Episode 149: Wendy Murphy on achieving gender equality under the law

en(gender)ed

On this episode of the en(gender)ed podcast, our guest is Wendy Murphy, a former child abuse and sex crimes prosecutor who teaches at New England Law School in Boston and heads the Women’s and Children’s Advocacy Project under the Center for Law and Social Responsibility. Wendy specializes in the representation of crime victims, especially women and children. She also writes and lectures widely on victims' rights and criminal justice policy, and published an expose of the American legal system, And Justice For Some, in 2007. We speak with Wendy today about the ERA, its implication for women, especially with respect to Title IX, and the need for a feminist revolution in public policy, law, and in our collective consciousness.

During our conversation, Wendy and I referenced the following resources:

• Big Love's misuse of "consent" as an analytical framework for polygamy
• The difference between the use of "consent" versus "autonomy" in crimes involving sex-based violence
• The discrepancy between how the law treats sex-based harm and other forms of harm, and how "consent" is used as a criteria, versus civil rights criteria of "unwelcome"
• Data manipulation of gender-based violence
• Dawn Wilcox's work in creating a femicide database
• How proponents of "Restorative Justice" and decriminalization of prostitution use "consent" as a justification for coercion and exploitation
• The impact of "de-sexing" of language
• An analysis of the policy impact of conflating "sex" and "gender identity"
• The inability of women to talk about "sex" as a political class
• TItle IX and Title VI and the Equality Act's implications for members of the transgender community and for cis women
• The Biden Administration's tacit and explicit opposition to the ERA
• Wendy's support for a new "Women's Party" or union

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