edmontons environmental portfolio; this later carried on into his work as mayor. During his time as councillor, Iveson attended climate change conferences and consistently showed concern for making Edmonton a greener city.

However, in my experience I have found that even after 14 years in politics, Ivesons push for environmentalism has gotten lost among the other policies he has implemented and Edmontonians often forget that environmentalism was a big part of Ivesons platform to begin with.

In 2013, Steven Mandel announced that he would not be running for mayor again. Iveson seized his opportunity to make an even bigger difference and ran for office. In October that year, Iveson won with 62 per cent of the vote.

Ivesons mayoral platform was based on sustainability of the city and ending homelessness. But in fall last year, he expressed concern over the citys struggle to achieve the 10 year plan to end homelessness citing struggles with other levels of government as part of the issue.

Ivesons mission to end homelessness was really put to the test in 2020 with the appearance of Camp Pekiwewin in Edmontons Rossdale neighbourhood. The camps population was dispersed among homeless shelters throughout the city and Iveson vowed to find permanent housing for Edmontons homeless population. That being said, the forcible abolition of the camp has made me question Ivesons sincerity on his promise to end homelessness and likely has many other young Edmontonians feeling the same way.

Though his career has been long, Iveson has impressively had only one notable controversy over the last 14 years. Back in 2015, in a tweet, Iveson speculated the shooting and death of EPS officer Daniel Woodhall may be connected to the abolition of the federal gun registry. Iveson later took the tweet down, issuing an apology.

Ivesons work to curb gun violence continued into 2021 when Justin Trudeaus government introduced a bill that would allow municipalities to ban guns within their borders rather than having a national law put in place by the federal government. Iveson voiced his concerns, maintaining the belief that municipal bans on handguns would simply not be effective unless municipalities worked together. This was also linked to his belief that a systematic approach needs to be taken in order to control drug use and organized crime, rather than each municipality dealing with it on their own.

While in office, Iveson had to face the discovery of mass graves of Indigenous children at residential schools. In response, Iveson pushed for the renaming of Grandin station. There were concerns raised about the murals in the station in 2014, which displays Vital-Justin Grandin, the stations namesake who helped administer and design Canadas residential school system. At the time, art honouring Indigenous culture was added on either side. This was proven unsatisfactory and, for the sake of reconciliation, Iveson rightly advocated for the station renaming and painting over the mural and was successful on both counts the station is now known as the Government Centre station.

The Valley Line LRT has been a defining feature of Don Ivesons career. It will be completed in two stages Valley Line Southeast and Valley Line West.

Construction for the Valley Line Southeast started in 2016 and was originally projected to be completed in 2020 but was pushed multiple times and is now set to finish in the first quarter of 2022. The construction of the Valley Line West is still projected to start in 2021. The project will ultimately make transit more efficient for transit riders, but there has been a cutback of transit routes across the city to make the buses faster. Buses avoid going through neighbourhoods and make the routes longer to ensure transit access for Edmontonians that live further away from Edmontons core. Though these cuts enabled access to transit even in the suburb communities of Edmonton, the combination of lost bus routes and the delayed LRT opening has been a source of frustration for Edmontonians which has undoubtedly cast a shadow on Ivesons time in office.

During Ivesons re-election campaign in 2017, his agenda was questioned; David Staples of the Edmonton Journal stated that Iveson has never been more popular in the city of Edmonton. But his agenda for progressive change? Theres far more doubt on that count. Concerns were voiced regarding his push for the LRT, bike accessibility, photo radar speed traps, and affordable housing. These were initiatives Iveson took in order to improve Edmontons sustainability, however, Edmontonians did not necessarily always appreciate the services that higher taxes provided.

Iveson has also been known for being a proponent of Edmontons LGBTQ2S+ community. In 2014, he attended the Mayoral Pride Brunch and in 2019 moved to ban conversion therapy, calling the practice psychological abuse. MLA Janis Irwin and MP Randy Boissonnault worked with city council to put the ban through and then went on to push the movements in their own respective levels of government.

Don Ivesons 14 years in office in municipal government have certainly been notable and he has left his mark on this city. Despite a rise in support for more populist politicians, Edmonton has elected a progressive mayor and council that look promising. It is clear that Ivesons influence will certainly not be easily erased.

Thank you for your service, Don.

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Iveson is gone, what should we remember him by? - The Gateway Online

From legalization of marijuana to abolition of the death penalty (even for murder of police), it didnt take long for the Democratic majority in the House of Delegates, aided by a Democratic governor, to dismantle sound policies.

This year, they added the unionization of public employees to their list of accomplishments. Next on their agenda will be to repeal Virginias right-to-work law, which protects employees from compulsory membership in unions. Imagine a government powerful enough to tell you that, in order to work, you must join a private organization and pay them dues.

Fortunately, we have a delegate willing to stand up to the liberal agenda of the majority party. We need to keep Bill Wiley working for us in Richmond. Please re-elect Bill Wiley and, while youre at it, lets make sure we have a strong Republican governor as well.

Dana Newcomb

Frederick County

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Letter to the editor: Democrats and unionization | Winchester Star | winchesterstar.com - The Winchester Star

Prison abolitionist and Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation founder Patrisse Cullors spoke at an event hosted by Pomona Colleges Humanities Studio on Tuesday. (Nanako Noda The Student Life)

Last Thursday, prison abolitionist and Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation founder Patrisse Cullors inspired 5C students through an interactive and personal conversation on fostering abolitionist culture.

Hosted by Pomona Colleges Humanities Studio and moderated through a conversation with Cherene Sherrard Johnson, Chair of Pomonas English department, the event centered around discussing Cullors upcoming book, An Abolitionists Handbook: 12 Steps to Changing Yourself and the World.

Cullors perception of how societal structures negatively affect the peoples interactions inspired her to write the handbook.

We live in a carceral culture, she said. Although the prisons and the jails and the surveillance and courts are these institutions that are outside of us, they have informed how we treat each other.

For Cullors, its important people focus on transforming themselves in order to then transform the world, which is why her book focuses on ways individuals can practice abolition within themselves.

We are supposed to be at the vanguard of changing systems in the world, (but) we often interact with one another through the carceral lens, Cullors said. I wanted to remind everyone, including myself, that theres a different way to be. We can get rid of every single system, and then we are still here. And those systems live inside of us.

One way to help individuals practice abolition is through collective care and prioritizing the wellbeing of people in their communities, she proposed.

How do we build an economy that is based on care? Patrisse Cullors

I think we send the wrong message to young folks and our new generation of leaders, that they have to burn themselves out, Cullors said. So the challenge is, how do we build an economy that is based on care?

Building this economy of care involves realigning how people relate to one another through important conversations, such as asking neighbors not to call the police on other community members.

Those small moments where we intervene on what we know may happen, actually create more room for love and care and dignity, Cullors said. Which is truly what abolitionist culture is about.

Cullors also remarked on the importance of advocating for abolition in the ways with which people felt the most comfortable. Specifically, she highlighted the role of artists in fostering the culture of abolition, something Cullors has personal experiences with as an artist.

I think that artists are often left out of the movement conversation, or sort of invisible in the movement conversation, Cullors said. And I think thats unfortunate because artists, in my opinion, are going to be able to usher in abolition, because we are the dreamers, the visionaries, and were creating new worlds.

Cullors then broadened the scope of her abolitionist conversation with Sherrard Johnson, looking at principles of restorative justice such as how to hold governments and institutions accountable for the harm they induce.

Every community has to have its own answer. Cullors said. Through an abolitionist lens, its not relying on police and prisons and courts and surveillance.

Additionally, she underlined the challenges of collectivizing people and of succession plans in social movements.

I always think that you should be planning for the next generation, Cullors said. Because the next generation is going to see things that you didnt see, know things that you dont know. And theyre going to evolve [the movement].

After Cullors and Sherrard-Johnsons conversation, the conference moved on to a 40-minute Q&A, where 7C students some of them members of the Claremont Colleges Prison Abolition Collective asked Cullors questions about her work, the abolitionist movement and ways to find joy and motivation in activism.

Cullors answered participants questions with personal and thorough advice, relating them to her own experiences in her 20 years fighting for abolition. Her responses inspired students to share personal anecdotes about activism in their own communities.

She particularly encouraged students to be involved in movements in the ways that felt best to them based on their current situations.

I dont think you hang onto a movement, Cullors told a student. I think you stay in it. And you find your ways to be inside of it that make the most sense for the time, place and condition [you are in].

She also reassured many students who talked about their struggles with maintaining a sense of direction in the movement or feeling as if they sometimes have to resort to a more passive approach.

As abolitionists, were not going to snap our fingers, and then the whole thing comes crumbling down, Cullors said. But there are ways where you chip away at it. For example, body cameras and police training does not chip away at it But defunding, reallocating resources, putting them into community needs and social services [do] We didnt get rid of it all the way. But were getting close.

Moreover, Cullors emphasized the importance of preserving a movements integrity while working under oppressive structures and of staying in a movements work even when it was not trending in order to be prepared when the movement returned to the mainstream.

Movements never die but the perception of them changes based on whos leading that megaphone, Cullors said. But we are always here.

Related

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Patrisse Cullors speaks on abolition, art, creating new worlds at Pomona event - The Student Life

For the past year, Yale scholars, librarians, New Haven community members, and student researchers have been digging through Yales own past for a deeper understanding of the universitys historical relationship with slavery and its legacy.

During a three-day academic conference starting Oct. 28, experts from across Yale and the nation will discuss what theyve learned so far, including new insights into the construction of Connecticut Hall, an iconic Old Campus structure built in part by enslaved Africans, and the reconciliationist approach to Yales Civil War memorial in Woolsey Hall.

Open to the public, the online conference, Yale & Slavery in Historical Perspective, is the latest in a series of events led by the Yale and Slavery Working Group (YSWG), which was convened by Yale President Peter Salovey in October 2020, to investigate Yales historic entanglements and associations with slavery, the slave trade, and abolition. Salovey will deliver opening remarks.

To register for the conference, which will be conducted over Zoom, or to see a full schedule of events, visit the conference website. A YouTube playlist of video presentations associated with the Yale & Slavery Research Project, including synopses of some of the research to date and student perspectives, is also available.

It is important we shine a light into every concealed corner of our past.

President Peter Salovey

Salovey has described the Yale & Slavery project part of an ongoing national discussion about racism and discrimination as an urgent reckoning with the universitys history, and an important opportunity to analyze, understand, and publicly communicate it.

Like many of Americas oldest institutions, Yale has seldom, if ever, recognized the labor, the experiences, and the contributions of enslaved people and their descendants to our universitys history or our present, Salovey said. For generations, we have looked away from what is in plain sight.But now we are acknowledging that slavery, the slave trade, and abolition are part of Yales history.

It is important we shine a light into every concealed corner of our past, because moving forward requires an honest reckoning with our history, and because the purpose of our university is to create, preserve, and disseminate knowledge. The fundamental work we all share applies as much to Yales past as anyones.

The conference is hosted by the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, part of the MacMillan Center at Yale. Founded in 1998, the Gilder Lehrman Center is the first such center in the world to study such international historical questions.

Topics during the conference will include the universitys 18th-century theological roots; the economics of slavery-created wealth; the place of Southern slaveholders at Yale during its first two centuries; medical and scientific legacies of race at Yale; forces of abolition at the university; the history of labor in building the campus; and why the inclusion of Confederate veterans was central to the purpose of the universitys Civil War memorial when it was created in 1915.

Following Saloveys introduction Thursday, the discussions will begin with a keynote conversation on the topic Universities, Slavery, and Memory featuring David W. Blight, chair of the YSWG, Sterling Professor of History, and director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at the MacMillan Center at Yale; Elizabeth Alexander 84, president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and a former Yale faculty member; and former dean of Yale College Jonathan Holloway Ph.D. 95, now president of Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Both Alexander and Holloway, in their writing and leadership, have been crucial voices on these issues.

President Salovey has described the Yale & Slavery project as an urgent reckoning with the universitys history.

Other panels will include conversations about slavery and the university; slavery and the economic landscape of colonial and 19th-century Connecticut; and slavery, religion, and Yale. View the full calendar.

During a discussion on Finding Slavery in the Archives, research team leaders will present and discuss findings emerging from YSWGs extensive archival work, focusing on Yales involvement with the institution of slavery, its abolition in the U.S., and how this history is commemorated. Crystal Feimster, associate professor of African American studies, history, and American studies at Yale, and a member of YSWG, will moderate the discussion.

Presentations will include:

Yale, Rum, and Slavery by Teanu Reid, a doctoral candidate in African American studies and history at Yale and a research assistant for YSWG, who will discuss archival research findings documenting slave labor in the building of Connecticut Hall and 18th-century donations to the college by slaveholders and by members of the Connecticut assembly with ties to sugar-producing plantations in the West Indies.

YSWG research assistant Steven Rome 20, now a teacher at New Havens Cold Spring School, will share his findings about the design of Yales Civil War memorial, dedicated in 1915, which honored both Yale Union and Confederate soldiers. He will discuss archival materials related to the memorial as well as opposing views about the design from that period that were not included the archives.

Ph.D. candidate in history Bennet Parten will speak on Reading the Archive Around the 1831 Negro College, focusing on an unsuccessful attempt to build a college for Black men in New Haven in 1831.

Yale University archivist Michael Lotstein will address Symbolic Annihilation: Issues in Modern Archival Cataloguing, exploring how modern archival descriptive practices aim to help uncover the history of under-documented or marginalized peoples within Yales archives.

During a luncheon breakout session on Friday, Courtney Martin, director of the Yale Center for British Art, and Edward Town, the centers head of collections information and access, will discuss a circa-1719 painting owned by the center that depicts a child of African descent pouring wine for Elihu Yale, an early and prominent university benefactor. Martin and Town will share what is known about the enslaved child and about Elihu Yales connection to slavery.

On Saturday, the conference resumes with expert discussions about race, art, and iconography at Yale, and about the ways in which ideologies of racial differences and accompanying social hierarchies were constructed in the fields of medicine and science at the university.

The conference concludes with a roundtable discussion moderated by Blight on Race, Slavery, and Yales Construction of Its Memory. A panel of scholars will address the way universities and other institutions face their past or present engagements with racial ideologies and practices, with a focus on how Yale has forged its own historical memory over time.

Presenters will also share ideas for how Yale and other universities can move forward.

The Yale & Slavery Working Group aims to release a full report of research findings and recommendations by the middle of next year.

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Conference to explore Yale's history with slavery - Yale News

MINNEAPOLIS Days after a police officer murdered George Floyd, protesters gathered outside Mayor Jacob Freys home demanding that the Minneapolis Police Department be abolished. The mayor said no. The crowd responded with jeers of Shame!

On Tuesday, nearly a year and a half since Mr. Floyds death thrust Minneapolis into the center of a fervent debate over how to prevent police abuse, voters in the city will have a choice: Should the Minneapolis Police Department be replaced with a Department of Public Safety? And should Mr. Frey, who led the city when Mr. Floyd was killed and parts of Minneapolis burned, keep his job?

Minneapolis became a symbol of all that was wrong with American policing, and voters now have the option to move further than any other large city in rethinking what law enforcement should look like. But in a place still reeling from the murder of Mr. Floyd and the unrest that followed, residents are deeply divided over what to do next, revealing just how hard it is to change policing even when most everyone agrees there is a problem.

Were now known worldwide as the city that murdered George Floyd and then followed that up by tear-gassing folks who were mourning, said Sheila Nezhad, who decided to run for mayor after working as a street medic during the demonstrations, and who supports the proposal to replace the Police Department. The message of passing the amendment is this isnt about just good cops or bad cops. This is about creating safety by changing the entire system.

Many residents have a dim view of the Minneapolis Police Department, which before Mr. Floyds death had made national headlines for the 2015 killing of Jamar Clark and the 2017 killing of Justine Ruszczyk. In recent weeks, a Minneapolis officer was charged with manslaughter after a deadly high-speed chase and, in a separate case, body camera video emerged showing officers making racist remarks and seeming to celebrate hitting protesters with nonlethal rounds. A poll by local media outlets last month found that 33 percent of residents had favorable opinions of the police while 53 percent had unfavorable views.

Despite those misgivings, the overwhelmingly Democratic city is split over how to move forward. Many progressive Democrats and activists are pushing to reinvent the governments entire approach to safety, while moderate Democrats and Republicans who are worried about increases in crime say they want to invest in policing and improve the current system. In the same poll last month, 49 percent of residents favored the ballot measure, which would replace the Police Department with a Department of Public Safety, while about 41 percent did not.

The divisions extend to the top of the Democratic power structure in Minnesota. Representative Ilhan Omar and Keith Ellison, the state attorney general, support replacing the Police Department. Their fellow Democrats in the Senate, Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith, oppose it, as does Mayor Frey.

I know to my core that we have problems, said Mr. Frey, who said his message of improving but not defunding the police had resonated with many Black voters, but not with white activists. I also know to my core that we need police officers.

Since Mr. Floyds killing, many large cities, Minneapolis included, have invested more money in mental health services and experimented with dispatching social workers instead of armed officers to some emergency calls. Some departments scaled back minor traffic stops and arrests. And several cities cut police budgets amid the national call to defund, though some have since restored funding in response to rising gun violence and shifting politics.

In the days after Mr. Floyds death, as protests erupted across the country, Minneapolis became the center of a push among progressive activists to defund or abolish the police. A veto-proof majority of the City Council quickly pledged to disband the Police Department. But that initial effort to get rid of the police force sputtered, and defund the police became a political attack line for Republicans.

If the ballot measure passes next week, there would soon be no Minneapolis Police Department. The agency that would replace it would focus on a public health response to safety, with more City Council oversight and a new reporting structure. And though almost everyone expects the city would continue employing armed police officers, there would no longer be a required minimum staffing level. The ballot language says the new Department of Public Safety could include licensed peace officers (police officers), if necessary.

Supporters of the measure, which would amend the City Charter, have largely steered away from the defund language, and there is little agreement on what the amendment might mean in practice. Some see it is a first step toward the eventual abolition of the police, or a way to shrink the role of armed officers to a small subset of emergencies.

But other supporters of the amendment, including Kate Knuth, a mayoral candidate, say they would actually add more officers to a new Public Safety Department to make up for large numbers who have resigned or gone on leave since Mr. Floyds murder.

Its clear people want to trust that we have enough officers to do the work we need them to do, Ms. Knuth, a former state lawmaker, said. But the goal is public safety. Not a specific number of police.

Concerns about police misconduct persist in Minneapolis: This year, the city has fielded more than 200 complaints.

But worries about crime also are shaping much of the conversation, and even as Minneapolis voters weigh replacing the department, city officials have proposed increasing the police budget by $27.6 million, or 17 percent, essentially restoring earlier cuts. At least 78 people have been killed in the city this year, and 83 people were killed last year, the most since the 1990s.

Minneapolis is in a war zone this is a war going on where your kids are not safe, said Sharrie Jennings, whose 10-year-old grandson was shot and severely wounded in April while being dropped off at a family members house. We need more police.

For his part, the police chief, Medaria Arradondo, has urged voters to reject the amendment, saying it fails to provide a clear sense of what public safety would really look like if the Police Department were to vanish.

I was not expecting some sort of robust, detailed, word-for-word plan, Chief Arradondo said in a news conference this week. But at this point quite frankly I would take a drawing on a napkin.

Some Black leaders have cast the amendment as the work of well-intentioned but misguided progressive white residents whose views are shaped by the relatively safe neighborhoods where they live. About 60 percent of Minneapolis residents are white.

AJ Awed, another of Mr. Freys challengers, said he agreed that policing in Minneapolis needed to be overhauled and that the current system was prejudiced against Black residents. But he said he resented seeing white residents angered by the death of Mr. Floyd rushing to get rid of the Police Department, describing that as cover because you feel guilty because of what you saw.

We are very much sensitive to the delegitimization of our security apparatus, said Mr. Awed, who is part of the citys large Somali American community, and whose family sought refuge in the United States after a breakdown of public safety. Policing is a fundamental structure in society.

Not everyone sees it that way.

Minneapolis remains deeply shaken by what happened over the past 18 months: The video of Officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on Mr. Floyds neck. The looting and arson and police crackdown that followed. The months of boarded windows and helicopters flying overhead. Then the trial this year of Mr. Chauvin, who was convicted of murder.

For some, trust in law enforcement has been frayed beyond repair.

Demetria Jones, 18, a student at North Community High School, said she planned to vote for the amendment and had become more wary of officers since Mr. Floyds death.

I didnt realize how much they didnt care about us and didnt care about our lives until I watched that video, Ms. Jones said.

Among Black residents, who make up about 19 percent of the population, the amendment fight has laid bare a generational divide. Many older leaders, some veterans of the civil rights era, are opposed, while younger activists were largely responsible for the campaign that collected signatures to put the amendment to a vote.

Nekima Levy Armstrong, a civil rights lawyer and the former head of the Minneapolis chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., opposes the amendment, saying the language is too vague.

When you think about the history of policing in the city of Minneapolis and how hard so many of us have fought over the years to bring awareness, to push for policy changes, Ms. Levy Armstrong said, it doesnt make sense to me at this point that there is not a written plan.

One evening last week, Matthew Thompson, 33, stood holding his baby in Farwell Park in North Minneapolis. He had been an early supporter of proposals to defund the police and had fully expected to vote for the amendment. But when he recently dropped his young son at day care, he learned that the car windows of one of the employees had been shattered by a stray bullet, and he had been hearing more gunshots at night, he said.

All of it left him uncertain about how he will vote on Tuesday. Im still really conflicted on this, he said.

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The Fate of the Minneapolis Police Is in Voters Hands - The New York Times

Prime Minister Pedro Snchez has committed to abolishing prostitution in Spain via a comprehensive law that he is planning to present before his term in office ends. Due to the way that the sector operates and the links it has to organized crime, prostitution has become a destabilizing factor, but above all else, it represents a dramatic situation in the center of societies and for the very human condition.

The terrible rite of passage that used to exist when so many fathers would celebrate their sons coming of age by taking them whoring has now disappeared, but prostitution has become a genuine mass tragedy. Mafia networks control the trafficking of women who are distributed in hangers where they live under lock and key, or in macro-brothels or apartments that move from place to place when they are detected and where exploitation knows no limits, with massive profits for the pimps who trade in human flesh.

In Spain, awareness about this problem has grown in several ways, from public debates where differences of opinion make themselves heard, to debates within the feminist movement with different solutions (ones that are often incompatible) to deal with the problem and even movies and TV shows that show in a new light the drastic problem that exists in the background: available estimates suggest that 80 to 90% of prostitution is controlled by pimps.

Escaping the social hypocrisy that is covering up, whitewashing or trivializing that appalling reality is a crucial step. Spain occupies the top spot in Europe and the third in the world (behind Puerto Rico and Thailand) when it comes to the consumption of prostitution, with an estimated volume of business of 5 million a day, according to figures from the Equality Ministry. Other estimates put the figure at 4 billion a year.

The prostitution industry has seen explosive growth that has taken advantage of being on the margins of the law, sometimes with the blurry complicity of those who should be prosecuting it. The vast majority of prostitutes in Spain are now foreign women without papers, having been recruited in many instances with false job offers and with many forced to prostitute themselves subject to death threats aimed at them or their families. Other factors at play are their extreme vulnerability due to poverty, social exclusion and pure and simple exploitation. No other sector suffers such a complete lack of escape from blackmail, extortion, intimidation and physical isolation.

Nearly all European countries have sought some way to deal with this problem, but none has found a comprehensive solution probably because none exists. In Germany, it is permitted and regulated, but the same authorities recognize that after reforms in 2017, which saw controls against the trafficking of women toughened up, the clandestine prostitution that is sustained by the exploitation of immigrants grew. Nor have countries that opted for an outright ban managed to eradicate prostitution, such as in Sweden, which has driven down consumption by punishing the client, but has seen the rates of violence against the women rise.

The debate that has been opened by the prime ministers proposal can serve to set non-negotiable criteria for a society that is adamant about the rights of women, based on that societys democratic decency, and without excessive moralizing airs nor censorial puritanism. The immense majority of Spanish society likely shares their rejection of the pimp who deals in human flesh, just as the customers of these brothels, apartments and macro-brothels distributed throughout Spain are incompatible with democratic civil standards.

Debate will have to determine how mafia networks can be effectively pursued, if clients should be punished, and what kind of options can be offered to women

Clients may overlook the horror that is behind the lives of the women that they visit, but that does not exonerate them from their role in feeding an industry of miserable exploitation. If these women have no other options, the closure of these places using the law exposes them to a new kind of vulnerability if they are relocated via prostitution networks in other countries.

That lowest common denominator could arrive based on the different current positions ranging from total abolition to regulation. The Finnish intermediate model combines regulation and abolition with the objective of only punishing the client when dealing with women who are victims of trafficking, while the total abolition option with Sweden and France as the key protagonists does not punish the women and offers ways out for prostitutes, instead going after and prosecuting both pimps and clients. This is the model that the governing Socialist Party voted in favor of at its 39th Federal Convention and that has now been ratified, after having promised in 2018 to legislate against human trafficking and sexual exploitation.

The very small proportion of women who work as prostitutes of their own accord, if indeed that phrase can be used in an acceptable manner, allege that this solution would force them underground given that it punishes their clients. In any case, any debate will have to determine how mafia networks can be effectively pursued, if the client of any kind of prostitution should be punished, and what kind of options can be offered to women who manage to break the chain in terms of their future lives and employment.

What cannot continue is the pretense that this problem does not exist. Modifying habits and promoting sex education that avoids the monetization of women are noble objectives, but in the meantime, tens of thousands of women are living devoid of even the most basic protection: they are the ones who are in urgent need of swift action.

English version by Simon Hunter.

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Prostitution: How to regulate its abolition - EL PAS in English

Civil War nurse, social justice warrior and even, briefly, resident of a commune: Most people know Louisa May Alcott as the author of Little Women, but she was so much more.

This quintessential author from 19th-century New England is the subject of Binghamton University English Professor Liz Rosenbergs latest book, Scribbles, Sorrows and Russet Leather Boots: The Life of Louisa May Alcott. Debuting this fall, it has received strong advance reviews from Kirkus, Booklist, BookTrib and Book riot, and is soon scheduled for an audio release.

Rosenberg draws on surviving journals and letters for a deep look into Alcott, a surprisingly complex figure with a large body of work. In addition to her famous series on the March family, she also wrote more than a dozen other works for young readers, some serious and some frivolous, as well as three long essays that Rosenberg is currently collecting into a special edition book for a British publisher. Hospital Sketches, a book-length essay, is a lightly fictionalized account of Alcotts time as a Civil War hospital nurse.

Her duties began days before a particularly grim battle, so she jumped into the hardest kind of nursing work with very little preparation. It was as a war nurse that she came down with typhoid pneumonia and very nearly died, Rosenberg said. The effects of mercury poisoning from her cure dogged her with ill health for the rest of her life.

Louisa May Alcott in 1870 Image Credit: United States Library of Congress.That essay was her first literary success, and featured the same combination of humor, pathos and believability evidenced in her later popular works. In addition to her published writing, she kept a life-long journal and wrote reams of letters, including missives to newspapers to announce her fiery stands on abolition and womens rights.

Louisas parents, Abbey and Bronson, were highly unusual: Bronson a prominent Transcendentalist philosopher whose theories left a lasting mark on education, Abbey one of the first social workers in America who also ran an employment agency for the poor. While Louisa and her three sisters adored their parents, their home life was highly unstable and the future author moved more than 20 times before she turned 18.

Picture old-school hippies who home-school their children; allow them all kinds of liberties but also fail to provide for their material needs, to the point where the family sometimes existed on bread and water; lived in a commune (which fell apart) in broken down houses and tenement apartments, Rosenberg recounted.

As a child, Rosenberg had two favorite books: Alcotts Little Women and L.M. Montgomerys Anne of Green Gables, both of which she has read at least 10 times. Alcott was the subject of the very first biography she ever read: Louisa May Alcott, Girl of Old Boston.

Two years ago, she published a highly-praised biography on Montgomery called House of Dreams: The Life of L.M. Montgomery. That book has already been translated into four languages. A book about Alcott was an inevitable next step.

Writing Montgomerys biography was emotionally draining, in light of her sad, troubled end by overdose, possibly a suicide. Unlike the brilliant yet edgy Montgomery, Rosenberg describes Alcott as other-regarding: someone who put family and friends ahead of herself, and gave away her earnings whether she was rich or poor.

That care extended to the larger world, as well.

She was a fierce, dedicated social justice warrior, a democratic socialist who believed in equal rights for all, regardless of race, gender, background or income, Rosenberg said. Shes a model human being, so her story was and is completely uplifting and inspiring. Shes very much like Jo (from Little Women) only nicer!

During the course of her research, Rosenberg discovered some surprises. While digging through original manuscript pages in the Concord Public Library, she came across an early version of Little Women that included a passionate love scene between Jo and Laurie. And there were striking episodes in the authors life: when teenage Louisa secretly serenaded Ralph Waldo Emerson until an owl spooked her, marriage proposals and less savory ones from her employer, plus a lost fortnight in Paris with a young Polish admirer named Ladislaw.

Writing biography is detective work. You have to be stubborn, persistent and non-judgmental, Rosenberg said. Let the material come to you; dont try to narrow it down into one idea or pigeon-hole the characters. Thats a great challenge in life as in art.

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More than 'Little Women': New book tells the story of Louisa May Alcott | Binghamton News - Binghamton University

TSL sat down with Angela Davis between her engagements this week to learn more about what was on her mind as she assumed the Ena H. Thompson Distinguished Lectureship. (Anna Choi The Student Life)

Activist, philosopher and scholar Angela Davis spent this week at Pomona College, visiting classes and delivering insight as the history departments 2021 Ena H. Thompson Distinguished Lecturer.

An icon in the struggles for abolition and Black liberation, Davis path first crossed the Claremont Colleges in 1975 when her engagement to lead a class at what was then the Claremont Black Studies Center caused an eruption of outrage and ultimately forced her to teach exclusively on weekends to minimize Miss Daviss appearance on campus, one administrator said at the time.

In between her engagements and two Bridges Auditorium lectures A Revolutionary Life and Radical Agendas and Possible Futures TSL sat down with Davis to learn more about her life in activism and whats on her mind today.

TSL: We can start with your relationship with academia. Between UCLA and the Claremont Colleges, academic institutions havent always been particularly receptive to your politics. What do you find valuable about academia that inspires you to keep working in those spaces despite the way theyve treated you in the past?

Angela Davis: As it turns out, I have spent the majority of my life in academia whether as a student or as a professor. I taught here on this campus in 1975, I believe it was, after UCLA. The philosophy department at UCLA had offered me a position. And in response to that, the then-Governor of California Ronald Reagan made the announcement that I would never teach in a University of California institution again.

So youre right that it hasnt been a habitable space for me in one sense and in another sense it has been. I look at academia as an arena of struggle that is similar to other arenas of struggle. Colleges and universities are the spaces where one encounters generations of young people who are seeking to expand their knowledge about the world. And I was initially inspired to do what Im doing now by my time in college and as a graduate student. Because after all, I think that ultimately we are struggling for a better world for everyone, which includes a world where people are able to explore their ideas, as well as to satisfy their material needs.

TSL: So, you see direct action organizing and work in academia as things that can work concurrently?

Davis: Absolutely. I think that, regardless of whether people are professional academics, that intellectual level is absolutely essential to the movement. And I think sometimes theres anti-intellectualism in the movement, but as a matter of fact, there are many really phenomenal intellectuals who never had the kind of official preparation that the university offers. In general, I think that knowledge is important, as well as the suffering I often always insist on, which is something that anthropologists call the epistemology of praxis. So whether the intellectual is trained at a university or trained through practice, that is absolutely an essential aspect of struggling for freedom.

TSL: You spoke of your time as a college student and how it was an influential source of inspiration for your lifes work. Where did you look as a college student that inspired you to take the path youve taken? And how can students do that today?

AD: Ive come to believe that people should follow their own passion. And they should try to figure out how what theyre passionate about can further collective goals. The college, the university, is a place where one gets to reflect, to read broadly. Hopefully, if there is an emphasis on interdisciplinary learning, on the humanities especially. Hopefully, students discover what they are most passionate about. And I discovered when I was in college that I was very passionate about ideas, about literature, history, philosophy, and eventually I came to focus on philosophy.

Philosophy as an engagement with the world, philosophy as critical theory, philosophy as raising the kinds of questions that can help us to transform the world. So I found that, and Im very fortunate that I discovered that at a rather young age. And I still try to follow my passions. But I also try to make them relevant to social change and to the radical understandings of the world.

TSL: Definitely. So, in terms of students working right now you said in a recent New York Times interview that youre ultimately optimistic about the future of activism in the U.S. Could you talk a bit about what you see today that inspires that for you?

AD: Well, Ive actually been optimistic for a very long time. Optimistic, not in the sense of assuming that theres pie in the sky, you know, not ungrounded optimism, but a kind of hope that is generated by people coming together, standing together and struggling. And I think that Ive had that hope since I was a child growing up in the most segregated city in the country, as I always point out. And it took me a long time to recognize that to a very great extent I owe it to my mother for encouraging us all, my siblings and myself, to imagine different futures.

Growing up under those circumstances, there was so much that was barred to us. And Im so thankful that she always knew to say that this is not right, things are not organized in the way they should be, and that one day things will be different. So I learned as a really young child to try to imagine a world that was different, even as I inhabited that world of racial segregation and the Ku Klux Klan and police violence, and so forth. So I think its a kind of hope that, as Mariame Kaba points out, its a kind of hope thats really a discipline. Its hope that is crafted and nurtured. And its that hope that is passed down to the next generation. And so when you think about it, were the recipient of generations of activists who have refused to give up and always held hope for the future.

TSL: So, to the point of students finding their place in activism, what could educators and academic institutions be doing to create those spaces for students and sustain that sort of environment?

AD: The challenge, I think, is to guarantee that students acquire the capacity to raise questions. And as far as Im concerned, that is the very heart of education, not only teaching students how to conduct research and acquire information, but what we do with it. So it seems to me that the most crucial aspect of education is teaching and encouraging students how to constantly engage in that process of questioning. And that involves also questioning those things we take for granted.

I always point out the gifts that the trans movement has offered the larger struggle for social justice. What does it mean to question that which seems to absolutely constitute the very foundation of our knowledge? Gender has served that purpose. And to question that, means that we can also question other foundational but oftentimes absolutely unrecognized aspects of our lives.

TSL: Lets pivot to 2020, and the sort of collective awakening that happened following the murder of George Floyd. Could you speak to what it was like for you, both in your work and personally, to see that surge of activist sentiment after having worked for these goals for your entire career?

AD: As far as Im concerned, this period has been the most interesting era, this conjuncture, if I put it that way, the coming together of the pandemic and recognition regarding structural racism, especially with respect to Black and indigenous people. And the lynching of George Floyd, precisely because of that conjunction, compelled people to recognize the structural and systemic character of racism in the police department, in prisons, in the university, in health institutions.

And the fact that some of us have been calling for this for decades and decades and decades, the fact that this kind of collective coming-to-awareness occurred is proof of the importance of doing the kind of organizing that weve done, and the need to have a long view. You may not see the consequences of that work within five years or 10 or 20 or 30 years. It may take half of a century before it really begins to make sense, before the message begins to circulate in the way that it has. And, like many of my comrades and people with whom Ive worked over the years around the issue of abolition, it never occurred to any of us that abolition would enter the mainstream in our lifetime. I mean, we I think we always thought it would. But we could not imagine a moment like this, that so suddenly it would begin to make sense.

And I can remember in the 1970s or 1980s, the almost universal response was, You must be out of your mind. So its been exciting. And I think that its also important to look at what is happening now, that you dont see millions of people in the streets, because this is the time when change gets incorporated into institutional structures. There was a German student activist named Rudi Dutschke. When he touched on this, he added, back in the 60s when he was a student leader in German I did my graduate work in Germany he talked about the long march through institutions. It seems to me that the value of that long march through institutions is being revealed in what has happened over the past year.

TSL: Youve talked about this spike in activism that weve seen recently. Looking at history it can feel like these surges come in waves, but activists and organizers arent stopping their work in between those events. How can organizers be sure that their work remains elevated as that energy subsides? How can they sustain that collective consciousness?

AD: We were talking about before, one never knows when these moments are going to emerge. That conjuncture in 2020 could never have been predicted, no one could have predicted it. But if people had not been consistently organizing, consistently doing the work on campuses and workplaces, in our community, all of those millions of people who were driven out into the streets would never have encountered those ideas. They would not even be familiar with them.

So one does the work precisely to be able to seize the time when it arrives. The change often happens in less glamorous ways. So I think what is important is to continue to do that wherever you are, whether youre on a campus, whether you are a healthcare institution, whether you are in a union. Continue to push for more radical agendas. And eventually there may come a moment when everything clicks and it comes together. If you dont do the work, if that moment arrives, you will not be able to take advantage of it.

TSL: To that point how reception to those ideas isnt always glamorous: A lot of young organizers face the criticism that language like abolish the police and abolish prisons is incendiary, and will alienate people from the cause. Im curious as to your thoughts on reconciling the need to work through institutions while not diluting the potency of your message to get there.

AD: I guess its a kind of balancing act. When I use the term radical, Im referring to the etymological meaning, which is to get to the root. Sometimes, many times, ideas emerge before they are ready to be digested by the mainstream. And if one does not continue to insist upon them there will never come a time.

Even though sometimes it can feel lonely, I think its really important not to dilute ones ideas to the point where their radical edge is gone. But this is not to say that one screams in peoples faces. I think its important to be able to engage in the kinds of conversations that will encourage people to think more deeply. But the other thing is that this has not only been an era of rising consciousness regarding racism, but also gender issues. And having just finished a collaborative book called Abolition. Feminism. Now., I think thats an important part of the picture and an important reason why were seeing these radical exhibitions of social consciousness. It has to do with the fact that theres a global consciousness of heteropatriarchy, and weve seen the rise of women.

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

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Q&A: Angela Davis on activism, optimism and the future of organizing - The Student Life

The child welfare system disproportionately harms families headed by parents with disabilities.

Activists and scholars are increasingly calling for the abolition of the carceral state after the police killings of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and numerous other people of color and the subsequent 2020 uprisings. They are also increasingly demanding that the child welfare system, often referred to as the family policing system, be abolished.

Nearly twenty years ago, in her revolutionary book, Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare, Dorothy Roberts, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, declared that the United States must finally abolish what we now call child protection and replace it with a system that really promotes childrens welfare.

Building off Professor Robertss groundbreaking work, in a forthcoming paper, I argue that the only way to achieve justice for parents with disabilities and their children is to abolish the child welfare system.

Each year, the child welfare system traumatizes and separates millions of marginalized families, including parents with disabilities and their children. Indeed, in 2019, the child welfare system investigated more than 3 million families and separated approximately 430,000 children from their parents.

Notably, two-thirds of the cases in which children were separated from their parents involved allegations of neglect, not abuse, which is often conflated with poverty. Thus, most of these families could have been spared child welfare system involvement if they had access to adequate supports and resources.

The disproportionate rate of child welfare system involvement in families headed by parents with disabilities is striking. Although children of parents with disabilities comprise only 9 percent of the nations youth, they make up 19 percent of the children in foster care.

The National Council on Disabilityan independent federal agency that advises the President and U.S. Congress on disability policydescribed the child welfare systems bias against parents with disabilities as persistent, systemic, and pervasive.

Similarly, the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services have stated that the child welfare systems discriminatory policies and practices toward parents with disabilities are long-standing and widespread.

The injustices that parents with disabilities and their children continue to experience are, in part, due to ableist provisions of the child welfare systems federal and state regulatory and funding policies. For example, the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 (ASFA) imposes a 15-month clock on families, which means that states may move forward with the termination of parental rights if a child has been removed from their home for 15 of the last 22 months.

Research shows, however, that it is often impossible for parents with disabilities to comply with ASFAs stringent timelines because locating and securing appropriate supports often takes extensive time. Examples of such supports include in-home training for parents, adaptive parenting equipment, respite services, and mental health treatment. ASFA also promotes adoption through financial incentives to states, resulting in staggering numbers of family separations.

Moreover, ASFA authorizes child welfare agencies to bypass the provision requiring agencies to make reasonable efforts to reunify families and instead to terminate parental rights if the child has been subjected to aggravated circumstances, which some states have interpreted to include parental disability. In other words, some states legally forgo providing reasonable efforts to reunify disabled parents and their children and proceed with termination of parental rights.

In addition, two-thirds of state child welfare laws include a parents disability as grounds for the termination of parental rights, meaning that a disability label can be used to demonstrate a parents unfitness.

Notably, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has been ineffective at preventing the child welfare system from discriminating against parents with disabilities. In another article, I analyzed 2,064 appellate termination of parental rights cases involving mothers with disabilities and found that the ADA was only raised in 6 percent of the decisions and only applied in less than 2 percent of the opinions.

In addition, interviews with parents with disabilities, their attorneys, and child welfare workers suggest that there are significant barriers to compliance with and enforcement of the ADA. So, even the far-reaching ADA has not stopped the child welfare system from unnecessarily interfering in the lives of parents with disabilities and their children.

Regrettably, the striking injustices experienced by parents with disabilities and their children are not surprising. As I have previously argued, the child welfare system is not ableist out of happenstance but rather is ableist by design. From institutionalization to forced sterilization to marriage restriction laws, the United States has enacted laws and policies aimed at prohibiting people with disabilities from creating and maintaining families.

Likewise, early child welfare laws and policies focused on good versus bad parents, with parents with disabilities always considered the latter. And, although early laws and policies focused on keeping families together, they carved out exceptions for family preservation in cases of bad parents. Today, those beliefs manifest in contemporary child welfare system laws and policies that disproportionately harm parents with disabilities and their children.

The child welfare system cannot be fixed because it is, in reality, not broken. Indeed, it is doing exactly what it is intended to do: oppress marginalized families, including those with parents with disabilities.

Accordingly, the only way to achieve justice for these families is to abolish the child welfare system and reimagine methods of providing non-punitive supports and resources. Such efforts must recognize and respond to the needs of parents with disabilities and their children, such as by ensuring economic well-being, investing in accessible supports, ending surveillance of families, and providing high-quality legal representation for those entangled in the system. Most importantly, all legal and policy responses must be led by those most impacted by the current child welfare system, including parents with disabilities. The goal must be to create a world in which the child welfare system is no longer deemed necessary.

Ultimately, the laws and policies that result in the child welfare systems injustices must be radically transformed from the roots on upward. Simply reforming the system is not enough. The time to act is nowwe cannot wait any longer.

Robyn M. Powell is a visiting assistant professor at Stetson University College of Law.

This essay is part of a five-part series, entitledRegulation and Disability Rights.

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Justice for Parents with Disabilities and Their Children - The Regulatory Review

When I was 9 years old, my parents separated and then divorced. When I was 15, I announced to my mother that I no longer would go to church.

Apparently, in doing so, I was living out a common phenomenon. As marriage declines, so does religious belief, John Van Epp and J.P. De Gance point out in their new book Endgame: The Churchs Strategic Move to Save Faith and Family in America. This is not merely a psychological issue, the authors argue, but a deeply spiritual one.

Marriage is central to both the Christian and Jewish faiths: Scripture begins with the marriage of Adam and Eve and ends with the marriage of Christ and his bride, the church.

In the Old Testament, marriage is used repeatedly to symbolize Gods love for his people, the Jews.

In the New Testament, marriage is a symbol of Christs relationship with the church. Paul, in Ephesians 5:25, commands: Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it

Yet the majority of churches in the United States seem to believe that the work of building and maintaining healthy marriages is best left outside the church. The authors of Endgame estimate that churches spend as much as $4 billion to $6 billion on youth ministry, but spend only a fraction of that on marriage or relationship ministry.

Three out of four churches do not provide relationship classes or resources for married couples, and more than 90% of churches do not offer a ministry for single adults. At the same time, the number of Americans who say they belong to a religious body has dropped precipitously in the past 20 years alonefrom 70% in 2000 to 47% today.

In the fight for faith and family in America, the authors argue, we have reached the endgame.

De Gance and Van Epp make an airtight case for why the church must radically change its thinking about its role in nurturing and supporting the family. Not only must the church engage in the recovery of marriage if it is to survive, but there is also a pastoral imperative: Americans feel lonely and isolated on an epidemic scale, and generational loneliness is worsening.

Depression, anxiety, and suicide have risen dramatically. Loneliness is not the only problem: Sex and parenthood outside marriage have led to a whole array of ill effects, including abortion, the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, a rise in poverty levels, and behavioral problems.

As Patrick Fagan wrote back in 2001 in a report for The Heritage Foundation: Throughout the social science literature, we find an ever-present correlation between a breakdown in the family and increases in child poverty, juvenile delinquency, child abuse, poor academic performance, addictions, and health problems.

The good news, as De Gance and Van Epp point out, is that the church has a record of stepping up in the midst of civilizational crises: When plagues ravaged the world, Christians created hospitals. When the barbarians invaded the West, monasteries preserved Holy Scripture as well as the works of the ancient world.

Christians formed the backbone of the abolition movement to combat slavery, and it was Christian Sunday schools that helped America abolish illiteracy in the second half of the 1800s.

The question now is whether pastors and priests will step up and take on this critical task.

If ever there were a set of circumstances that could powerfully and viscerally underscore the value of family and healthy relationships, it has been the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the decline of the family has been underway for decades, our confinement to home in the past year and a half has been a wake-up call.

De Gance and Van Epp have built a powerful case, grounded in data and tested through experience, for how churches can step up to help us heal relationships and restore the family as the cornerstone of both individual and civilizational health.

For further discussion of Endgame, watch The Heritage Foundation event Saving Faith and Family in America.

Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email[emailprotected]and well consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular We Hear You feature. Remember to include the URL or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.

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Healing the Family and Saving the Country - Daily Signal