Stigma...Addicts....Women

The stigma attached to female addicts is vastly different than that for males, for a few reasons, the greatest being motherhood (or lack of it), prostitution, and abortion. (god, just look at the most recent republican efforts to ban abortion, birth control!!!). These are highly-charged emotional issues, rendering female addicts with far more shame and guilt than their male counterparts. Society is quick to single them out, judge, and persecute them rather than dig deeper and understand that an addict is an addict is an addict; and when people are addicted, their actions are involuntary. Their ability to choose is gone. Although they may commit despicable acts to feed their addiction, when one graduates from using to being addicted, his or her actions become a necessity versus a choice. This fact is lost on those outside the realm of drug and alcohol treatment, although, in recent years, there has been more education about addiction. One only need look as far as television, i.e. Intervention, Relapse, Dr. Drew Pinsky’s Celebrity Rehab, The Biggest Loser, and hundreds of other documentaries and popular movies. Even so, female addicts still face distorted and ill-conceived perceptions about their decency. In my experience, I have witnessed no guilt worse than that of a mother who has lost, abandoned, or hurt her children. Even when she begins to understand that while she was addicted, she was unable to make any other choices, the guilt consumes her.Working in prisons, both men’s and women’s prisons, was the most rewarding, profound work I have done. It was filled with heartbreak and miracles, reaching into vast realms of human emotion. My team and I worked in a place where we had to foster growth, warmth, and hope in an unwelcoming, harsh, ugly environment. We were witness to women coming to us with stories of male guards sneaking into their cells in the deep, dark night and raping them; women who had no voice, no power, no support. We were witness to women who started doing time on the wrong foot by perhaps saying yes to the wrong convict, and then becoming property - to be bought, sold, or traded for a pack of smokes. We were witness to the stories of women from all walks of life who had been beaten, broken, exploited, raped, and oppressed in places where they learned that to survive, one had to either oppress or be oppressed; there was no in-between. We were witness to the “black market” that came to be when smoking was banned in the California prisons, and tobacco was worth more than any drug on the yard. It created yet another context for the use of extortion, blackmail, and violence. One woman in the program had convinced a younger, weaker woman to get her mother to smuggle tobacco into the prison. The mother got scared and decided to stop. The one who had been getting and selling the tobacco had friends on the outside threaten the mother and the rest of the family unless she continued to bring it in. The mother called the prison authorities, prompting an investigation. Her daughter - the younger, weaker one - was attacked in her sleep with a lock inside a sock, after which she was in a coma for over a month.