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Kylie Cheung is a journalist and the author of two other books on gender and power, A Woman’s Place and The Gaslit Diaries. Currently a staff writer at Jezebel, she previously worked at the culture desk at Salon and at several nonprofits where she researched reproductive health policy. Cheung holds a BA in political science from the University of Southern California and lives with her pit bull-chihuahua, Bucky.

For issue #49 of The Internationalist, Cheung sits down with Tanya Singh to discuss the themes of her latest book, Survivor Injustice: State Sanctioned Abuse, Domestic Violence and Fight for Bodily Autonomy (North Atlantic Books, 2023). In this conversation, she touches upon challenges in enacting policy changes to support survivors of gender-based violence, the intersections of reproductive rights, advocacy, the need for inclusivity and support for Indigenous activists through local policymaking and organizing.

Tanya: Policy changes in the United States, such as ensuring access to healthcare, housing, income, and safety from criminalization for abuse survivors, are touted as the most effective long-term solutions. Yet, there seem to be bureaucratic obstacles and a lack of political will hindering these changes. What do you believe could break this stagnation and bring about the necessary policy shifts?

Kylie: Bureaucratic obstacles, particularly in the federal government, have made meaningful changes that survivors can actually feel in their day-to-day lives essentially impossible. There honestly aren’t easy, sweeping solutions—a lot of breaking this stagnation and supporting survivors in meaningful ways certainly comes down to compassionate organizing and mutual aid. In terms of policy change, where bureaucratic procedure hinders much of policymaking on the federal level, local and state policymaking can hugely impact the resources survivors can access—there are a number of cities, like Portland, Austin, New York, that fund abortion access—and we can all create more change than we might realize by being more active in politics at this level.

Tanya: You discuss the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) at length in your book, especially in the context of carceral feminism, noting that it centres the experiences of white, middle-class victims. Can you elaborate on the distinction between conservative opposition to VAWA and abolitionist opposition for our readers, especially in relation to newer iterations of the law? How can we create legislation that genuinely supports survivors without perpetuating carceral systems?

Kylie: Conservative opposition to more modern iterations of VAWA, as I understand it, is rooted in new protections for undocumented abuse victims and trans women, who should obviously receive those protections. Abolitionist criticisms of VAWA take issue with how the law allocates most of its funding to local police departments and reifies the idea that law enforcement and criminal “solutions” are effective, supportive, and safe to address gender-based violence. As we’ve seen, that’s not the case. One survey from 2015 showed a quarter of women who reported intimate partner violence to the police were arrested or threatened with arrest themselves. Other surveys have shown most police believe most rape reports are false. Legislation that genuinely supports survivors without empowering the carceral system looks like funding shelters and resources for survivors. Pro-survivor legislation looks like anything that expands the social safety net—access to health care, housing, financial security, and all basic needs—so that no one has to rely on an abuser or abusive situation to live.

Tanya: In Survivor Injustice, it's clear that there's a challenge to how society views dignity in work, especially regarding sex work. And this notion, perhaps finds resonance in many societies across the world. How do you think this perspective on sex work connects to the larger issues of economic and social inequality? And could it potentially change the way we think about the value of work and individuals?

Kylie: It was important to me to address the disproportionate vulnerability of sex workers to gender-based violence and the lack of options that are available to them to safely seek justice and protection, when surveys of sex workers have shown that they’re turned away, mistreated, even attacked and assaulted by police. At the same time, this stigmatizing notion of sex work as uniquely dangerous, uniquely undignified, uniquely associated with sexual violence, is also wrong-headed, when sexual violence and misconduct are prevalent across so many lines of work, and certain workers—undocumented workers, service workers, people of colour—have limited options for recourse. When our workplaces are not safe but capitalism requires us to rely on them anyway, that’s inherently at odds with a culture of working with dignity.

Tanya: In Chapter 7 of Survivor Injustice you examine how anti-rape and domestic violence organisations were relatively quiet about the erosion of reproductive rights for survivors. Why do you think there has been a disconnect between these movements and reproductive justice, and how can organisations better address these intersections moving forward?

Kylie: I think there tends to be a cultural fixation on rape exceptions to abortion bans and what these laws mean, in particular, for people who were impregnated by rape. That’s a horrific outcome and so it’s an understandable fixation. At the same time, all abortion bans are, in themselves, innately a form of gender-based violence. So much of our discourse about the issue, is squarely hypotheticals, abstraction, like these policies are just a philosophical debate and not real-life violence, so those connections between abortion bans might not be as obvious as they should be. There’s also the unfortunate, disappointing reality that abortion is regarded as a “controversial” political issue, when it shouldn’t be, meaning national anti-rape organizations that are bipartisan institutions and rely on wealthy donors are often less than inclined to touch this issue, which I detail in the book drawing on some of my previous reporting in Jezebel.

Then there’s also the difficulty of abuse victims, sometimes, to recognize reproductive coercion in their lives. I also think it’s interesting that in Survivor Injustice I spoke to people who said their partners had tried to control their votes and for a long time they hadn't considered how political control and coercion were forms of abuse—they were experiencing so many different forms of abuse simultaneously, which absolutely makes sense. When you're already experiencing physical violence or financial control or other emotional abuse, you might not be actively identifying all of the other maybe less-obvious abusive acts that sort of slip through the cracks. If someone’s tampering with your birth control, trying to force you to become pregnant or forcing you to have an abortion, you might not readily recognize that as abusive. But reproductive abuse has such steep ramifications for whether victims will be able to exit an abusive relationship, so I hope we can talk about this more.


Tanya: In the book, we see numerous examples of how Indigenous women in the United States face a lack of compassionate healthcare, especially when it comes to reproductive caregiving. Do you have some insights or observations for our readers on how well-intentioned, non-Indigenous-led reproductive rights activism can improve to offer stronger support and amplify the voices of Indigenous activists and pregnant individuals? What steps do you think could be taken to make this advocacy more effective and inclusive?

Kylie: I think an example of well-intentioned activism from non-Indigenous reproductive rights advocates has, for example, looked like some advocates in Oklahoma suggesting that non-Indigenous abortion seekers travel to sovereign tribal land that’s not governed by abortion bans to seek abortion care. Historically we’ve seen Indigenous people, especially Indigenous women, actively endangered by non-Indigenous people coming to tribal land, so there are obvious implications with directing people to exploit tribal land in this way. Indigenous Women Rising is such an incredible group that funds and offers pregnancy-related support for Indigenous people as well as really bold thought leadership on what Indigenous reproductive justice looks like, and we should all be listening and supporting their work. Additionally, I think it’s so important to be thoughtful and critical about the issue of national reproductive rights organizations and nonprofits often having white leadership or funders, and the blindspots that naturally arise from that.

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