"I was gang-raped by three men in the lobby of my building. It was my third time; the first was when I was nine. I think my husband set the whole thing up. He beat me for being raped." -Kim, age 37
"He told me all along about how he beat me because he cared." -Blondie, age 21
"My husband started abusing my son when I wouldn't have sex. One day we were all hungry, and my son was crying. He beat him so badly I was really scared. He tied him up and made me have sex while my son was under the bed. When it was over, I rushed to get my son, but he wasn't breathing. I was charged with second-degree homicide for failure to protect my child." -Sebina, age 32
"He hit me in the head and I lost consciousness. He was still hitting me when I came around, and I just lost my mind. I took a metal stick I always carry in my bag and beat him in the head. I really didn't mean to kill him." -Janet, age 46
"I was raped by my husband, then forced to prostitute, raped while waiting for a john, had my money stolen. Since I've been here I found out I have HIV [and] PID. I'm an addict and an alcoholic. I didn't start out this way." -Doreen, age 26
Murder, rape, assault, theft, drug addiction -- all infused with passion. This is the stuff of great novels. But the quotations above are the real-life prose of African-American women incarcerated at Rikers Island Correctional Facility.
Beth Richie has put these compelling and unsettling tales of terror in the national spotlight in her just-published book, Compelled to Crime: The Gender Entrapment of Battered Black Women (Routledge). This study focuses on a group of 26 African-American women who were assaulted by male partners and arrested for their various responses to this abuse. Compelled to Crime offers a gallery of portraits of women who are led to a life of crime and violence and entrapped by gender roles, loyalty to the African-American community and to abusive intimates -- boyfriends or husbands.
On a snowy afternoon, I visited with Dr. Richie over cups of coffee in her Upper West Side living room and talked with her about her life and her work. "As the twig is bent..." certainly applies to her formative years. Richie's parents and grandparents were all civil rights activists, so she grew up thinking about how to change the world. An outspoken feminist from an early age, she recognized that violence against women was the most overt expression of male dominance. Eventually, she became a social worker in East Harlem.
There she was stunned by the number of battered women seeking help at the acute care clinic where she worked. A quick tally of patient records showed that nearly 40% of walk-in clients evidenced either direct signs of abuse-lacerations, broken bones and the like- or indirect consequences such as sleeplessness, anxiety, stress- induced obesity, or family problems. Workers felt impelled to intervene, but investigation revealed that there were virtually no community resources to help residents address domestic violence.
"Because this health clinic was so accountable to the cultural dynamics of the community, it was very clear we couldn't say to people, 'Go downtown to 42nd Street and thereUll be a womenUs counselor there'," she recalls. "We had to create our own site."
Thus was born the Violence Intervention Program (VIP) of the East Harlem Council for Human Services, one of the nation's first such projects for women of color. Now independently run by energetic second- and third-generation community activists, VIP has recently moved into a beautiful newly renovated tenement building, where it provides counseling, support groups, a hotline, child care, and safe apartments for abused women and their children. A special surprise for visitors is the "Beth Room," a comfortable counseling space decorated all in the color purple, Richie's favorite. "Of all the things I've done in my life, working with that group of women to start that project is one IUm most proud of," she says.
Increasing national visibility in the field of domestic violence led Richie to Hunter College in 1985, first as an adjunct, then a substitute, and finally as full-time faculty. While working at Rikers Island to establish Hunter College Health Link project, she began to recognize that criminal activity and domestic violence were related phenomena. "I had an encounter with a client of our battered women's program one day," Richie recalls. "She had disappeared, and I asked her what had happened. She said, 'At the time I was using the battered women's program, I was also working as a prostitute, shoplifting, and selling drugs. I felt more and more alienated from the services because of all this discussion about being a victim of a crime. I was a victim of a crime, yes, but I was also a criminal'."
Richie drew the painful conclusion: "I felt like we had, through all our hard work to criminalize violence against women, categorically excluded women who were involved in illegal activity from seeking services. I was setting up programs that couldn't accommodate her experience."
This unsettling recognition led Richie to do what any good community activist would do: Listen more carefully to people affected by the problem. Taking the opportunity afforded by her Rikers connections, she began to spend more time listening to the stories of women there. A pattern quickly emerged. The violence these women were surviving, the crimes they were charged with, and their social and developmental circumstances all painted a very logical but frightening picture: They were headed down a grim path with seemingly no safe exit, a path that often led them into a vicious cycle of crime and entanglement with abusive partners. Many of them were compelled to commit the crimes with which they were charged.
Richie formalized her inquiries into doctoral research in sociology, where she took a social-constructionist perspective on what she was hearing. This led her to develop the concept of "gender entrapment." The women whose lives she recounts have been "set up" for crime and battering by their position in their household of origin, their household's position in the local community, and the community's position in society. Part of this preparation for poor, young black women, of course, is simply growing up in a world of stigma, stereotypes, prejudice, overt racism, and discrimination. But it is also a world in which they learn a deep sense of cultural loyalty and loyalty to their family members-- particularly the men.
The profile of gender entrapment includes, for example, a girl's sense of responsibility for boy children and her need to do whatever she can to protect them. This subtle clash of social ideology and cultural loyalty puts women in a position where their men could say to them, "If you don't do this, I'll kill you," or "I'll kill your kids," or "burn your house down," or "turn you in to the police," and the women feel trapped into compliance. Two comparative research samples of incarcerated women- white women who were battered and African-American women who were not- revealed to Richie that the dynamic described, although related to race and culture, was primarily one of gender.
This theoretical model explains an experience of a particular group of African-American women. "Now, whether gender entrapment as a construct works for other groups," says Richie, "it doesn't work in the same way. And part of what I had hoped to do was contribute to the body of feminist literature that assumes that gender is a common category. So sometimes womenUs studies folks say 'This isn't gender entrapment; this is race entrapment," as if you can't be black and a woman at the same time, or that one privileges the other."
But as she learned more about the women's lives, Richie also began to adopt a more interactionist position. "Symbolic interactionism is a sociological construct that describes how identity and social structure are actually co-influences on behavior," she explains. "And in particular how much of our behavior is a social performance, in which we determine what the appropriate roles are and do our best to enact them. It implies judging each social encounter and making a best guess what our social roles should be. Most sociological studies of black families haven't looked very much at the richness of our inner psychic life. It's as if, when people are poor and black, they don't have an internal life. They don't have drives or needs that are separate from the poverty and racism that they experience."
Influenced by CUNY sociologist and psychoanalyst Catherine Silver, who served on her dissertation committee, Richie began to look at the different ways people came to their sense of identity and the many layers of those identities, as generated by social roles, including the role of "criminal." Leith Mullings, a CUNY anthropologist who has studied the black family, was a second committee member, and the third was Judith Lorber, who brought a social constructionist perspective on gender. Richie was also influenced by Nancy Chodorow's writings to address women's early childhood experiences with their caretakers.
The material for Compelled to Crime was collected through life- history interviews conducted between 1992 and 1994. Asked why she thought the women so generously shared their stories, Richie replied, "I think women found it therapeutic to tell their story. I listened with interest. I could relate." These battered women were frequently referred by other inmates or through other prison services. "I gave them a chance to explain in detail what had happened to them and why, and there was a cathartic dimension for them, too. The verbalizing was very painful for them- and for me, too."
Rarely did she encounter a battered woman who was unwilling to tell her story and never once did she feel fearful in the inmates' presence. "Sometimes, though, I wanted them to be more self- protective. If they were asked questions, I think they felt like they had to answer them, as if they had no privacy, no sense of boundary around their own conditions or circumstances or the events in their lives. Their instinct for self-protection had been completely eroded by repeated incarceration and by insensitive public services."
On the other hand, on several occasions Richie felt fearful of officers at Rikers. "One time I walked unescorted without my I.D. Card, which was not a very smart thing to do. An officer mistook me for an inmate, and I found myself trying to explain my way through these locked gates, like 'Where was I going?' and 'Who did I think I was?' And I remember feeling very close to the inmates, like I was just one more black woman trying to sneak through the gates."
As the women's stories unfolded, Richie's life-history method provided ample opportunity for self-discovery among the women. "I asked them what it was like growing up in their family. Then I asked questions like 'What was it like in your adult intimate relationships? And what's the connection between those two?' In that manner I helped them reconstruct the path, the unique journey, that led them to Rikers. Some questions were intentionally reflective, like 'How would your life have been different if you had been a boy?' This gave them a chance to think about their gender role differently. In this way they began to analyze their own situations. "It was fascinating," she adds admiringly. "They were smart. They understood what was going on, even though most hadn't ever articulated it in great detail."
I wondered about the difficulties of opening up emotional PandoraUs boxes. "I was worried about that," Richie responded, "because I had very little control over the interview setting. I could be thrown out of the space I was using. There could be a raid. There were any number of institutional factors which made me never know whether I would finish an interview once I started it. I felt that if I could conclude in my own way, then this natural ending would leave people with a sense of being put back together." The institutional review procedure, rigorously applied through both Hunter College and Montefiore Hospital (the health service provider for Rikers), assured as safe a visit as the environment would allow.
Richie left the women a number to reach her- "provided they could get to a phone, which Rikers rarely allows." If not, they could go to the health clinic and ask someone there to reach her. She also provided a list of community support resources to contact after release. But most importantly, Richie always made an attempt to follow up with each of the women at least once. Surprisingly, she was usually successful. She continued to visit those who remained- and many did- throughout their stay.
To each woman she gave a book by a black woman that in some way represented a story similar to their lives. "One of the women suggested the idea. She asked me, 'Have you ever read that book about "the caged bird sings," or something?' She was talking about Maya Angelou's book, of course, and I thought, 'What a perfect idea!' The gift of a book tied in so well. They knew I was writing a book, and they were telling their stories, so it conveyed to them that their lives had meaning, just like the lives of the characters in Angelou's book. They loved it. And I found out that they would swap the books after they read them." As an academic, Richie was able to take three books with her each time she visited. "I wasn't able to take a pen in. There was some jewelry I couldn't wear. But I was able to take in books. I left with none."
The interviews were transformed into a book during the 1994-95 academic year, while Richie held the Women's Health Policy Fellowship at the Center for Research on Women and Gender at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Funded by the MacArthur Foundation, the Center typically invites people outside Chicago to conduct research and contribute to the formulation of health policy that will benefit Illinois women.
While in Chicago, Richie began to explore the experience of black adolescent girls with violence. "Talking with young girls made me feel both better and worse," she says. "While they were much more hopeful, I came away thinking that things are really much worse for them in terms of the violence they're experiencing in their homes, their communities, their streets and schools. Most of their lives are completely organized around the threat of violence- much more profoundly than the young women in my book. But they also had this spunk and irreverence for anybody disrespecting them that made me feel hopeful. They had that typical adolescent paradoxical sense of being completely powerful, yet totally vulnerable."
Richie notes that the relationships between certain communities in New York City and jail are becoming closer and closer. "It's almost as if the jail is part of the community. The connection between the South Bronx and Rikers is much closer than between the South Bronx and midtown Manhattan, for example. Everyone seems to know somebody whoUs been on Rikers. People go to jail all the time to visit family members. Even since writing the book, I think conditions in the communities of the women at Rikers Island have significantly deteriorated, and that includes the deterioration of outside human services."
Last fall Richie began to visit Rikers on a regular basis again to listen, this time to adolescent girls. This, her busy teaching, writing and public speaking schedules, and her continuing work with community-based organizations leave her little free time. Richie thinks of herself as a vigorous advocate for women's health. But she sees her most important role as teacher, offering courses in the Masters in Public Health program on such subjects as "Family and Sexual Violence," "Community Organizing for Health," and "Social Dimensions of Health." Each semester, she says, two or three women usually come forward after class to disclose that they have survived- or are still suffering from- sexual abuse or violence.
Her various roles provide great satisfaction. "The more I can be a role model, the more I can raise issues, the more I can confront racial and gender stereotypes in all the classes I teach, then the more I can help people think how to locate themselves in a different place and how to change the world around them. If people can think more critically about themselves and their place in the world, I think it will have some ultimate impact on whether women experience violence or not. That is the rich reward of my work."