Jackson Free Press

Mississippi is only as strong as our women. And right now, by most economic and social indicators, Mississippi is not very strong.

As Mississippi Public Broadcasting reported this week, a national group called the New Organizing Institute recently created a database that examines gender distribution among state Legislators. It would surprise few that Mississippi's lawmakers are overwhelmingly male.

Brenda Carter, the organization's director, pointed out that white males in Mississippi compromise 41 percent of elected officials but represent just 28 percent of the state's population.

As you'll read a lot about in this issue, endemic poverty has persisted as Mississippi has refused to grant public schools funding to be considered adequate by the Legislature's own definition. Too often, women get the shortest end of the stick. And often, gender inequality goes hand-in-hand with domestic violence.

To be clear, as we report in this issue, people who abuse come from myriad socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds. But, research shows that domestic violence tends to correlate where financial and other stresses are also present. When you get right down to it, allowing poverty to persist over a generation is itself a violent act.

What's more is that we have a policy structure in this state that punishes girls by cutting off access to valuable information about sexual health and limiting, more than most other states, the ability of women to receive legal abortions.

To give credit where credit is due, there has been progress in Mississippi with the policymakers in recent years creating the Mississippi's Domestic Violence Task Force and deferring to the expertise of the advocates on the ground, working with families in shelters all across Mississippi. We hope the state's commitment to this program continues.

If we think Dak Prescott and Dan Mullen of Mississippi State and Ole Miss' Bo Wallace and Hugh Freeze are heroes for what they've done for Mississippi lately, we should also take note of the contributions of the nine Men of Character we profile this week for the work they are doing in Mississippi Coalition Against Domestic Violence's men's work group (see pages 16-25).

In the spirit of the this issue's theme of engaging men on violence, male policymakers should not wait on women's advocates to ask them to do the right thing. The reasons are simple. For one, women are already doing most of the hard work and have been for a long time. Secondly, we cannot stress enough, these are not solely women's issues; they are critical to our state's success, and it is incumbent on all Mississippians to do the work.