With more than two dozen states poised to ban abortion if the U.S. Supreme Court gives them the OK next year, California clinics and their allies in the state Legislature on Wednesday revealed a plan to make the state a “sanctuary” for those seeking reproductive care, including possibly paying for travel, lodging and procedures for people from other states.
The California Future of Abortion Council, made up of more than 40 abortion providers and advocacy groups, released a list of 45 recommendations for the state to consider if the high court overturns Roe v. Wade — the 48-year-old decision that forbids states from outlawing abortion.
The recommendations are not just a liberal fantasy. Some of the state’s most important policymakers helped write them, including Toni Atkins, the San Diego Democrat who leads the state Senate and attended multiple meetings.
“We’ll be a sanctuary,” Newsom said, adding he’s aware patients will likely travel to California from other states to seek abortions. “We are looking at ways to support that inevitability and looking at ways to expand our protections.”
Abortion, perhaps more than any other issue, has divided the country for decades along mostly traditional partisan lines. A new decision overturning Roe v. Wade, which could come next summer, would be the culmination of more than 40 years of conservative activism. But Wednesday’s report offers a first glimpse of how Democratic-dominated states could respond and how the debate over abortion access would change.
California already pays for abortions for many low-income residents through the state’s Medicaid program. And California is one of six states that require private insurance companies to cover abortions, although many patients still end up paying deductibles and co-payments.
But money won’t be a problem for state-funded abortion services for patients from other states. California’s coffers have soared throughout the pandemic, fueling a record budget surplus this year. Next year, the state’s independent Legislative Analyst’s Office predicts California will have a surplus of about $31 billion.
California’s affiliates of Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider, got a sneak preview of how people might seek abortions outside their home states this year when a Texas law that outlawed abortion after six weeks of pregnancy was allowed to take effect. California clinics reported a slight increase in patients from Texas.
Now, California abortion providers are asking California to make it easier for those people to get to the state.
The report recommends funding — including public spending — to support patients seeking abortion for travel expenses such as gas, lodging, transportation and child care. It asks lawmakers to reimburse abortion providers for services to those who can’t afford to pay — including those who travel to California from other states whose income is low enough that they would qualify for state-funded abortions under Medicaid if they lived there.
It’s unclear about how many people would come to California for abortions if Roe v. Wade is overturned. California does not collect or report abortion statistics. The Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights, said 132,680 abortions were performed in California in 2017, or about 15% of all abortions nationally. That number includes people from out of state as well as teenagers, who are not required to have their parents’ permission for an abortion in California.
Planned Parenthood, which accounts for about half of California’s abortion clinics, said it served 7,000 people from other states last year.
A huge influx of people from other states “will definitely destabilize the abortion provider network,” said Fabiola Carrion, interim director for reproductive and sexual health at the national Health Law Program. She said out-of-state abortions would also likely be later term procedures, which are more complicated and expensive.
The report asks lawmakers to help clinics increase their workforce to prepare for more patients by giving scholarships to medical students who pledge to offer abortion services in rural areas, help them pay off their student loans and assist with their monthly liability insurance premiums.
“We’re looking at how to build capacity and build workforce,” said Jodi Hicks, CEO of Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California. “It will take a partnership and investment with the state.”
Abortion opponents in California, meanwhile, are also preparing for a potential surge of patients from other states seeking the procedure — only they hope to convince them not to do it.
Jonathan Keller, president and CEO of the California Family Council, said California has about 160 pregnancy resource centers whose aim is to convince women not to get abortions. He said about half of those centers are medical clinics, while the rest are faith-based counseling centers.
Many of the centers are located near abortion clinics in an attempt to entice people to seek their counseling before opting to end pregnancies. Keller said many are already planning on increasing their staffing if California gets an increase of patients.
The Florida Department of Education has removed an anti-bullying portal from its website, including links to LGBTQ advocacy groups. The removal comes following changes to the DOE webpage for the Office of Safe Schools, created under the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act.
According to the Florida Capital Star, DOE removed the anti-bullying page after the news site inquired about the LGBTQ resources listed on the site.
When pulling the bullying portal, the department removed links to state anti-bullying policy, LGBTQ advocacy groups and other bullying prevention resources. The Capital Staron Friday reported that DOE officials said the content on the bullying page was under review. Officials did not immediately return Florida Politics’ request for comment.
Read the full article. The Florida Capital Star is part of a flotilla of Bannon-linked pro-Trump right wing news sites. NPR published an exposé of the outfit back in July.
n honor of World AIDS Day, we’re pleased to bring you an interview with Crystal Mason, an AIDS activist who worked with the direct-action group ACT UP/ San Francisco in the early 1990s. Mason, whose current project is an art, care and community-expanding network called Queering Dreams that they recently cofounded with Jason Wyman, also worked with the San Francisco AIDS Project as a case worker in the 1990s.
Mason was one of 23 ACT UP veterans who sat for an oral history as part of the GLBT Historical Society’s ACT UP Oral History Project, which was completed last year and is available here. In their oral history, Mason offered their thoughts on the importance of intersectional identity and why ACT UP had limited success integrating those perspectives as an activist organization. We invited Mason to discuss some of the issues they raised in their oral history and reflect on what they learned as an activist of color thirty years ago.
In your oral history, you mention that even from attending your first ACT UP protests, you were living in Washington D.C., before you came to San Francisco, you were interested in how AIDS was affecting poor people, marginalized people and people of color.
CM: Yes, and in fact shortly after I moved to San Francisco I accidentally wandered into the Castro Sweep [a brutal police crackdown on AIDS activists in the Castro in October 1989] on my way home from work! I was taken by how physical it was. People were really willing to put their bodies, their physical selves, on the line, against police brutality. So right there, you’ve got the intersection of AIDS with policing and incarceration. That interested me, and I started attending ACT UP meetings. And I feel like part of my role during my work with ACT UP was to keep bringing up the fact that HIV was affecting other populations beyond what was commonly seen in the media and understood by the American public, which was largely gay white men.
I remember being in a meeting, trying to reach consensus, and I can’t remember what we were discussing—perhaps homelessness, and one guy got impatient and snapped, “While we’re sitting here discussing this, dozens of people have died.” And I said, “In my community people have been dying all this time—and for a hell of a lot longer.” So there was always that tension. It is true that there were some activists from earlier political movements who had been involved with larger social issues. There were also people who began their ACT UP work with a pretty narrow focus. And there were those who did eventually came to appreciate and align themselves with a larger worldview. But it was always a bit of a struggle.
In your oral history, you really insist on the fact that intersectionality informs priorities and that over time, ACT UP/SF deemphasized these. You mention specifically women and people of color.
CM: I did spend a lot of time on women’s issues, which many of the men were receptive to. AIDS did not affect women the same way, and for a long time that just wasn’t accounted for. Women who clearly had the disease couldn’t get a diagnosis, which meant they couldn’t access Medical, social security, treatment studies, and so on. But ACT UP was not successful in terms of issues that affected people of color and the most marginalized. There was a time, for example, when we focused on universal access to healthcare and health insurance, which would have made treatment more available to marginalized people, such as the homeless, people with mental-health problems, or low-income people. Ultimately when the focus became centered narrowly around “let’s get drugs into bodies,” these larger issues were deprioritized, and it turns out that they weren’t necessarily talking about poor bodies, brown bodies, Black bodies, homeless bodies…
And I really wonder how different things might be if we had centered intersectionality and been more strident about equity issues. Today many white gay people see HIV as a manageable disease, but it is still booming in the Black community. And it’s not just people of color; when I was a case worker at the SF AIDS Foundation, it was poor people and people with drug problems. Having mental-health problems or being homeless would automatically disqualify you from access to treatment and coverage. I’ve realized that over and over—in the women’s suffrage movement or the labor movement and today with voting rights—the notion of “urgency” has ended up deprioritizing marginalized communities. And this is going to keep happening until we create movements where the goal is really to create a better life for the most marginalized, including Black people, transgender folks, incarcerated people and sex workers.
What advice would you have for students, historians and members of the public who are interested in learning about ACT UP and AIDS activism today?
CM: I think that ACT UP in some ways was very successful and remains worth emulating. We were strident, even when we didn’t have social support. We were just one in a long line of movements that were more vilified than celebrated at the time. There’s such a thing as “respectability politics,” and a lot of LGBTQ people were not happy when we were out there protesting during Pride parades. But I’d also say to folks, be willing to look at what fell by the wayside. Yes there is a moral arc of history, and yes, it does bend. But that arc doesn’t bend without us. And when I say “us,” I mean all of us, we have to stop creating movements for change with this addiction to centering whiteness.
Black people and poor people and trans people are still fighting for a place at the table. Those who are at the table can’t speak for those who aren’t. What we can do is make space for other voices. And hand the microphone over from time to time. When we get in certain rooms, we have to demand that other people also get into that room. Not to see ourselves as singular, but realize our connections to the whole.
Photo by William Beverly
Crystal Mason (they/them) is an activist who recently cofounded “Queering Dreams,” anart, care, and community-expanding network that uses the power of art to envision liberation from capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, ableism, colonialism, and other forms of oppression.
Chile’s Congress passed a law to legalize same-sex marriage on Tuesday, in a milestone for the conservative South American nation after a decade-long legal battle and with the country delicately poised ahead of a crossroads election this month.
“Today is a historic day, our country has approved same-sex marriage, one more step forward in terms of justice, in terms of equality, recognizing that love is love,” Minister of Social Development Karla Rubilar said after the vote.
Chile’s Senate and lower house of parliament both voted heavily in favor of the bill on Tuesday, which had previously been partially approved in November before the Senate sent it back to a committee to clarify ambiguities.
Current President Sebastian Pinera, who will leave office in March, has backed the bill and is expected to sign it into law.
The vote culminates a process that began in 2007, when then-President Michelle Bachelet pushed Congress to pass a same-sex law. Chile is now poised to join 30 other countries where same-sex marriage is legal — including Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica and Uruguay in Latin America — according to the Human Rights Campaign.
“It is hard to believe that today we are taking this step,” said Rolando Jimenez from LGBTQ rights group Movilh, one of the major backers of the bill and which helped spearhead Chile’s push to legalize same sex marriage for more than a decade.
Chile will elect a new president on Dec. 19, choosing between progressive Gabriel Boric and social conservative Jose Antonio Kast, a practicing Catholic. The two offer wildly different visions for the country’s future.
While Kast disagrees with same-sex marriage, he had said he would have signed the bill into law anyway had it been passed by Congress during a potential presidency of his.
Chile has long had a conservative reputation even compared with its deeply Catholic Latin American peers. Still, a strong majority of Chileans now support same-sex marriage and Chileans have shown signs of moving left on social and cultural issues in recent years.
Civil unions have been permitted in Chile since 2015, which affords same-sex partners many but not all the benefits of married couples, like the right to adoption.
There has been an alarming surge in the number of homophobic and transphobic hate crimes recorded by UK police forces since the COVID-19 pandemic began.
According to new figures, after lockdown restrictions were eased this summer, anti-LGBT+ hate crime numbers soared to the highest level since the beginning of the pandemic.
Between January and August this year, at least 14,670 homophobic hate crimes were recorded in the UK. During the same period in 2020, there were 11,841, and the first six months of 2019 saw 10,817.
The third national lockdown began in January, 2021, and from January to April there were an average of 1,456 homophobic hate crimes reported per month, and 208 transphobic hate crimes.
As lockdown restrictions eased, this figure soared to 2,211 homophobic incidents per month from May to August, and 324 transphobic ones.
This year, reports of violent anti-LGBT+ hate crimes in the UK have felt endless.
Manchester and Liverpool have faced waves of homophobic attacks over the last year.
Stonewall told LBC that even these shocking figures do not show the terrifying full picture of UK hate crimes because of under-reporting.
Stonewall’s associate director of policy and research, Eloise Stonborough, added: “LGBT+ people have struggled throughout the pandemic, with many not having access to vital support networks and spaces during lockdowns.
“It’s always worrying to see an increase in anti-LGBT+ hate crime, particularly at a time when our communities were more isolated than ever.”
Leni Morris, the chief executive of the LGBT anti-violence charity Galop, told The Guardian: “What we saw in the pandemic was LGBT+ people experiencing forms of abuse and violence that were either exacerbated by the pandemic itself or caused by it.
“We have some people who were victims of abuse and attacks because of being blamed for the pandemic itself, either because perpetrators thought the pandemic was an act of God – because of the existence of LGBT+ people – or because of the community’s association with the last major pandemic in people’s minds, and that’s the HIV/AIDS pandemic.”
The National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) has promised that police will “always pursue action against perpetrators of hate crime where there is the evidence to do so”, but admitted that as many hate crime offences move online, prosecution has become increasingly difficult.
Allyship, an old noun made new again, is Dictionary.com’s word of the year.
The look up site with 70 million monthly users took the unusual step of anointing a word it added just last month, though “allyship” first surfaced in the mid-1800s, said one of the company’s content overseers, John Kelly.
“It might be a surprising choice for some,” he told The Associated Press ahead of Tuesday’s unveiling. “In the past few decades, the term has evolved to take on a more nuanced and specific meaning. It is continuing to evolve and we saw that in many ways.”
The site offers two definitions for allyship: The role of a person who advocates for inclusion of a “marginalized or politicized group” in solidarity but not as a member, and the more traditional relationship of “persons, groups or nations associating and cooperating with one another for a common cause or purpose.”
The word is set apart from “alliance,” which Dictionary.com defines in one sense as a “merging of efforts or interests by persons, families, states or organizations.”
It’s the first definition that took off most recently in the mid-2000s and has continued to churn. Following the summer of 2020 and the death of George Floyd, white allies — and the word allyship — proliferated as racial justice demonstrations spread. Before that, straight allies joined the causes of LGBTQ oppression, discrimination and marginalization.
“This year, we saw a lot of businesses and organizations very prominently, publicly, beginning efforts to promote diversity, equity and inclusion. Allyship is tied to that. In the classroom, there is a flashpoint around the term critical race theory. Allyship connects with this as well,” Kelly said.
In addition, teachers, frontline workers and mothers who juggled jobs, home duties and child care in lockdown gained allies as the pandemic took hold last year.
Without an entry for “allyship,” Kelly said the site saw a steep rise in lookups for “ally” in 2020 and large spikes in 2021. It was in the top 850 searches out of thousands and thousands of words this year. Dictionary.com broadened the definition of “ally” to include the more nuanced meaning. The terms “DEI” and “critical race theory” made their debuts as entries on the site with “allyship” this year.
What it means to be an authentic ally has taken on fresh significance as buzz around the word has grown louder. One of the aspects of allyship, as it has emerged, is how badly it can go.
Among the example’s of how to use the word in a sentence cited by Merriam-Webster is this one written by Native activist Hallie Sebastian: “Poor allyship is speaking over marginalized people by taking credit and receiving recognition for arguments that the unprivileged have been making for their entire lives.”
As global diversity, equity and inclusion executive Sheree Atcheson wrote in Forbes, allyship is a “lifelong process of building relationships based on trust, consistency and accountability with marginalized individuals and/or groups of people.” It’s not, she said, “self-defined — work and efforts must be recognized by those you are seeking to ally with.”
Allyship should be an “opportunity to grow and learn about ourselves, whilst building confidence in others,” Atcheson added.
Among the earliest evidence of the word “allyship,” in its original sense of “alliance,” is the 1849, two-volume work, “The Lord of the Manor, or, Lights and Shades of Country Life” by British novelist Thomas Hall: “Under these considerations, it is possible, he might have heard of Miss Clough’s allyship with the Lady Bourgoin.”
Kelly did some additional digging into the history of allyship in its social justice sense. While the Oxford English Dictionary dates that use of the word to the 1970s, Kelly found a text, “The Allies of the Negro” by Albert W. Hamilton, published in 1943. It discusses extensively the potential allies of Black people in the struggle for racial equality:
“What some white liberals are beginning to realize is that they better begin to seek the Negro as an ally,” he wrote. “The new way of life sought by the liberal will be a sham without the racial equality the Negro seeks. And the inclusion of the Negro in the day-to-day work, in the organization, the leadership and the rallying of the support necessary to win a better world, can only be done on the basis of equality.”
On the other side of allyship, Kelly said, “is a feeling of division, of polarization. That was Jan. 6.” Allyship, he said, became a powerful prism in terms of the dichotomy at a chaotic cultural time during the last two years.
Other dictionary companies in the word of the year game focused on the pandemic and its fallout for their picks. Oxford Languages, which oversees the Oxford English Dictionary, went for “vax” and Merriam-Webster chose “vaccine.” The Glasgow, Scotland-based Collins Dictionary, meanwhile, plucked “NFT,” the digital tokens that sell for millions.
While Merriam-Webster relies solely on site search data to choose a word of the year, Dictionary.com takes a broader approach. It scours search engines, a broad range of text and taps into cultural influences to choose its word of the year.
Learn Social Square Dancing, a new, easy-to-learn set of calls that get you square dancing in just 13 weeks. Gently exercise your body and mind while moving to music and having fun. Give it a try—the first class is free!
The South African government has taken important steps but did not provide adequate funding for shelters and other services for gender-based violence survivors during the Covid-19 pandemic. Many survivors have been made more vulnerable in the context of Covid-19.
The South African government has acknowledgedhigh rates of gender-based violence both during and before the pandemic. But South African experts told Human Rights Watch that despite promises – including in a National Strategic Plan – to address gender-based violence and femicide, the government has still failed to provide necessary funding for shelters and other services. Efforts should be made to improve access for marginalized people, including sex workers; lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people; and undocumented survivors.
“South Africa is facing a situation in which survivors have been locked down with abusers, and they need economic security to free themselves from their abusers, all during a very tight job market and a period of food insecurity,” said Wendy Isaack, LGBT researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Key services such as shelters have been under huge stress for months because of pandemic-related problems and costs and long-standing difficulties like late payment of funds in some places and patchy government support.”
Human Rights Watch interviewed staff at seven shelters spread across the country and six other frontline organizations working directly with victims to prevent gender-based violence or provide emergency support to survivors. Human Rights Watch also interviewed activists and other experts from 12 organizations working to end this violence. Human Rights Watch made unsuccessful attempts to interview or obtain feedback from South Africa’s Department of Social Development (DSD), which oversees shelter services.
Those interviewed said that the biggest problem was a lack of adequate government funding to help overwhelmed nongovernmental organizations providing direct support to victims, including shelters, cope with the pandemic.
The DSD should finalize its draft Intersectoral Shelter Policy as a matter of urgency, and all government agencies involved should carry out planned improvements.
Immediate-, medium- and long-term impacts from South Africa’s Covid-19 lockdowns have increased the risk for women and girls of domestic violence and other forms of gender-based violence. Human Rights Watch research with frontline workers in South Africa suggests that this risk may be greater for additionally marginalized people like black lesbians, transgender men and women, sex workers, and older women, as well as refugees, asylum seekers, and undocumented migrants.
Those interviewed said that domestic violence victims living under lockdown were cut off from others who might help them, giving them no respite from partners or family members beating, raping, or psychologically or verbally abusing them.
Government support to shelters during the Covid-19 pandemic appeared to vary enormously among provinces. Some shelters described firm relationships and public health guidance and other support from the provincial DSD staff. Shelters in the Western Cape, for example, said that the agency provided guidance, solidarity, and personal protective equipment (PPE) and that funding for shelters arrived on time.
In other places, though, funding was late. The National Shelter Movement of South Africa, a nonprofit organization with about 78 shelters under its umbrella, said that some staff even had to take personal loans to pay expenses. The South African government did promote a hotline for victims it had set up in 2014, but civil society members said it sometimes provided confusing or out-of-date information and that it was hard for some victims to use because they were afraid their abuser would hear them.
Commentators have said that the South African government worked to keep services open for the survivors. But experts criticized the South African government, saying it was too late to acknowledge the impact of strict lockdowns and had not provided adequate public information about shelters and services to make clear that domestic violence victims could leave their homes to get help.
Frontline workers said that many people, perhaps especially among vulnerable populations, were further endangered by the sudden loss of jobs, incomes, or housing. Sex workers, in particular, were forced to leave brothels and to take greater risks to make ends meet as the work dried up, sex worker rights groups said. Research by Human Rights Watch in 2018 found that female sex workers are especially vulnerable to violence in South Africa, in part because their work is criminalized.
Frontline workers also said that loss of income and lack of food security made undocumented migrants even more dependent on abusive partners and less likely to leave them. Human Rights Watch researchfound that the government’s Covid-19 aid programs, including food parcels during national lockdown, overlooked people with disabilities, refugees and asylum seekers, and many LGBT people.
Shelters vary in whether they accept undocumented migrant survivors. South African law prohibits sheltering immigrants without documentation but allows for emergency humanitarian support for undocumented people. The exception is not clearly defined, and some shelters fear liability for violating the law. South Africa has one shelter designed for LGBT survivors, the Pride Shelter in Cape Town. Though other shelters accept them in theory, experts said that more funding, training, and skills building is needed to counter discrimination and bias in the shelter space, provide tailored services, and raise awareness about availability of shelter services among marginalized populations.
The pandemic and lockdowns temporarily affected or made impossible some important in-house services in shelters, such as some forms of counseling and job training, Human Rights Watch found. Job opportunities for clients evaporated. Shelters were unable to carry out normal in-person outreach activities to raise awareness about their services as well as fundraising activities to support themselves or supplement government grants.
Perhaps because of uncertainty and isolation, several shelter workers said they felt that anxiety and depression among clients increased. Staff also had to make significant changes to how they worked, they and experts said, for example, working week-long shifts rather than going home every day, and there were many reports of burnout among shelter staff.
Inconsistent government support for the shelters is not a new problem. The Heinrich Böll Foundationfor example, together with the National Shelter Movement, has long noted that shelters are “chronically underfunded,” and that funding is also highly variable between and within provinces. A 2019 report on the state of shelters by the Commission for Gender Equality, an independent government watchdog body, found “grossly inadequate and misaligned” funding for shelters from the agency and late payments in some provinces.
Ongoing sensitization and skills training for shelter staff to prevent discrimination against LGBT people, sex workers, or undocumented African non-nationals and to ensure tailored services are available is important, Human Rights Watch said. The DSD should also ensure that all shelters accept undocumented survivors and know how to assist them with immigration procedures.
“The government of South Africa has been addressing gender-based violence during the crisis over the past year,” Isaack said. “But a large-scale and fully resourced effort will be needed to ensure the Covid-19 crisis and its fallout over the next years doesn’t result in South Africa’s rates for gender-based violence worsening further.”
For more information about gender-based violence in South Africa and the impact on shelter services, please see below.
Gender-Based Violence in South Africa
South Africa’s president has characterized gender-based violence in South Africa as a “second pandemic,” after the coronavirus. Statistics, including police reports, are worrying but incomplete, both because of problems with data collection and because victims often do not report abuse. Despite the lack of accurate statistics, it is evident that the rates are high, both for women and for LGBT people.
It is also not yet clear to what extent gender-based violence increased during the Covid-19 lockdowns. An analysis by the Heinrich Böll Foundation released in August 2021 found that various data, including police reporting, a government helpline, and hospitals, did not provide a clear indication that rates had increased, but said that more research was needed. Several people interviewed said that they thought rates increased, and experts and frontline workers widely agreed that the pandemic created additional vulnerabilities.
In September 2021 parliament passed three linked bills amending relevant laws. One, the Domestic Violence Amendment Act, should make it easier for victims to get protection orders.
There is political will to address the crisis, but adequate funding has long been a problem, Human Rights Watch found. The National Strategic Plan on Gender-Based Violence and Femicide attributed the high rates of gender-based violence to South Africa’s history of violence and apartheid, but also to government underinvestment in solving the problem. Others have also concluded that budgetary constraints and lack of cooperation among government departments have undermined progress. Victims lack support when attempting to report violence and lack adequate access to courts and to shelters. The experts interviewed said that the pandemic worsened these problems.
The Commission on Gender Equality’s March 2020 submission to the United Nations committee that oversees states’ compliance with Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women detailed the situation just prior to the pandemic and lockdown. It said that while there was “political willingness to lead national efforts to deal with gender-based violence”, in practice, funding and implementation of a pre-Covid-19-era Emergency Response Action Plan was “still unfolding.” Despite promises of more support, the commission said that even before the pandemic, a lack of government funding had meant the shelters were forced to close, police were undertrained, and medical services for rape survivors were lacking.
The National Strategic Plan is the result of years of activism by South African civil society, including demonstrations in August 2018 that triggered a Presidential Summit Against Gender-Based Violence. Drafted by government and activists, the South African cabinet has also approved the plan. However, it is difficult to track how the plan is being funded. In February 2021 in response to government efforts, the private sector pledged a total of 128 million South African Rand (R, about US$8.1 million) to fight gender-based violence.
Government financial support to shelters and services for survivors is an important part of meeting human rights obligations to address gender-based violence. The National Plan’s Pillar 4, “Response, Care Support and Healing,” and Pillar 5, “Economic Empowerment” tasks the DSD with increasing funding for shelters and services at shelters, and to increase access to shelters and interim housing for all victims, including LGBT people, sex workers, undocumented immigrants, older women, and women with older children.
Covid-19 and Economic Insecurity
The abrupt change in economic activity caused by the pandemic and response had a profound impact on many South African’s economic security. Interviewees said that certain marginalized populations, in particular, African LGBT asylum seekers, undocumented migrants, and sex workers, already more at risk of violence, experienced a significant drop in food security and loss of income. This compounded their risk, especially for those who were forced into homelessness.
Human Rights Watch analysis showed that the authorities did not take steps to facilitate support, including from donors, for refugees and asylum seekers whose access to food and other basic necessities were limited during the nationwide lockdown. As far as Human Rights Watch has been able to ascertain, the government did not consult with people from vulnerable and marginalized groups, such as people with disabilities, leaving many at serious risk of Covid-19 infection, hunger, and other harm.
“Things were very bad to be honest – migrant sex workers were told to move out of brothels and safe houses,” a sex worker peer advocate said about her efforts to assist sex workers in a small town in Gauteng province. “We intervened and made agreements [with the owners] like [in one place] – as long as the sex workers were able to pay electricity the owner allowed them to stay. In another brothel [the owner] gave them a few days after we intervened, but eventually they had to go.”
Dudu Dlamini, a sex worker activist, said that “Sex workers had no cash, no income, they were chased out of houses by landlords”. She said that the loss of income often affected three or four dependents. “They couldn’t go home without bringing money, (couldn’t) visit their children.”
Sex work remains criminalized in South Africa, and as a result, the South African Police Service in some places perpetuates abuse by profiling and harassing sex workers. “Lockdown amplified the challenges for sex workers,” said Nosipho Vidima, a sex workers’ rights advocate. “You can imagine if you’re trying to work and there’s no one else in the street because of curfew… sex workers were harassed and arrested by police for being out, because they were known to be sex workers.”
A social worker at People Against Suffering, Suppression, Oppression, and Poverty (PASSOP), a community-based organization working to defend the rights of asylum seekers, refugees, and non-nationals in Cape Town, said economic insecurity because of the pandemic made it even less likely that their clients, mostly undocumented immigrant LGBT survivors of gender-based violence, would leave abusive partners or report violence. “The majority [of our clients] have lost their jobs [and the need for food and shelter have been those most faced during Covid-19,” he said, adding that the group’s programming had been replaced by proving food parcels and other emergency relief.
“[Even under better times] our clients can’t get work and struggle because they don’t have documents and so have to rely on partners even if they are ill-treated,” he said. He said that at least nine clients were doing sex work to survive, and some had faced police harassment and others violence, and all were more likely to have unsafe sex.
“We did an announcement about our food parcels on the radio as well as our evacuation services and our line blew up,” the codirector from Rise Up Against Gender-Based Violence said. “[Newly homeless people needed] things like buckets to go get water and plastic bags to keep their things in. Especially during the hard lockdown, we had a lot of LGBTIQ people we needed to assist because their families had thrown them out of homes [and] we also did a lot of parcels for non-nationals because there was no assistance for undocumented people.”
Covid-19 Impacts on Gender-Based Violence Shelters
Human Rights Watch found that the pandemic had a significant impact on gender-based violence shelters. The shelters provide refuge from violence and include safe houses that offer temporary accommodation. Crises centers typically offer accommodation for three to six months, and most interviewed by Human Rights Watch also provide counseling, psychosocial and emotional assistance, and life planning, skills building and job training, as well as connections to courts or other government services such as help with protection orders or divorces.
Human Rights Watch did not receive any reports about major Covid-19 outbreaks in shelters, but protecting clients and staff from Covid-19 infection and managing lockdowns strained shelters in many ways. Several shelter workers said that stress and anxiety were greatly heightened for both clients and staff. “We probably worked harder than ever before,” said a senior social worker from a Durban shelter in KwaZulu-Natal. “We had greater levels of anxiety than before among the clients.”
One social worker said that a client and a worker, a cleaner at her shelter, had died of Covid-19, causing anxiety and distress among both staff and clients. “It was a roller coaster,” she said.
Clients at shelters had to self-isolate, especially new arrivals, meaning they lost out on solidarity and community, made worse by restrictions against visitors or making trips outside of the shelter. At one Gauteng shelter, for example, new clients had to self-isolate for 14 days. “It was a very traumatic time,” said a social worker at the shelter. “I’ve never spoken or debriefed about it, but it was frustrating and depressing and not just for the clients here but also for the staff.”
Two other senior shelter workers said that they and their staff had not had a chance to talk about the impact of the pandemic on their wellbeing, and a few people said that the work and sacrifices of shelter staff had not been acknowledged, and that burnout was increasingly a problem. “Everyone just put their heads down and did the work, but now we’re seeing the impact on staff,” said a senior social worker at a 120-bed shelter, Saartjie Bartman Centre, in Cape Town. At least two shelters moved employees from daily shifts, going home at night, to working a week at a time to reduce exposure.
Protections against Covid-19 also created additional costs. “We spent huge amounts of money on PPE in the first months, some R60,000 [about $3,800],” said a senior social worker at the Saartjie Bartman Centre. Like others, this shelter also spent precious funds on private car services to reduce staff exposure on public transport. Fundraising events were canceled and at least some shelters decided to stop in-kind deliveries of food and other support that they usually depend on to reduce opportunities for virus transmission. In-person outreach work in communities also stopped, potentially reducing people’s access and knowledge about sheltering.
Covid-19 Impacts on Services for Survivors
Shelter workers said that perhaps the most worrying loss for shelter residents from the pandemic has been job opportunities. “Women can’t find jobs now, some have been with us for six months now and have no follow-up plan because of that,” a KwaZulu-Natal social worker at a shelter said in February. “I refuse to send a client back to an abusive situation.”
“Our clients have been disappointed,” said a senior social worker from the Sahara Shelter. “A lot come here unemployed, and we try to work as much as possible with local businesses and people who can give our clients jobs, so they have income, but that’s not been possible under Covid-19.” Another social worker said that “We have 15 women [clients] with us now, and only two are employed – it’s terrible.”
Government services were harder to get, including some lifesaving services. “Some government officials were working from home and it was hard to reach them”, a social worker from a shelter in the Eastern Cape Province said. “[This] led to a delay in service delivery to our clients and also added strain on them with regard to their cases. In the beginning of the lockdown, cases were postponed in court and protection orders could not be granted on the date set.”
“We faced huge problems in getting protection orders,” another social worker said.
Others said that health services were affected, with some hospitals shutting down or canceling normal services their clients depended on, some medications being harder to get, and general anxiety and uncertainty as to when taking a client to a hospital or clinic was worth the risk of exposure to Covid-19. “Access to mental [health services] and other health care has proved to be extremely inaccessible during lockdown, even more so than before,” a domestic violence worker in the Cape Flats said.
Shelters struggled to keep essential services such as psychosocial – mental health – support and counseling ongoing, and these essential services were halted in some places for at least a period. Some shelters lost at least some programming. “We also had to stop all our extra services,” said one social worker.
Organizations like SWEAT, the Sex Workers Education and Advocacy Taskforce, and Mothers for the Future, a SWEAT offshoot, who work to support sex workers including protecting them against gender-based violence, struggled with major programming losses, especially in the early days of the pandemic. “We had to stop support group meetings,” Dlamini said. “We moved over to a WhatsApp group so we could provide a little support.”
“We even saw places that had provided condoms for free had shut down,” said a sex worker activist, Megan Lessing. “Some sex workers were earning R50 a day [about $3.20] and paying R20 [about $1.30] for condoms.”
Access to Shelters for Marginalized Survivors
Human Rights Watch found that shelters differed in whom they accepted as clients. Undocumented migrants, LGBT people, and women with older male children were sometimes excluded, for reasons that range from lack of private family facilities to concern about running afoul of the immigration law, or not being able to pay expenses the government would not reimburse for non-nationals. Older women, people who use drugs, and women with severe illnesses were sometimes excluded as well, with many facilities lacking the resources to provide specialized health or services, such as personal care and other support, to people with disabilities, including older people with disabilities.
While sex workers, transwomen, transmen, and lesbians, were usually accepted in theory, people working with these vulnerable groups said that particular group often did not feel welcome and that more needed to be done to help them access shelters.
“Vulnerable groups struggle to find or use shelters mainly because of stigma,” a shelter social worker said. “They are often discriminated against by the public and by staff at shelters … and they’re coming from a place where there’s a lack of acceptance to start with from family members.”
Citing security concerns, about half of the shelters contacted would not take older boys, usually any male over 12. Two shelters said that they did not take older women, in one case because of fears that they would never find another home for them. “We can’t [discharge] them because other support structures [like [older] people’s homes] are not working,” said one social worker. More commonly shelters said that they would not take women using drugs, because they are not set up to safely provide necessary services.
“Some shelters won’t take foreign nationals, especially undocumented people, [and] we spent a lot of time trying to place foreign nationals,” said one person who had helped more than 50 women leave domestic violence in Johannesburg. “We will assist, we won’t judge them if they’ve got papers and have been referred to us and have a right to be in the country,” one shelter social worker said. Others said that they would take undocumented survivors, but it was “problematic … we then have to refer them to the correct institutions handling their cases.”
The Creighton Shelter in KwaZulu-Natal said that they had recently taken in a transwoman. “It was very hard for her to find a shelter because in her ID she’s still a man,” the manager said. Other shelters said that staff can feel reluctant to accept transwomen in the facility, especially if there are no private rooms and bathrooms, or training for staff. Another shelter manager and National Shelter Movement executive committee member, Bernadine Bachar, said that the shelter serves transwomen, but that generally, “there’s a lot of reluctance to take transwomen. Staff feel that they’re not equipped to deal with issues.”
Sex workers experience barriers to accessing shelters, including assumptions about their drug use, on whether they can remain working and not violate shelter rules, or whether they have immigration documentation. One shelter worker said: “Sex workers are sometimes [dependent on] drugs; we have a zero-tolerance policy on that.” She also said that female sex workers often “disregard” the shelter’s 5 p.m. curfew, along with the government’s Covid-19 regulations.
“Sex workers … often do not stay long because they have to leave to do their work and so they violate the shelter rules as well as Covid lockdown regulation,” another person interviewed said.
“I put one sex worker in a shelter and the staff there saw her working and told us to take her to another shelter,” Dlamini said. “And there was another case where a sex worker tested positive for drugs and so was not allowed to stay.”
Sex workers usually do not even consider a shelter an option, a sex worker peer said. “The general feeling is that without a South African ID you can’t access anything.”
Government Support During the Pandemic
Unlike many other governments in the region, South Africa does provide support to shelters, and the pandemic has placed many strains on government institutions and services, Human Rights Watch said. It is apparently difficult to calculate government spending on gender-based violence, but experts agree that more funding and focus is needed.
Experts said that the government was too slow to publicly note that the pandemic and the stringent lockdowns had increased the risks of gender-based violence. They said that national and local officials have never acknowledged the added dangers to some groups like sex workers, refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants as well as LGBT people. The experts also said that it was not made clear from the beginning that shelters and other services were essential services that would remain open and that survivors could leave their houses to get help even during curfew or the various levels of lockdown. “Women didn’t know what was going on,” Bachar said. “It was unconscionable.”
South African authorities’ enforcement of curfews and lockdowns has been strict, and sometimes violent, which may have affected victims’ ability to seek help. In June 2020 a report by the Atlantic Council noted that, “Since South Africa instituted a country-wide lockdown on March 27, the number of violent incidents by police against civilians has reportedly more than doubled, with poor and vulnerable populations most affected.”
For many shelters, work with local government officials and police continued during the pandemic even if it was bumpy. Some said they got some additional assistance like funds, PPE including masks and sanitizers, and advice from the government, although more commonly from the National Shelter Movement.
A social worker at the Sahara Shelter in Durban said: “we got masks and sanitizer … whenever there was stuff available (DSD) would drop it off and they helped with deep cleaning two or three times.”
“DSD worked with us from the beginning to prepare, even before lockdown, they sent an epidemiologist to consult with shelters,” a senior worker at a large shelter of 120 beds in Cape Town said. Other shelters said that they did not get any additional support from the government and instead were dependent on the National Shelter Movement for PPE and other resources as well as guidance on how to handle social distancing for example.
The biggest problem was when funding arrived late, those interviewed said. But the overall lack of funding for shelters, even when on time was also consistently mentioned as a problem. “A lack of funding means many shelter workers earn a minimum wage even though they are essential and the work they do is so important,” said Claudia Lopes from the Heinrich Böll Foundation.
Lopes and Kailash Bhana, who are doing research for the Heinrich Böll Foundation on the impact of Covid-19 on shelters, and Lisa Vetten, another expert, said that two shelters in the Eastern Cape had to halt their operations because they could not afford to pay for food as they had not received government funding during the pandemic. They said that at least one shelter in the Northwest province, struggled to feed about 80 clients, some of them children, and came close to collapse because of significantly delayed government funding.
Experts also expressed concerns about the quality of a government hotline set up during the pandemic for victims. “We were shocked by the GBV [gender-based violence] hotline,” the codirector at Rise Up Against Gender-Based Violence said. “[Victims are] trapped in their homes with their abuser and you’re giving them a telephone line. Many people have no phone, and [even if they do] the abuser is within earshot.”
Even when survivors could call, said Lopes, hotline workers were sometimes giving callers inappropriate advice and “deciding for themselves whether someone was eligible for shelters or not” rather than just doing referrals. In one example, she said, “the victim’s partner was a gangster, and she was needing urgent escape from the situation and the community that she lives in, but the command center told her that she was not eligible for sheltering as she could be accommodated elsewhere, essentially with her mom in the same community she had to leave for her own safety. They simply didn’t understand the dynamics.”
Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh seemed to suggest earlier this week that landmark LGBTQ cases could support overturning federal abortion rights.
The Supreme Court heard 90 minutes of oral arguments Wednesday concerning a Mississippi law that would ban almost all abortions in the state after 15 weeks of pregnancy.
A majority of the court’s conservative justices appeared prepared to uphold the law and possibly overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 landmark decision holdingthat women have a constitutional right to have an abortion before fetal viability, usually around 24 weeks.
The crux of Wednesday’s oral arguments centered around whether the justices should preserve or walk back on precedent, a court decision that is considered authority for subsequent cases involving similar or identical circumstances. The court’s liberal justices warned that reversing a decades-old ruling would politicize the country’s highest court.
However, citing two landmark gay rights cases — Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down state laws criminalizing consensual same-sex activity in 2003, and Obergefell v. Hodges, which resulted in the legalization of same-sex marriage across the United States in 2015 — Kavanaugh suggested that overruling the court’s previous opinions was standard procedure.
“If you think about some of the most important cases, the most consequential cases in this court’s history, there’s a string of them where the cases overruled precedent,” Kavanaugh said. “If we think that the prior precedents are seriously wrong, if that, why then doesn’t the history of this court’s practice with respect to those cases tell us that the right answer is actually a return to the position of neutrality and — and not stick with those precedents in the same way that all those other cases didn’t?”
The lawyers who argued in favor of gay rights in the landmark LGBTQ cases offered differing views on the validity of the argument by Kavanaugh, who was appointed in 2018 by then-President Donald Trump.
Mary Bonauto, who argued on behalf of same-sex couples in Obergefell v. Hodges and now serves as the Civil Rights Project director at GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders, or GLAD, challenged Kavanaugh’s analogy.
“It’s a pretty thin interpretation of a reversal,” she told NBC News. “The reversals that Justice Kavanaugh is citing were about righting wrongs. They were centered on the rights of individuals and expanding constitutional protections to more individuals, not about taking rights away.”
When the court ruled in favor of same-sex couples in Obergefell v. Hodges, it effectively overturned its prior decision in Baker v. Nelson. That ruling centered on Jack Baker and Mike McConnell, who in 1970 were blocked from obtaining a marriage license. The high court rejected the men’s case in 1972 without ever hearing oral arguments.
Bonauto argued against Kavanaugh’s comparison of reversing Baker v. Nelson to the potential reversal of Roe v. Wade.
“There was no briefing, there was no argument. They just essentially utterly dismissed the case for basically: ‘There’s no way same-sex couples seeking to marry have claim under the Constitution.’ The end,” she said.
LGBTQ advocates largely agreed with Bonauto, saying that the landmark gay rights decisions in Obergefell v. Hodges and Lawrence v. Texas “reflected the growing societal understanding of our common humanity.”
“To that we say, NOT IN OUR NAME,” Sharon McGowan, legal director of the LGBTQ advocacy group Lambda Legal, said of Kavanaugh’s argument in a statement Wednesday. “Those landmark LGBTQ decisions EXPANDED individual liberty, not the opposite.”
But Paul Smith, who argued in favor of LGBTQ rights in Lawrence v. Texas — which overruled the court’s 1986 decision in Bowers v. Hardwick — suggested that Kavanaugh’s comparison was valid. Smith said that in order to win Lawrence v. Texas, he also had to bolster the argument for the court overriding precedent.
“We really, actually made those arguments ourselves in Lawrence because that was the whole point — we had to get rid of Bowers v. Hardwick,” Smith, who is now a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, said. “It is certainly one of the most prominent examples of an overruling that’s happened in the last 20 years.”
“People talk about stare decisis when they like the prior decision and not when they don’t,” Smith added, referring to the legal term for following what the court has ruled previously.
But during the oral arguments, Justice Sonia Sotomayor raised the question of whether overruling Roe v. Wade could open the floodgates for the court’s 6-3 conservative majority to overrule a broad swath of previous opinions it does not agree with.
“Why do we now say that somehow … Roe and Casey are so unusual that they must be overturned?” Sotomayor said Wednesday, referring to Planned Parenthood v. Casey, a 1992 opinion that affirmed Roe v. Wade.
Later, during the oral arguments, Justice Amy Coney Barrett pressed Mississippi Solicitor General Scott Stewart, who was defending the Mississippi abortion limits, to address Sotomayor’s assertion.
Stewart said that several of the other cases Sotomayor cited, including the LGBTQ cases, produced “clear rules that have engendered strong reliance interests and that have not produced negative consequences,” in contrast to Roe v. Wade.
But if the court does overrule the landmark abortion law, some legal experts warn that previous rulings, including the landmark LGBTQ decisions, would be in danger.
“You can be sure that the Alliance Defending Freedom has the lawsuit ready to file the day after the Supreme Court issues an opinion broadly overruling Roe,” Katherine Franke, the director of the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia Law School, said referring to a Christian law firm with a decadeslong track record of litigating against LGBTQ rights. “They will file the next day challenging Obergefell and even Lawrence. I have every confidence that that is what they’reto do.”
The court is expected to decide on the Mississippi abortion law early next summer.
