Safety in Service: 2024 Overview
The Program
Ensuring the safety of women in elected leadership roles requires deliberate and proactive measures. In both the U.S. and globally, elected women and femmes of color experience the highest levels of online and offline hate and harassment. Often shielding the true toll of these attacks, they need comprehensive and empowering resources for themselves, their staff, and their families – and they deserve for this to be invested in and powerfully responded to as an urgent threat to Democracy.
Launched in late 2022, Safety in Service (SiS) seeks immediate, mid-term, and long-term solutions to address the escalating threats faced by Indigenous women and women of color in politics. This project creates safe healing spaces for leaders to share their experiences, reclaim their agency, and collectively contribute foundational solutions.
During the first 18 months of SiS, we collected data provided by our focus community of elected women of color to inform specific tests on possible solutions. The next phase of SiS is dedicated to WDL’s solutions focused experimentation. Addressing safety will become a core focus of all of our work across the organization.
We are creating a holistic community on and offline that elected Indigenous women and women of color can turn to for trusted support and highly informative, empowering resources that help them reach their greatest ambitions.
WHY IS THIS SO IMPORTANT IN 2024?
A 2024 Brennan Center report reinforced what we heard from our women: that these safety concerns threaten to deter them from remaining in office and engaging in vital policy work.
Our narrative collection process has helped legislators impacted by threats, violence, and unsafe environments build community and powerfully contribute to solutions to address the threats and harassment they are experiencing. This is even more important during an election year, where threat escalation is likely to increase, especially in hostile areas and races.
OUR PLAN
Recognizing the urgent need for attention and action in this critical space, WDL produced a short impact film, “Elected and Unsafe”, to highlight the depth and magnitude of this growing issue. The film was released in Feb. 2024 and will continue to be a tool for narration and a call-to-action for solutions-building. Through 2024, we will be standing up a dynamic resource hub on our website to amplify research findings, recommendations, and planning tools. We are working to scale our ability to create access to traditional and non-traditional mental health resources, as well as engaging and eventually forming a network with law enforcement allies. We will also work to direct additional collective solutions quickly to these elected women via innovative collaborations with other progressive partners.
A SOLUTIONS-BASED COMMUNITY
STARTING THE DISCUSSION: We will use our short impact film “Elected and Unsafe” as an introductory conversation starter in spaces where we can increase buy-in from and urgency among audiences and key stakeholders. We will be intentional in sharing this tool with those who can help create and implement changes and increase our capacity to bring the threats and attacks from the margins into the light.
BUILDING AN ONLINE RESOURCE HUB: We will make resources and documents accessible and easy to share with elected officials and their ecosystem, partner organizations, and allies via a resource hub housed on the WDL website. This hub is on track to launch late-Q2 2024.
CREATING A SAFE PEER NETWORKING SPACE: We will stand up a two-way communication space for our networks of women to connect and know that they are not alone.
BRIDGING THE GAP: We will build a comprehensive law enforcement* navigation map across all levels of government. We will create relationships with local law enforcement to both help inform this work and to stand up a national network of current and former law enforcement officials who are willing to be resources, whether behind the scenes or public facing.
“Given the complicated relationships many in our focus community have, or may have had, with members of law enforcement – including law enforcement being the source and/or enabler of threats – we are designing this work with those additional layers of complexity built into our planning.”
THREE MAIN PILLARS: We have identified three main categories to inform our solutions-building efforts, which are outlined on the next page: Personal/Logistical Protection, Community Protection, and Legal/Policy Protection.
SAFETY IN SERVICE PILLARS
Our main audience for these solutions is our community of elected Indigenous women and women and femmes of color, with a secondary audience of electeds’ family members and immediate staff. We will support our electeds with the tools to accomplish the below:
PERSONAL/LOGISTICAL PROTECTION
Safety Planning: Create a plan for self, family, and staff on how to handle each threat level based on The Brennan Center’s degrees of abuse (Insults,Harassment, Threats, Physical Attacks).
De-escalation Training: Learn de-escalation techniques to help reduce tension during 1:1s, open meetings, public events, etc.
Mental Health Resources: Seek out affordable, trauma-informed resources.
Digital Security/Social Media Literacy: Create strategies for digital security and safe social media practices, protect personal information, and learn how to both prevent and react to doxxing.
Security Resources: Learn what to include in crisis management planning.
COMMUNITY PROTECTION
Circle of Trust: Identify people who can hold space for you.
Network of Allies: Build a network of allies comprised of staff, community organizations/advocates/leaders, external validators, and colleagues.
Law Enforcement Allies and Advocates: Understand legal options and learn how to ask for security details. If possible, build relationships with local law enforcement.
Media/Comms Support: Learn how/when to talk about a threat, how to prepare for a tough vote or crisis comms, and how to create model public statements.
LEGAL/POLICY PROTECTION
Systemized Security Measures: Address safety concerns through policy changes, using recommendations from The Brennan Center and peer legislators who have already led successful policy changes.
Law Enforcement & Legal Experts Network: Tap into a network of allied and justice-centered law enforcement officers and attorneys.