The professor, advocate and veteran of multiple political campaigns reflected in the latest episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward on her journeys to both survivor advocacy and politics—and the ways in which our political structures reinforce the injustices survivors face writ large across the country.

Vanessa Tyson, an associate professor of politics and chair of the Department of Politics at Scripps College, has spent a lifetime searching for justice in political and movement spaces—working both on presidential, Senate, and state and local campaigns, and within organizations advocating for survivors. 

Tyson’s 2018 book, Twists of Fate: Multiracial Coalitions and Minority Representation in the US House of Representatives, explores structural inequality in the U.S. In 2020, she took aim at it yet again when she launched a campaign for the California Assembly explicitly centering survivors and women’s rights.

As part of the fourth episode of the Ms. Studios podcast Looking Back, Moving Forward, I talked to Tyson about the urgency of repairing our political system, how lopsided power structures reinforce the injustices survivors face across the country, what a future without violence might look like—and how we can get there.

Tyson is joined in this episode by civil rights and employment law attorney Debra Katz, VAWA pioneer and law professor Victoria Nourse, former Ms. writer and editor Ellen Sweet, and The Age of Sex Crime author Jane Caputi.

Together, we traced 50-plus years of feminist writing and advocacy confronting sexual harassment, rape culture and intimate partner violence—and outlined what it will take, in the courts, legislatures and our communities, to finally break the cycle.

This interview had been edited and re-organized for clarity and length.

Carmen Rios: I know you have a deeply personal journey with this work. What has motivated you to be such an advocate, to speak out and to make the personal political? What has been your motivation to center that work in a lot of what you do?

Vanessa Tyson: I think I’ve always been political—not I think; I’ve always been political. I dragged my mom to vote for Jimmy Carter when I was 3-and-a-half years old. Politics has always been in my blood in some way, shape or form. 

I can’t exactly pinpoint why, except that I was a little obsessed, when I was a kid, with this concept of fairness. Because—fairness on whose terms? When and where do we get to this place called ‘fair’? Because it sounds like a lovely utopia, but so far I haven’t really seen it. 

When it came to actually actively speaking about what happened, or events that took place in my own life where I was perpetrated against, I didn’t become more vocal about my personal experience until I was in graduate school. I was still involved with activities like Take Back the Night and stuff like that when I was an undergrad, but I wasn’t public about the fact that my father had been convicted of double-digit counts of felony child molestation when I was 8 years old. I left that out of the equation, and very few of my friends knew.

When you talk about child sexual abuse, it’s almost as if it’s not polite conversation, particularly if it happened to you. Usually what ends up happening, in various ways, is that I find myself comforting the person who I’ve told, because they’re upset about it, which might be a little taxing. It’s a little exhausting to try to comfort people because they can’t handle the trauma that you experienced at like 6 years old. Let’s just be honest. 

How are individual citizens expected to survive in a society that is grossly unfair, grossly unequal? What does it mean that so many women, in particular, have to shoulder the burdens of violence and abuse in our day-to-day lives? What would a world look like where victims of violence aren’t simply here to survive, but are here to thrive?

Vanessa Tyson

It started when my advisor had just left the University of Chicago, and he had gone to Harvard. I’m a grad student in the Cambridge area, Boston, and I remember going to see this documentary that was being screened at the Kennedy School, and the documentary was called Rape Is. It must’ve been 2002. And it was produced by Diane Rosenfeld, who teaches about women, violence and the law at Harvard Law School. 

There was a panel following this documentary, and it was brilliant. It was these amazing women talking about the prevalence of violence against women in the United States, the prevalence of sexual violence, in particular; the glorification and glamorization of violence against women, as if this was normal and acceptable. One woman even made a comment—this was in the documentary—when discussing the dynamic of Desiree Washington having gone to Mike Tyson’s hotel room late at night. She acknowledged that, yes, that probably was not the smartest move—but the punishment for being stupid isn’t rape. 

When we try to think about dynamics that women are told to endorse: Be trusting, be genuine. Implicit amongst this is kind of like an obedience. The punishment for being trusting, or naïve, or just plain ignorant, does not mean that someone, therefore, has license to commit horrible acts against us. I mean, hell, look at Congress. If the punishment for stupidity was rape, I’m not sure how many of them would necessarily make it through. I say this as a political science professor. Take that for what it’s worth. 

I see this video, this fantastic documentary, and I’m so moved because it was all about people on the frontlines—either rape survivors themselves or persons working at rape crisis centers, who were doing their best to help women heal, and it made me think about what I could do. And it was just about that time that the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center was actually forming an official survivor speaker’s bureau, and I was asked if I would take part in it, and so I did. And thus began a journey, in January of 2003, where I started giving talks to the Boston Public Health Commission, the Massachusetts State Sex Offender Registry Board. 

I did a press conference in the Massachusetts state House in Boston with the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts. I was really very open, at least within these certain circles, about my experiences as a child, how they affected me both as a child and as an adult. 

You’ve got to hope that you can turn lemons into lemonade. That’s what I tried to do.  

Rios: Yep, absolutely. It’s a long and winding road, and I feel like that’s true for so many of us, in so many ways, in feminism. We’re here for a reason. 

All this ultimately leads you to running for office with a platform that explicitly talked about survivors’ rights, survivor justice. And of course, you’re a political scientist. Talk to me a little bit about those connections for you. Where does policy connect back to  social change for you—this idea that we can break cycles of violence, end a culture of violence, and create a more supportive culture for survivors?

Tyson: So many of us were very devastated by the fact that an adjudicated sex offender, a convicted felon, was reelected to the presidency of the United states. Nothing good comes from this. 

That said, in terms of trying to connect policy and practice, along with theory—again, I’m going back to fundamental fairness. My focus has been primarily about empowering and vocalizing the needs of minority communities, marginalized groups. And that includes women, that includes all persons of color, that includes immigrants, that falls under a larger umbrella of human rights. 

When I’m teaching politics, what I care about is humanity—writ large but also writ small. How are individual citizens expected to survive in a society that is grossly unfair, grossly unequal? And what does it mean that so many women, in particular, have to shoulder the burdens of violence and abuse in our day-to-day lives? 

I always think to myself: If we could take away racism, if we could get rid of all these horrible -isms, and phobias, and what have you—what would the world look like? What would a world look like where victims of violence aren’t simply here to survive, but are here to thrive? 

Running in politics is also about impacting the dialogue and the agenda, whether or not you win. It’s about setting the agenda. 

This is something that’s discussed in political science a lot, but it’s not discussed outside of political science, which is how certain individuals and certain personalities have managed to reshape U.S. policy debates. This is important because if you don’t have people who are in the room—and it doesn’t matter where we’re talking about, it could be a political debate, boardrooms. If you don’t have the kind of diversity that is necessary—not optional necessary—there is a greater likelihood that policies will be poorly formulated, that they will be not only ill-advised, but that they will have unintended consequences.

I want more women at the table. I want more women of color at the table. I want more women who have actually survived various obstacles and can speak to the types of policy changes that would better enable young girls, elderly women, everybody in between to thrive in our society.

We have a society that allows particularly women, but persons who have been victims of trauma, to fall through the cracks.

Vanessa Tyson

Rios: You touched on this idea that, right now, we have a lot of men in power who are credibly accused predators. They’re on the Supreme Court, they are the president, and we know there’s lots of others as well. It adds insult to injury that they’re also advancing an anti-woman, very anti-survivor agenda. 

How did we get here? How did we get to that point in this country where he didn’t just get elected—he got reelected.

Tyson: To a certain extent we live in a culture that has always been highly patriarchal, highly white supremacist. I don’t think anybody who has studied history and has looked at this would think otherwise. There are certain questions about whether or not we’ve always been, right? 

Forgive me, I’m going to give a doom-and-gloom assessment. Because I don’t exactly have fond memories of the Reagan era. I have memories of terms that were developed, like ‘crack whores.’ I remember Ronald Reagan talking about ‘welfare queens.’ This was all a means of trying to denigrate women who didn’t have money, who had never been offered stability—and particularly, for women of color and Black women, this was a way to demonize us, to act as if this country wasn’t built upon our serving as chattel. 

I don’t know of a time in U.S. history where I can point to and say, ‘hey, Black women were doing really well.’

My job as a political scientist is to offer the critical theory, but also to offer the critical history necessary to better address the unique positions of women, particularly those who have been impacted by intersecting identities and intersectional oppression. 

So, case in point, when you look at the movements, particularly for civil rights in the United States, there has been a tendency amongst civil rights scholars to not centralize the Black women’s experience—in fact, to subjugate it and never talk about the dynamic of raping Black women’s bodies, and the fact that we’ve never truly had control. 

I don’t know that American society, that U.S. society has ever been fair to Black women, in particular. And when you look at certain statistics and find out who is poorest, time and time again, you’ll find that it’s African American women. Black women have never had adequate access to healthcare. 

I remember years ago I was writing a senior thesis on Black feminism and the civil rights movement, and I was on the phone having a conversation with Angela Davis because, what else are you going to do in 1998 except try to wield some brilliance as a 20 year old? Bill Clinton had, only a couple of years prior, signed in a new crime law, which would be actually devastating to Black communities. And she talked about the fact that, at Princeton, my undergraduate alma mater, students had disproportionate access to antidepressants, for instance. 

When you’re looking at what’s happening in various communities that aren’t so privileged, people would often self-medicate, for instance, by smoking marijuana. And there’s this double standard—persons who already have tremendous access to wealth and various resources readily available only get more and more resources available to them; meanwhile, those who are trying to struggle through daily life and just get by are criminalized without any kind of conscience of what they’re going through, or what they’ve already been put through. We have a society that allows particularly women, but persons who have been victims of trauma, to fall through the cracks. 

And yet, we simultaneously try to pride ourselves in ideas of meritocracy, blah, blah, blah. But whose meritocracy is that? It’s not mine. And it doesn’t seem that being a good person merits much of anything, but you can be a convicted, adjudicated sex predator and felon and become president of the United States.

My concern, in terms of politics, is the fact that if the voices aren’t in the room, if the voices aren’t in the political debate about what our priorities should be, making a normative case for fairness is critical. It is completely essential. And what fairness looks like is wholly subjective, so we need at least some diversity to improve the deliberation and the quality of policy outcomes in this country. 

Rios: I’m curious if there are things—when it comes to these intersecting issues, survivor justice—that you’re concerned about, that you’re focused on, that are haunting your mind the way that they’re haunting so many of ours? 

Tyson: On the one hand, I would say I don’t even know where to begin. On the other hand, given the fact that my town has been experiencing ICE raids since June 7, I’m extremely upset with how people are being subject to severe trauma and devastation, abduction, by so-called ICE members, but we don’t know if they’re actual ICE employees. We don’t know if they’re volunteers. We don’t know who they are. We can’t see them because they wear masks. 

People are being disappeared. This is decimating entire communities. What I’m thinking right now, based upon my own personal background, is how much damage will this trauma do to not only to this generation, but to the generations coming after us? There is a tremendous amount of harm that can’t be undone once it’s done. You have an administration that would willy-nilly break everything, but in such a malevolent fashion that there is no empathy, there’s no kindness, there’s no compassion, and that’s got to change. 

We live in a culture that has always been highly patriarchal, highly white supremacist. I don’t think anybody who has studied history and has looked at this would think otherwise.

Vanessa Tyson

I’ve been working in politics in one form or another, since I started volunteering when I was 12, and there are lots of good people out there. But I want those good people to focus on their education, to focus on critical thinking, to understand when misinformation is being spread deliberately by people who would lie to you through their teeth to make money. 

And when I think about how we got here, back to the initial question—this downturn that we’ve seen over the last 25 years started with Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court case, which basically decided the outcome of the 2000 presidential election. Because you wouldn’t have had John Roberts and Samuel Alito opening the floodgates of money into our democracy. 

Right now what we’re seeing is a bloodbath, and it’s a bloodbath that’s built on this idea that money is speech, and therefore it shouldn’t be encumbered, despite the fact that so many people in the United States don’t have any money and thus have far lesser voice in politics. Instead, we’re increasingly run by billionaires. 

I might’ve been staff on Gore 2000—take that for what it’s worth—and then Gore-Lieberman. My life has been a long series of disappointments.

Rios: I’m asking you all these questions about how we got here. What about where we could be instead? If we had a political system, and a culture, that weren’t inherently violent, that were preoccupied and concerned with compassion, and empathy, and care for those who have been traumatized, for survivors of all stripes—what would it necessitate? What would have to change? 

Tyson: I can use my imagination to talk about the United States that I’d like to see. People would be much more productive if we weren’t dealing with posttraumatic stress disorder. People would be, hopefully, much more honest and directly able to better express their emotions, instead of repressing them and then acting out in violent ways. We’d see heightened self-awareness and emotional processing. ‘What am I feeling and why am I feeling it now?’ 

These might be basic, but I don’t know that most human beings can actually answer this. Instead we are constantly reverberating back and forth from here to there and everywhere because we don’t know how we feel, but we’re reacting nonetheless. Case in point, felon-in-chief. I almost miss the days of covfefe. 

There are many books that I love—many, many books. I grew up on books. They were all about imagination. 

One of the books that changed me the most and influenced me the most as a child was Madeleine L’Engle’s, A Swiftly Tilting Planet. It was the third in her series, which started with A Wrinkle in Time and then A Wind in the Door, but especially Tilting Planet, in so many ways, was about path dependence—about tracing back the origins of violence and tracing back the origins of hate. When did it start? How did it start? How can we save what’s good and let go of all the hate that’s been passed down from generation to generation to generation, all the insecurity, all the depression, all the anxiety, and instead live life to our fullest and embrace each other, and embrace difference? Because it’s nothing to be afraid of. 

I don’t recall that she actually had an answer to that, but it was more the fact that when we think about when and where we might see nuclear disasters of epic proportion, we’re edging closer to that as a possibility, as a reality, and none of this seems new when you look at history. 

Instead we have to think about how we better enlist human nature for good, and for compassion, and for empathy and towards giving others grace. I’m not sure how that starts, but I have to imagine that we practice it in our every day, in every way possible, because maybe one little thing will help. You don’t know what’s going to help. 

I tried to be nice in high school. It was very important to me, and not just nice on the surface, but just to be warm and kind. There’s a relatively well known activist that I’ve known since high school and I didn’t realize this, he told me years after the fact—apparently there was a point where he was very depressed, but he told me that my warmth and my kindness saved him when he was feeling desperate. And I had no idea. I was just being me, wandering around smiling for no apparent reason, I got that from my mother, but nonetheless it impacted his life in a positive way. I don’t remember what I did or said, I just know that to him it made all the difference in the world, and I’m grateful. And he’s still a good friend. 

Practice gratitude, practice generosity, practice kindness. 

I’ve got to believe that love will win, but that doesn’t mean that I’m giving up any fights. Sometimes you have to fight for those you love. You have to stand up to bullies and you have to make clear, ‘not today Satan, not on my watch.’ I’m tired, I am perimenopausal, and I don’t have to take it today. Maybe tomorrow, not today. 

Rios: When you think about survivor justice and ending violence, what would your marching orders be for the movement at-large for the people in power? What are the laws, or the policies, that you believe that activists should be focused on? What do you think should be the goals that we’re carrying forward in this moment, and beyond it? 

Tyson: Amongst other things, I want money out of politics—shocker!—and I’m thinking structurally. 

I teach a wide array of courses that probably would go on the list of courses to be eliminated by the current administration. I teach Intro to Public Policy. I teach Women in Public Policy. I teach Environmental Policy in the United States. I teach a course called Marginalized Communities. I teach Black Americans and the Political System. I also teach Research Methods. 

When I think about what I’m teaching, I try to draw the connections and the parallels where students aren’t necessarily looking. 

I want more women at the table. I want more women of color at the table. I want more women who have actually survived various obstacles and can speak to the types of policy changes that would better enable young girls elderly women, everybody in between to thrive in our society.

Vanessa Tyson

I teach all about lead poisoning in my Environment Policy class. If you look at where lead is centered, where you find the highest levels, the highest concentrations of lead pipes, the highest levels of lead paint, you will find that it’s disproportionately poorer communities that have higher levels of violence per capita. When you think about lead you have to think about its implications. If you’re suffering from lead poisoning—and lead can also be inhaled through fumes, it can be ingested through eating or drinking, et cetera, even brushing your teeth if you’re using the tap water—lead can lead to behavioral problems, and it can lead to cognitive impairment. 

When you think about this in context, you have so many children who are suffering from lead poisoning, so many workers, whether we’re talking about big factories, whether we’re talking about employees dealing with lead in the air in their workplaces—people are suffering from lead poisoning. It is causing them cognitive problems, which is making them, less rational and more prone to violence. 

What I want my students to do, what I want everyone to do, is start drawing the connections and the parallels that actually show how structural inequality manifests in virtually every policy realm that we have. There is no one-size-fits-all to this. It is an amalgam of gross inequality that has only been exacerbated by the realities that people in power are okay with horrible atrocities happening to someone else. Just as long as it’s not happening here, just as long as I don’t have to see it. ‘I’ll drive on the freeway so that I don’t have to see poverty. I’ll take the long route because that might be a dodgy neighborhood.’

Maybe it would help if you actually saw the dodgy. Maybe it would help if you actually had to confront the discomfort of knowing and witnessing the pain of others. And some people do that because we’re masochists, but most people don’t, and that’s one of the greater barriers to injustice that is right under our noses.

Rios: When you think about survivor justice and all these intersecting areas, what changes do you believe or hope that we will see in the next 50 years?

Tyson: I want so much to change that I wouldn’t know where to begin. 

I want more persons from disadvantaged backgrounds and diverse backgrounds to be sitting in the higher echelons of power. I want money out of politics. I want environmental justice, always. I want smart, pragmatic policy makers who operate with a level of empathy and understanding while they craft policy as opposed to being basically handed legislation by corporate interests. 

I don’t really think the world needs billionaires. I’ve been told that hoarding isn’t good for anyone, so hoarding money when other people are dying really isn’t kosher. Instead, I want good people of sound mind to start focusing, if they haven’t already, on what leadership means and how we recruit and sustain leaders who will uphold the central tenets of our democracy. Because right now we’re seeing an unparalleled amount of democratic erosion to the point where this democracy doesn’t really look like a democracy anymore. 

We have to think about how we better enlist human nature for good, and for compassion, and for empathy and towards giving others grace.

Vanessa Tyson

My immediate call is that I want people to vote, damn it, in the 2026 elections and the midterms. Vote like your life depends on it, because it does. Vote like the future of your country depends on it, because it does. And I want them to show up again in 2028 and I want them to do their best to rally the troops. I know it feels hard, and it’s okay to lick your wounds. 2024 hurt, it really, really hurt, but sometimes we have to do these things. We have to rise to the challenge not for ourselves, not for our peers, but for generations to come—because they do deserve better than what we’re handing them.

It’s incredibly important to try to hold people accountable for the things that they say and do. Keep the receipts. While none of us are perfect by any stretch, and nor should we be, we’ve got to stop being perfect and start being awesome. We have to figure out our true north and start following it. 

Our politics, our political situation right now seems to be largely derived from convenience and expedience.  It’s inconvenient that ICE has been in my community for the last month and a half, right, inconvenient. But it is not expedient to watch and do nothing. It might be expedient in the short-term, but we need to focus on long-term realities. Because if they’re coming for a certain group now, they’re coming for the rest of us next. Don’t let expedience get in the way of long-term goals of justice and equality, and basic fairness. 

I have made some decisions where it’s like, ‘Vanessa there’s a thin line between brave and stupid. But try to be brave and set a path for others to follow.’