Kylie Cheung, a writer and reporter for Jezebel, has a book out today that is a must-read. It’s called Survivor Injustice: State Sanctioned Abuse, Domestic Violence, and the Fight for Bodily Autonomy. She recently spoke with Reckon about her work.

Reckon: Can you tell us what your book is about?

Kylie Cheung: The book is really about drawing the connections between state violence and interpersonal domestic violence. I look at how the policies and the conditions created by our government and by capitalist and carceral systems really create the optimal conditions for abuse and gender-based abuse. That’s the abortion bans that prevent people from getting the care that they need, which also, as we’ve seen from studies, increased abortion seekers’ vulnerability to domestic violence. (Of course, we also have to understand abortion bans as gender-based violence in and of itself.)

Whether it’s the prison system that is largely created by what’s called the sexual-assault-to-prison pipeline, or the everyday policies, like our for-profit health care system that can make it so that someone has to stay with an abusive partner or they might lose access to their health coverage or their housing, all of these policies that really create the conditions for interpersonal gender abuse to thrive.

I think that a big problem is that we kind of tend to see these issues as separate. That’s how I came to this project—it was actually from much narrower parameters originally. In 2020, I got really interested in reports of domestic violence increasing during the COVID-19 pandemic, which is what we tend to see after natural disasters or large-scale tragedies that might keep people in the home or might exacerbate stressful conditions or tensions within homes. And at the same time that the pandemic was happening, we were also experiencing the 2020 presidential election.

I was really thinking about the ways that people were able to safely vote. There was obviously an important push to make mail-in voting more accessible. But for years I had seen only passing coverage of domestic violence as a form of voter suppression, and it was something that I was thinking more and more about. It’s very hard to have any actual statistics about that, because of the inherently private nature of domestic violence and of voting. I really wanted to understand and to talk to survivors who had experienced domestic violence about their experiences with an abuser controlling their access to the ballot box, or their access to political information and information about elections. I started looking at that in the context of how this pandemic was affecting the election, but it just panned out into a much broader story of how, again, how state violence creates these conditions for abuse.

As writers, we know the power of naming things and putting them into these categories, but your book really works to break apart the ways we silo different issues. For example, there are lots of people who don’t think of gender-based violence as a voter suppression issue. What was it like trying to stitch all that together?

When I first thought of the concept of (the) book, I think what you were just talking about in terms of the power of naming things was really the center of what I was trying to accomplish—naming domestic violence as a form of voter suppression and naming these normalized government policies as violence.

I think that what was really important was creating a historical context for the ways we understand things like the Violence Against Women Act, and our reproductive rights policies and our prison policies. Those historical foundations are really steeped in, frankly, a lot of white supremacy. I think that creating that context early on in the book, and then kind of building on it toward a lot of the current crises that we face today was crucial. It’s impossible to understand the overturning of Roe v. Wade or the Amber Heard vs. Johnny Depp case without the extensive history of how the legal system has screwed over survivors. And, yeah,I didn’t want it to read like a history textbook, but laying some of those foundations parallel to the modern developments in all these issues was deeply necessary.

How did you deal with the challenge you mentioned earlier about there being a lack of data around domestic violence and voting?

I did have to mine data at a state-by-state level in addition to a federal level. It was the only way to try and find trends between state policy, domestic violence, and voter suppression. But yeah, there wasn’t a lot of formal data around domestic violence and voter suppression.

I was lucky enough to be able to interview people who were very open about their experiences. And I’d spoken to people who, when they were in an abusive relationship, there were just so many forms of abuse at play—to the extent a partner would control their vote or take them to the ballot box, a lot of survivors were not really registering that as a specific form of abuse. In a similar vein, I spoke to some experts and to people who had experienced reproductive coercion from an abusive partner. People who experience birth control sabotage or other attempts to control their pregnancy or their pregnancy outcomes, that usually coexists with a lot of other forms or demonstrations of control.

To what you talked about, it’s just being able to name those different forms of abuse, as abuse is just such a big, sprawling thing. But specific to the issue of voter suppression and domestic violence, that was definitely something that there wasn’t a lot of existing research on. But there was a lot of other existing research that I just don’t think there’s been enough light shined on. That was really jarring and surprising to me as I was working on this.

How do you hope people receive your book? What do you want them to really take from it?

I want the book to challenge mainstream conceptions of how we define violence. State violence comprises those horrific videos of police brutality, but it also includes the day-to-day policies that we’ve had to accept as normal, whether that’s the privatized health care system or whether that’s abortion bans that we’re supposed to just talk about some policy debate when it’s really about forcing someone to be pregnant and endure childbirth. We have to understand that as a form of gender based violence.

I think especially in the 2010s, it was very common for media depictions of sexual violence to really focus in on depicting the most traumatic forms of that, in Game of Thrones or in news reports. It created this understanding of (what society deems) “acceptable” sexual assault as grisly and violent and black-and-white. The finer complexities of sexual violence were ignored. I hope my book can transform people’s understandings of what gender-based violence entails.