A Review by Wanda Sabir
“As countries implemented lockdown measures to stop the spread of the coronavirus, violence against women, especially domestic violence, intensified – in some countries, calls to helplines have increased five-fold.
“The UN Secretary-General’s UNiTE to End Violence against Women campaign, a multi-year effort aimed at preventing and eliminating violence against women and girls, will focus on amplifying the call for global action to bridge funding gaps, ensure essential services for survivors of violence during the COVID-19 crisis, focus on prevention, and collection of data that can improve life-saving services for women and girls” (UN).
Nov. 25, Kim McMillon hosted a poetry reading in support of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. As we gathered virtually to highlight this important issue through poetry and prose, Kim and Nina spoke of the late artivist Mama Coatl who is responsible for San Francisco’s observance of this day. The day kicks off 16 days of activism concluding Dec. 10, International Human Rights Day. The theme this year is “Orange the World: Fund, Respond, Prevent, Collect!”
Many people know October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, purple the reigning color, but the International Campaign to End Violence against Women is not as well known. That orange is the color highlighted is further irony when we think about the thousands of abused women and girls behind bars dressed in orange jumpsuits.
Orange is the new black. Orange also paves the brick road to detention, a place where one can find herself in a literal cage or a cell – all human rights evaporated. Such happened to Kelli Dillion while she was serving a 15-year sentence in California’s Central Valley.
Is orange a subtle hint that for women who defend themselves from violent attacks and survive they are then criminalized by a judicial system that does not recognize partner violence as defensible? So many women are in prison because they killed their batterers. It was their lives and that of their children or their partners’.
There are so many programs for the abuser and little to none for the survivor. Survivors have to create their own support network if they are old enough and savvy; however, for the girls who are victimized. . . . Often children who survive get on a treadmill into a lion’s lair where they are eaten alive, their bones toothpicks. Captured in a net too big to avoid consumption, these kids lack the resources to save themselves and institutions which spend time and money on perpetrators rather than victims miss these children, often girls until it is too late. Many survivors end up in the California Correctional Institutions with rap sheets longer than they are tall. Trauma-bound and trauma-driven these children then adults are easy prey for predators who know their marks and lay traps with bait just for them.
Besides having the largest incarcerated women’s population in the world, California also has the distinction of being the eugenics capital up to 1979 when such practices were outlawed. Eugenics, a system of population control seeped in systemic racism and sexism is an othering of major proportions by the politically powerful and elite. Eugenics reared its ugly head not once but twice. “Belly of the Beast,” (2020) directed by Erika Cohn, a Peabody and Emmy Award-winning director tells the more recent story. Produced by Angela Tucker (dir. “All Kinfolk, Ain’t Skinfolk”), it is now streaming on POV.org
Shot over a period of seven years, we meet two amazing warriors– Kelli Dillion and Cynthia Chandler and many supporting cast who are just as phenomenal. They don’t don capes or fly through the air, but they could. We meet women whose stories are represented here legs dangling from examine table(s) before tucked in stirrups. Women who risk retaliation to tell this important story.
—20,000 people were sterilized forcefully and through deceptive procedures in Sunny California pre-1979. If a person was poor or “insane,” “criminal,” or “unfit,” Mexican or Black, the state facilitated the person’s sterilization. Yep, there were big bucks in decreasing the population of unfavorables.
At the height of Eugenics II— post-1979, Chowchilla, California, was the epicenter for this insidious secret mission to systematically rid the state of less favored populations, incarcerated mothers: Black woman, poor women, Latinx women, Indigenous women and others. California legislators were broadsided. No one knew these sterilizations were taking place because they thought the practice outlawed. Not so, for incarcerated women. This profitable secret might have remained secret except for one woman, Kelli Dillion.
When she chose life instead of death, self-defense cost Kelli 15 years of her life, the years she would have spent raising her two sons who were teens when she returned. Time can’t be returned, but Kelli lost something else just as precious, something she had not imagined losing. It was stolen from her, taken without her consent.
City of Los Angeles Commissioner, now Co-Chair of Empowerment Congress Southeast and Executive Director of the Non-profit, Back to the Basics, Kelli’s ordeal began when she complained of pain in her uterus and the doctor scheduled her for exploratory surgery. He told her that he saw cysts and said if he found any malignant cells he would perform a hysterectomy. Later when Kelli awakened from the procedure the doctor told her everything was fine. Translated, Kelli heard there was no cancer and she had all of her reproductive equipment in tack.
When she started to lose weight and began having menopausal symptoms and she didn’t get any answers from prison medical staff, she wrote a letter to Justice Now, a prisoner advocacy organization in Oakland, California. Cynthia Chandler, co-founder and lead attorney, subpoenaed Kelli’s medical records and had the heartbreaking task of reading medical records to Kelli detailing what happened to her.
Kelli’s dreams were shattered. There was no reason for the sterilization other than the California Corrections medical contractors’ decision to save the state money by decreasing this woman and other women’s ability to bring children into the world. There was this unspoken narrative that certain women were not fit mothers and that it was a tax savings to sterilize them “while everything was out on the table. A couple snips and it’s done,” a nurse who set up an ObGyn clinic at CCWF said.
It was as if the women were felines not human beings with rights and feelings. One doctor would almost forcibly make women agree to sterilization if they were having a second or third child, his nurse responsible for gathering the signatures. She stated after the bill’s passage ending the practice that she thought sterilization was useful and did not regret her role in a process that left 100s of women unable to bear children.
Justice Now launched an investigation and letters from incarcerated women spoke of pressure to sign medical forms while cut open and in various states of consciousness. One women shared being forced to have a C-section when she was perfectly capable of vaginal childbirth. “Why would I want to have major surgery?” She says. While in the operating room she was asked to sign a form agreeing to the tubal ligation. Justice Now and Corey Brown,journalist, at the Center for Investigative Journalism (CIJ) uncovered tubal ligations connected to these C-sections which cost the state of California $100,000s of dollars. The interviews and surveys sent into CCWF, and the stealth meetings on the prison yard where documents exchanged hands led organizers like Justice Now and California Coalition for Women Prisoners to learn the forced sterilization was bigger than the organizers had imagined. We hear the voices of these women and their stories read aloud in the film narrative. (I met some of these women myself on legal advocacy visits with CCWP. One woman said the doctor told her a hysterectomy would help her headaches. She suffered from mental illness.)
One loses her agency once she dons an orange garment and a number replaces her name, which made it hard for the team at Justice Now to identify the scope of the travesty given the anonymity of its victims. The Center for Investigative Journalism and Justice Now, which has on its board women who are incarcerated and also the formerly incarcerated, pushed the State of California legislature to ratify and enforce new legislation to stop CDCR from sterilizing incarcerated women.
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Governor Jerry Brown signed SB1135 Sept. 25, 2014, new legislation specifically including prisons in the eugenic ban, yet, in the federal prison system here in California and elsewhere in the country, not to mention the other state prisons, sterilization is still happening. To sterilize a person is to shred said person’s humanity—and for it to continue in other legislative bodies like the federal government makes one question what kind of “beasts” are these in government office.
Mary J. Blige says in an interview with Larisha Paul at “U Discover Music” that when she heard Kelli’s story “I immediately knew I wanted to be involved, so I teamed up with Nova Wav and DJ Camper to write a song that would amplify the voices of women in prison. No one has the right to make decisions about a woman’s body without her consent and ‘See What You’ve Done’ is an indictment, a testimony, a call to be strong, and an anthem for a movement whose work isn’t done yet.”
Mary J. Blige sings in “See What You’ve Done,” that “too many people are invisible,” that the wounds and damage are irreversible. “That it ain’t over until the crime against these women is acknowledged [. . .]”
“What’s going on,” Blige sings.
“When I gotta fight for a right that is rightfully mine
“What’s going on
“When the world can decide if a caged bird flies or ever gets a chance to grow
“Too many people are invisible
“It’s a problem
“How can we ignore what’s going on
“I got questions I need answers
“It’s been too long [. . .]”
There is no reversing the travesty of justice. These women will never be able to bear children again, yet “[the women] are fighters”
“We won’t lay down, we’re survivors,” she sings.
All my scars are my reminders [. . .]
Cause it ain’t over.”
As California looks to establish a commission on reparations for African American descendants of enslaved people (AB3121), the persons sterilized should be compensated monetarily. Kelli is currently supporting “California reparations bill AB3052, which provides justice and compensation for the survivors. Should it pass, it is evidence that California has a willingness to acknowledge the medical injustices, the medical malpractices, and the lack of respect for human life for people of color, in which they have suffered at the hands of the people who were supposed to preserve it and protect it.” The criminal legal system needs to step up and reform its still inadequate medical care for women, especially women who are aging and now at risk for Covid-19. “Belly of the Beast” closes with a brief look at the fallout from the legislative victory four years ago—now incarcerated women at CCWF are denied reproductive care or made to wait unnecessarily for treatment. It is appalling that taxpayers pay for the healthcare for politicians—most, if not all, able to afford their own coverage, while for the more vulnerable among us—there are no services. Nonetheless, this win against the powerful CDCR is encouraging and can serve as a blueprint for continued systemic change.
