I have been thinking about courageous parenting. I have been thinking about it, watching you come to Congress on behalf of your slain children. It is unimaginable to me how parents who are forced to bury their children find the strength to go on. It is especially unimaginable when parents,...

Years ago, I worked at a domestic violence shelter in Rhode Island. I watched mothers come in, bruised and bloodied, clutching their small children. Many of them left their homes and sought refuge in the shelter when they found out that their husbands or intimate partners had just purchased a...

My sons are the love bugs in our family. Jonah and Gabriel are six and three, and they are full of affection for their older sister, and for me. They are the ones most likely to share hugs and kisses, to remind their sister that she is adored, and to...

Yesterday, I watched President Obama sign the Violence Against Women Act's reauthorization, to the cheers and applause of advocates and survivors. And, I kept thinking about inheritance -- the inheritance we possess as women who stand on the shoulders of so many who went before us, who fought for us,...

She exists at the margins. A bad girl. A girl who should have made other choices. She looks at the handcuffs around her small wrists. She watches the police let go of the man who just purchased her for sex. One hundred and fifty dollars to rape a 14-year-old for...

Once in our history, race determined if you were property or not. Those born Black in the American South were born into bondage. The Black body was chattel, controlled by the laws of property rather than human rights. It took the abolitionist movement, a civil war, and the courage of...

Because Malala, you were viciously targeted and shot down days before we celebrate the first "International Day of the Girl, " I write these words to honor you -- and all the girls like you, who despite the wolves of hatred, inequality, and violence, insist on your human rights.

After stepping off the podium at the United Nations, President Obama made a historic commitment -- to combating modern day slavery. Not just in remote corners of the developing world. But here in this country as well.

Many of the slaves in America today are girls. Born in this...

Is it really surprising what Congressman Todd Akin said? During an interview, the Congressman remarked that a woman who suffers "legitimate rape" cannot get pregnant "because the female body has ways to shut that whole thing down." It makes sense to me that he doesn't understand how a woman's body...

The day that Craigslist shut down its adult services section, I got a call from a mother whose daughter was still under the control of a trafficker. "You did it" she said. "The pimps are losing their minds because they can't put the girls up on the site anymore. They...

Last week, I attended my daughter's school dance recital. While her second grade class, thankfully, did a performance that celebrated the strength of their bodies, the third and fourth graders performed dances that were suggestively sexual in aesthetics and movement. The girls -- although not the boys -- were dressed...

I grew up loving the Village Voice. Nat Hentoff taught me how to listen to Billie Holiday. Jack Newfield politically baptized me through his stories and recollections of Bobby Kennedy. During the 80's and 90's, the Village Voice was also one of those rare mainstream publications in which the Black...

Last weekend, I talked to my daughter about the significance of the holidays, as she painted Easter eggs at a friend's house. When we discussed Passover, and the enslavement of the Jews, and then talked about the enslavement of African Americans, she asked me if slavery still existed.

My...

I am not a supporter, by any means, of Rick Santorum. He is a politician wedded to a politics of fear and divisiveness. His potential election as president would, I believe, endanger our nation's restored moral credibility.

At the same time, I am disappointed by the left's summary dismissal of...

This Women's History Month marks the long-awaited emergence of a new post-Roe generation of women who are reframing the women's rights movement and discourse. March is, quite possibly, revealing the first stirrings of our own Women's Spring.

Sandra Fluke's insistent dignity, and those who supported it, challenged what is so...

On International Women's Day, a young woman named "T" is testifying at a U.S. Senate Caucus roundtable on child sex trafficking. T was trafficked at the age of 10, and through her childhood, she endured being sold to at least 8 different men a night.

T's story is not an...

A few weeks ago, Congresswoman Maloney looked at the all male congressional panel on birth control and asked, "where are the women?" I want to ask Rush Limbaugh and those who applauded his tirade against Sandra Fluke: "where are the men?"

According to Rush,

"What...

Last week, the Rebecca Project for Human Rights and the National Women's Law Center released a State by State Report Card on the conditions of maternal confinement. And what we found out about the challenges and indignities endured by incarcerated mothers in the United States should concern all of us...

That's why it was so critical to take down what became the "Walmart" of child prostitution and sex trafficking online. It is now less convenient, easy, and normative to sell girls online.

We can obfuscate the dirty little secret in America that girls are being sold for sex on...

Dear Craig Newmark,

You finally responded to the open letter written by survivors who were trafficked for sex on your website. Thank you for reading their open letter which, as you know, we originally posted almost three months ago in the San Francisco Chronicle.

We were however very disappointed by...