Why I am a Feminist
By Jonathan Uriarte
For the past couple of weeks several events in my daily life have reaffirmed my strong beliefs in fairness and justice towards women, particularly those who are most disadvantaged. It first started with a visit from a human rights activist to my Political Science seminar on the same topic. Her first question to our small group was, “why are you interested in human rights?” My first instinct was to answer, because I am a Political Science major and I’m focusing on international relations. I gave her that as my answer and so did half of the room. However, as the conversation progressed I knew that wasn’t the only reason why I was interested in human rights. She struck a chord when she mentioned the work she had done in creating shelters for immigrant women in San Francisco who suffered through domestic violence and feared deportation. These women, she said, are often the spouses of U.S. citizens, residents or government officials and are brought here under the belief that they will have a better life. Instead, they are confronted with violence and are threatened with deportation. Her words swept me off my feet and made me realize that I cared about human rights because I cared about those women, and because my mother had been one of them.
In the assigned readings of that week, my professor gave us a selection that focused on using a human rights framework to rephrase domestic struggles. In one of those articles was the story of Jessica Gonzalez, a mother of three beautiful girls who suffered through a horrible ordeal and was the victim of governmental inaction. On June 22, 1990, Simon Gonzalez abducted his three children from their home, a direct violation of a court-issued restraining order. Jessica had filed for divorce earlier that year and now frantically found herself requesting the help of the police department in Castle Rock, Colorado to enforce that restraining order against her husband. After calling law enforcement four times and physically visiting the station, her pleas were ignored. At 3:20 a.m. of the next day, Simon Gonzalez arrived at the police station and initiated a shooting, culminating with his death. Afterwards, police discovered the bodies of his three children in his truck, killed that same evening.
Jessica sued and her case was heard in district court and the court of appeals, ultimately culminating in the U.S. Supreme Court. In Castle Rock v. Gonzalez, with a 7-2 majority the Court found that “enforcement of the restraining order was not mandatory under Colorado law” and that there was no “individual right for enforcement” as this enforcement of a restraining order was a “process” and not the interest, and there is no due process protection for a “process.” Needless to say, this case almost brought tears to my eyes. My mother was Jessica and I was one of those children who—had it not been for the enforcement of our right to freedom from fear—could have suffered a similar fate.
On Thursday night, I had the distinct honor to hear former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet speak about her work as the head of the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, also known as UN Women. In her speech she mentioned three areas in which women are still being marginalized around the world: economic power, political power, and through violence. While she gave a fair assessment of the horrors some women face around the world, I was slightly disappointed with her omission of the struggles women face in the United States. She briefly mentioned domestic issues such as migrant and domestic workers, but her evaluation was focused outward. I believe this feeds a misconception that the United States does not need to use a human rights framework because we are a nation that already provides those standards. Earlier that day, I participated in a heated discussion in my human rights seminar about the framing of domestic violence as “torture.” Some of my classmates disagreed with this notion. While they considered domestic violence a “horrific” and “unimaginable” circumstance, they feared that by using the word “torture” the significance of the word would be watered-down. The value of “torture” would be diminished if it was used as a way to frame a “slap in the face”, as one of my classmates described it.
This made me wonder, are our own views as to how we categorize the world inherently biased toward a male-based structure? Why is it that only situations in which men are faced with extreme physical and emotional pain—such as waterboarding and military isolation—considered torture, but not the extreme physical and emotional abuse suffered by women? Of course, there should be standards in which a slap in the face is not considered torture for either a man or a woman, but by using the framework of human rights we give women, or any other disadvantaged group for that matter, the tools for justice when domestic mechanisms have failed them.
In March 2007, Jessica told her story to the Inter-American Commission, a formal body of the Organization of American States. It was the first time she had been allowed to testify in any official proceeding. By allowing her to share her story, the violation of her human rights and her suffering was finally recognized. Similarly, by using a human rights framework in issues such as domestic violence we not only create awareness by encouraging debate, but we can also provide the tools for activism and change when our own domestic political mechanisms have failed. Based on these observations I can acknowledge that we do not live in a fair world, because in a fair world women would not earn 75% of a man’s wages. In a fair world, women would not comprise less than 20% of the U.S. Congress and less than 30% in state legislatures. In a fair world a mother would not be forced to part from her three little angels because of the failure of a biased criminal system. This is why I am a feminist, because I have the courage to recognize that the world is not a fair place.