CCChat-Magazine_Issue-16

I was a very voracious reader and
consumer of content with regard to all of
these issues that impacted me in family
court and, going back to Rachel’s film,
I’ve interviewed several of the people in
the film because I know them personally
and from all the years of attending BMCC
(Battered Mothers Custody Conference)
and I feel like I have a set of ideas of how
we can address this.
So I created the Engendered Collective
partly so that there would be a place
where we can look for those solutions and
share those best practices so that people
who are going through similar things can
both be educated about it, because that’s
what they’re experiencing, or because
they want to be an ally and informed
towards increasing accountability for
abuse and abusive power rooted in
sexism, sexist oppression and sexual
exploitation and so domestic violence is
one of them, the family court, issues
around understanding coercive control,
making sure that we are putting together
a template to educate people all around
the world, but also working with other
groups who are trying to criminalise it.
We’re trying to do that in the US as well,
state by state and it’s helpful to come
together with other people who have
experienced it already.
"You’ve already had 5 years of this law to learn
what’s worked and what’s not worked."
Teri Yuan
about how to help with these various
issues, but also because I wanted to
elevate the best practices and people who
are in this space and show who was ‘ safe’
and who was a genuine ally, in my
opinion, because a lot of people who are
working in this space, I don’t perceive as
necessarily a genuine ally and so it’s a way
for me to also help identify who I should
reach out to.
Who are the people putting out the best
solutions and ideas so that globally we
can access it. So it’s not in any way trying
to compete with non-profits and
organisations out there , but it’s sort of
like an aggregator of the best practices
and ideas for people who are prioritising
abuser accountability and that is one of
our main tenets in our theory of change,
it’s that we are working in the advocacy
front ,
You’ve already had 5 years of this law to
learn what’s worked and what’s not
worked, so we can put forward the best
language and to anticipate the kind of
opposition we’re going to get, maybe even
create additional solutions that might not
be in the laws already, so that we can
garner the greatest support.
And the second advocacy effort that I’m
just exploring is working with this
organisation on developing a Court
Watch app which hopefully will be
available not just to litigants in the US but
also globally and the idea would be - there
is no transparency around family court
and Joan Meier’s research only deals with
the US – to collect that kind of data,
similar to the ways in which Black Lives
Matter, as a movement have been able to
use police data around racist policing and
racist policing outcomes to question and
hopefully dismantle qualified immunity
for police officers.
Making The Invisible Visible