A Fight Against Inequality Where Family and the Law Intersect
Suzanne Kim, a professor at Rutgers Law School in Newark, runs the Rutgers Center for Gender, Sexuality, Law and Policy
“To the extent that #MeToo and Time’sUp destigmatize things that have historically been considered private matters and not the kind of thing you talk about, there’s now a potential to catalyze more sustained efforts to address the important issues.”– Suzanne Kim
Before the Women’s Marches and the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements made headlines and brought issues of women's rights back to the forefront, Rutgers scholars had been working for decades as ardent advocates through their research, teaching and outreach. Over the next several weeks, Rutgers Today will be highlighting many of the women whose work is making a noticeable impact.
Suzanne Kim is focused on family—not her own, specifically, but family as it’s viewed through the lens of the law. As a legal scholar, she’s turned her own lens in the direction of the ways in which family, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and culture intersect. Kim wants to know how, for instance, the legal understanding of family privacy can be a detriment to gaining redress for domestic violence, and how a parent’s sexuality or sexual orientation can affect family matters like child custody in cases of divorce.
“My scholarship focuses, in part,” she says, “on the role that the legal regulation of family plays in reflecting and creating social inequality.”
Like her scholarship, her influence runs deep and wide. As a professor at Rutgers Law School in Newark, she teaches courses in family law, civil procedure, and sex discrimination, she is a member of the executive committee of the Association of American Law Schools Section on Family and Juvenile Law and the Section on Law and the Humanities. Kim is also the founder and director of the Rutgers Center for Gender, Sexuality, Law, and Policy and a member of the executive committee of the Institute for Research on Women at Rutgers—to name just a few examples of her commitment in the real world to the principles she studies in academia.
Given her longstanding interest in the ways in which the law has “shielded” harms within the family, she’s also conversant in the subject of domestic violence—a topic she’s covered in her classes at Rutgers Law School. Typically, she highlights the complexity of the subject—in general and as it pertains to the law, citing, for example, the connection between domestic abuse and gun violence and the impact on domestic violence of “shifting and uncertain immigration policy.” Regarding the latter, she notes that an increased sense of anxiety has been reported among undocumented survivors of domestic violence, resulting in the fear (well founded, as it happens) that “if they report on domestic violence or they go to court in order to try to pursue remedies to address it, they might get deported.”
Underreporting of incidences, of course, isn’t limited to the undocumented. “Social inequalities in the family as they related to gender,” she says, “have long been underaddressed due to legal and social concepts of family privacy.” The home, after all, has been considered the most private of arenas, and for many years the law was loath to intercede in activities that took place there. Legal notions of privacy made it hard for victims to report domestic abuse and to find legal redress for it.
Sometimes, Kim notes, victims don’t even recognize that they’re experiencing domestic abuse, since it doesn’t always take the expected form of physical violence. But abuse doesn’t always involve a bruise or a broken bone. We need, Kim says, “a broader societal recognition of the fact that there are other kinds of abuse in addition to the physical. The psychological and economic pieces are really important.”
And of course, domestic abuse doesn’t just happen between partners. “The numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,” Kim observes, “say that one in seven children experienced some type of child abuse or neglect in the past year. And a culture of silence exacerbates that.” The same range of abuse applies to the elderly, incidences of which are underreported as well. “Some estimates,” Kim says, “show that one in 10 elders have experienced abuse or neglect in the past year.”
Nevertheless, she’s hopeful that an increasing public conversation about formerly taboo subjects, as manifested, for instance, in the #MeToo movement’s focus on sexual harassment and abuse, will begin to erode that corrosive culture of silence. “To the extent that #MeToo and Time’sUp destigmatize things that have historically been considered private matters and not the kind of thing you talk about,” she says, “there’s now a potential to catalyze more sustained efforts to address the important issues.”
Read the Rutgers Magazine #WeToo story profiling Rutgers scholars here.