Tribunal cites 'crimes against women
By David Behrens *Newsday
NEW YORK-For the feminists in the audience, it was a familiar catalog of victims:
The unwed mother, pressured to give up her child. The battered wife, unable to escape her marriage.
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The lesbian, badgered by a society willing only to cure or condemn.?
The welfare mother, disspirited by poverty.
The uninformed patient, victim of unnecessary medical operations.
The mother with too many children, unable to find child care.
And the aging mother, now rejected by her children.
The problems are not new, but during the first Tribunal on Crimes Against Women, they were labeled as "indictable offenses.”
The session, attended by more than 300 women last weekend, was organized by a coalition of New York feminists in conjunction with a similar 24-nation tribunal opening in Brussels tomorrow. Similar tribunals are also scheduled this week in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Denver and San Francisco.
Patterned after Bertrand Russell's 1967 tribunal against war crimes, the Manhattan session at Columbia University focused on socalled crimes and indictinents that have no standing under the law.
"But we want society to realize
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that these problems are crimes in themselves," said Judith Friedlander, an anthropology professor at the State University of New York at Purchase.
In many cases, individual women offered personal testimony about their own experiences. The principal "indictments” fell in five areas: economic crimes, crimes committed in the family, sexual crimes,
might be in order, and sterilizing poor women who do not fully understand the operation.
The public health establishment was accused of failing the poor and the psychotherapeutic establishment of forcing women to adjust to a "criminally oppressive society."
The legal system was also denounced for "favoring the rapist rather than the victim," and the
Health professions were charged with failing to inform women about the dangers of some birth control, with performing unnecessary operations and sterilizing poor women who do not fully understand the operation.
crimes against women political prisoners and medical crimes.
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The medical "crimes" were the mest specific. The health professions were charged, among other things, with failing to inform women about the dangers of some birth control methods, with performing unnecessary operations, such as mastectomies and hysterectomies, when less-serious surgery
patriarchal family system was condemned for exploiting women in a variety of ways.
Several women testified about the hardships of the "bastard" brand that they were forced to live with as children because of the social stigma of illegitimacy.
Alice Pifer of the NOW Rape Prevention Committee contended that "rape is an everyday issue for
women... that the power of rape is the power that keeps us in place. We indict all the people that buy into this male system the police, doctors, the media, the courts, the rapists, and even the families who mistreat their relatives who have been victimized by rape.'
A lesbian leader said that the indictments "should not be a plea for the righting of wrongs but a female declaration of war." She added, "We should not wallow in oppression," and denounced the stereotype of the woman as victim.
Although many of the panel members reflected the more radical sentiments of the feminist movement, the opening statement was presented by State Sen. Karen Burstein who warned against the dangers of overzealous rhetoric and within the urged harmony movement.
Referring to her own Long Island constituency, where many women are still seeking more traditional goals, she said, "I come from America, the heart of America." The women there, she said, "are not that different than you... they just don't know it yet.".
Among the women attending the tribunal were feminist theoretician Ti-Grace Atkinson, Beulah Sanders, organizer of the Welfare Rights Organization, Daphne Busby of the Sisterhood of Black Single Mothers, and poet Adrienne Rich, who read from her forthcoming book on new attitudes toward motherhood.