Equity, Human Rights and Health
Models of Care for People with Innate Variations of Sex Characteristics
Collaboratively led by Dr Aileen Kennedy, Dr Morgan Carpenter, and Bonnie Hart.
- This research seeks to develop co-designed, person-centred models of care that improve the physcial and mental health and wellbeing of people with innate variations of sex characteristics and their families, including those with intersectional disadvantages.
- The research, in partnership with University of Sydney, Intersex Human Rights Australia, Canberra Health Services, Australian National University, University of Southern Queensland, University of Queensland, UNSW, La Trobe University, University of Western Australia, Telethon Kids Institute, University of Canberra, Intersex Peer Support Australia and A Gender Agenda, will draw on the knowledge and insight of those with lived experience to transform models of care from narrow biomedical to practical multidisciplinary approaches that centre psychosocial support.
- Through this research, we will develop peer-led models of care, conduct mixed method research to understand the needs of adults and adolescents with intersex variations, and develop new bioethical frameworks in support.
For more information about this project, visit the announcement article: 'Models of Care for People with Intersex Variations'
Human Rights-informed Adaptation in Response to Climate Change related Inequalities
Led by Prof Beth Goldblatt in collaboration with Dr Cristy Clark
- This research seeks to understand the complex inequalities, including severe health impacts, resulting from climate change on a range of populations based on race, gender, class, disability, age, etc.
- This research, in partnership with Dr Cristy Clark of the University of Canberra, will draw on grounded research with NSW communities facing flooding, increasing temperatures and inadequate water supply.
- This research will inform legal responses using human rights and discrimination law to ensure equitable adaptation.
Inheriting inequality
- Social inequalities have been found, through emerging epigenetic research, to have a persistent and intergenerational health impact.
- This research claims that gender, socio-economic and racial inequalities can cause inheritable biological harm. Biological processes that turn genes off and on are triggered by traumatic experiences of inequality and manifest in health detriments such as low birth weight, cardio-vascular disorders and brain deficits. Sources of stress and trauma as diverse as child abuse, domestic violence, slavery and poverty are linked to changes in gene expression in individuals and their offspring. Inequality, it seems, is inherited biologically as well as socially.
- At this critical turning point, we need a legal framework that can recognise and respond to the harms newly identified by these scientific findings. A legal approach that recognises the bodily and intergenerational effects of inequalities would target the intransigent problem of perpetual social disadvantage for particular vulnerable groups.
- Through this research, we will develop legal responses that target and mitigate the intra and intergenerational health effects attributable to the stress and trauma of inequality and disadvantage.
Gendered Harm and Violence
Led by Prof Beth Goldblatt and Dr Jane Wangmann
- This project looks at the links between poverty, lack of services and gendered violence and how rights-based responses to material inequality can prevent and respond to violence. Beth Goldblatt has considered this issue at the level of international law for a book project on women and international law. She has written a chapter on the jurisprudence of the South African Constitutional Court on violence against women for a collection celebrating 20 years of this court. Lastly, she has completed a study of litigation and advocacy by groups working on violence against women and social and economic rights in South Africa. This research was discussed at a workshop in Johannesburg and presented at an international conference on women’s rights in Colombia in 2017.
- Jane Wangmann's research is generally concerned with how the legal system conceives of, understands, and ultimately responds to, the gendered harm of intimate partner violence. This has involved research which explores gender differences in the perpetration of intimate partner violence, and differences in the experiences of victimisation in civil protection order proceedings, and most recently in terms of differences between men and women reported to the NSW police as domestic violence offenders in sole or dual circumstances. Wangmann is also conducting research on domestic violence homicide cases to explore the interaction with the civil protection order system and breaches of those orders. Wangmann's previous work has also explored and critiqued the use of typologies of intimate partner violence have been applied or translated to the family law legal setting.
Menstruation and discrimination
Led by Prof Beth Goldblatt and A/Prof Linda Steele
- This project looks at discrimination relating to menstruation as it affects women and girls, including particular challenges for people with disabilities.
- Linda and Beth have co-authored a chapter for a Handbook on critical menstrual studies looking at the human rights dimensions of this issue.
- They also wrote a paper for presentation at the Berkeley Comparative Equality & Anti-Discrimination Law Study Group Annual Conference in Melbourne in June 2018.
Unpaid Carers and the Social Reproduction of Harm
Led by Prof Beth Goldblatt in collaboration with Prof Shirin Rai
- This project looks at the inadequacy of legal frameworks to provide for harms faced by unpaid carers of people who are ill or injured. It suggests new ways of understanding and compensating harm at national and international levels.
- The project has involved a joint paper with politics scholar, Professor Shirin Rai, of the University of Warwick, on a class action case concerning silicosis on the gold mines in South Africa.
- We drew on the photographic series of Thom Pierce documenting the litigants in the case and their families. It also involved a workshop in Warwick in June 2018 on Law, Harm and Social Reproduction.
Select publications
Beth Goldblatt, (2018) ‘Violence against Women and Social and Economic Rights - Deepening
the Connections’ Susan Harris-Rimmer and Kate Ogg (eds) Research Handbook on The Future of
Feminist Engagement with International Law, (Edward Elgar, UK), forthcoming.
Beth Goldblatt, (2018) ‘Violence against Women in South Africa: Constitutional Responses and
Opportunities’ in Theunis Roux and Rosalind Dixon (eds) Constitutional Triumphs, Constitutional
Disappointments: A Critical Assessment of the 1996 South African Constitution's Local and
International Influence (Cambridge University Press, UK), forthcoming.
Kaye, M., Wangmann, J., & Booth, T. (2017). Preventing personal cross-examination of parties in Family Law proceedings involving family violence. Australian journal of family law, 31(2), 94-117.
Beth Goldblatt, Violence against Women and Socio-economic Rights, Report from workshop held at the University of the Witwatersrand, August 2017
Rai, S and Goldblatt, B (2017) ‘Visualising the human price of gold’ Transformation, opendemocracy.net/transformation/shirin-m-rai-beth-goldblatt/visualising-human-price-of-gold
Karpin, I. & O’Connell, K. 2017, ‘Social determinants of health and the role of law’ in Farrell, A., Devereux, J., Karpin, I. & Weller, P. (eds), Health Law. Frameworks and Context, Cambridge University Press, pp. 34-47
Goldblatt, B and Rai, S (2017) ‘Recognizing the Full Costs of Care? Compensation for Families in South Africa’s Silicosis Class Action’ Social and Legal Studies, 1-24. journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0964663917739455
Karpin, I. 2016, ‘Regulatory Responses to the Gendering of Transgenerational Harm‘, Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 31, no. 88, pp. 139-153
