Black women have been talking about police sexual violence for a long time

Black women have been talking about police sexual violence for a long time

That is certainly true of sexual violence by police officers, described as something “no one talks about” in a recent piece on The Root. Kaba is just one black woman whose work was erased by this casual stroke of the keyboard: She has been talking about the issue of sexual violence by police for years. Most recently, she lifted up the case of Tiawanda Moore, a black survivor of domestic violence who attempted to report a sexual assault by the officer who responded to her call for help when her boyfriend was beating her.

She was instead prosecuted for recording investigating officers trying to dissuade her from filing the report. Kaba co-organized court watches, petition drives and statements of support for Moore, highlighting the systemic nature of police sexual violence, including officers’ pattern of predation on survivors of domestic violence. She is just one among many black women who have been talking about sexual assault by police officers, for a long, long time.

In fact, as noted in Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color, which features an entire chapter on the topic, black women have been talking about sexual extortion and rape by slave patrols, and later police officers enforcing Black Codes, Jim Crow, and vice laws, throughout U.S. history. As documented by historian Danielle McGuire, black women in the civil rights movement consistently called attention to sexual violence by police. In 1964, the National Council of Negro Women and Delta Sigma Theta sorority formed an interracial coalition on the issue after 24 women’s groups conducted an investigation into incidents of sexual violence by police across the South. Yet their efforts garnered neither media coverage nor widespread support from mainstream civil rights groups.

In the early 1970s, black women, including Rosa Parks and Angela Y. Davis, led a successful multiracial campaign to free Joan Little, a black woman sexually assaulted by a North Carolina Sheriff who killed the officer in self-defense. While they pointed out that sexual violence against black women by law enforcement agents was a widespread and historic problem, the issue faded from the headlines once the case was over.

Source: theroot.com