I recently had the pleasure of meeting the women and girls of the Young Women's Empowerment Project. YWEP is made up of women and girls ages 12-23 who are involved in the Chicago sex trade and street economies, either willingly or unwillingly. They have been around six or seven years and have clearly spent a lot of time and energy thinking about how to build an organization that can be an asset to women and girls in their community.
Their Motto: Girls do what they have to do to survive.
Website: www.youarepriceless.org
Values: Self-care, empowerment, harm reduction, social justice, and popular education.
Not coincidentally, these well -chosen values would work well to guide a community academic partnership.
YWEP’s research was conducted over the course of a couple of years with design help from adult allies. (Scientists). They were able to reach 205 women and girls with a combination of street surveys, interviews, and focus groups. About half of the women and girls in the YWEP study were mothers or pregnant at the time of the research.
One of their research findings was that individual violence was magnified by individual violence. The individual violence was from family, pimps, johns, other community members. The institutional violence came from systems designed to help and protect their community. The criminal justice, child welfare, the hospital/public health systems, and other social services. They gathered many stories. Stories of girls being abused in foster care, then having their babies taken away from them and put back into that same abusive system. Stories of police demanding sex in order to let girls go and then arresting them anyway. Stories of hospital workers turning away girls because they admitted to being in the sex trade or because they were transgender or queer.
After conducting this research, YWEP concluded that they should continue to work on resistance to oppression and resiliance in their community without engaging the systems that were failing them. I have a lot of respect for these strong, intellegent, resiliant girls, and when they tell me that their resources are better spent working in their own community than on the systems surrounding it, I respect that decision. Although I did offer to help them work on system-level change any time they feel ready to do that.
The total rejection of systems seems a bit extreme, but the reality is that right now in America there are so many systems that are failing the communities they serve, and many individuals who are turning their backs on those systems - some practicing resilience and resistance like the YWEP girls and some simply hopeless. These system failures are expensive, tragic, and unjust. So let’s think about how community-academic partnerships can combine evidence-based policy with organized constituencies to effect changes in those systems.
