The many manifestations and consequences of violence—and potential measures to address these pressing issues—were the topic of an Oct. 27 conference titled the Impact of Violence on Health and Education, presented by the Fordham Graduate School of Social Service, the Fordham Institute for Women & Girls, and the International Health Awareness Network. The conference placed special emphasis on gun violence, school violence, and sexual and gender-based violence.

“We’re living in a violent time,” said Sandy Turner, Ph.D., associate professor at the Graduate School of Social Service and director of the Institute for Women & Girls. “All we have to do is turn on the news for five minutes and we know that. I think it affects all of us in one way or another just about every day.”

Global perspectives

The event, held at Fordham University School of Law, brought together a roster of experts from a wide array of disciplines—ranging from academic researchers to medical doctors to political leaders—who gave attendees a range of perspectives on how violence impacts societies around the world and what can be done to mitigate the tragic outcomes.

Ambassador Modest Jonathan Mero, the permanent representative of Tanzania to the United Nations, described the Tanzanian government’s efforts to combat domestic violence and promote gender equality. Councilwoman Helen Rosenthal, who represents the Upper West Side in the New York City Council, described municipal legislators’ efforts to allocate more police resources toward investigating instances of sexual assault.

Protecting human rights at every stage of life

Individuals can suffer lifelong effects from violence suffered before they are even born, said Dr. Melody Behnam, an obstetrician-gynecologist in private practice. Physical or emotional abuse of pregnant women can result in lasting complications for both mother and child, she explained, ranging from maternal depression to deficits in cognitive function for children. Clinicians must be trained to recognize domestic violence and implement early intervention techniques, Behnam said.

“This is not just a women’s question—it’s humanity’s question,” she said. “We have to take responsibility to end it.”

Janna C. Heyman, Ph.D., holder of the Endowed Chair of the Henry C. Ravazzin Center on Aging and Intergenerational Studies at the  Graduate School of Social Service, described how older adults can be susceptible to physical, sexual, and emotional abuse because they often suffer from isolation and have no one to turn to for support.

Living a life of dignity, free of abuse, is a human right that we must ensure is protected throughout an individual’s lifespan, Heyman said, “from pregnancy all the way though to older adults and even in death and dying.”

Finding solutions

The Graduate School of Social Service held a contest for students, who submitted papers presenting policy solutions addressing the impact of violence on health and education. Elaine Congress, D.S.W., a founding member of the Institute for Women & Girls and professor and associate dean for continuing education and extra-mural programs at the Graduate School of Social Service, presented awards to the winners at the conference.

Yingying Zhu, an MSW student, won an award for her proposal on improving safety in schools. Among other policies, Zhu advocated for providing additional training to teachers and staff on conflict resolution and classroom management and hosting educational workshops and support groups for parents.

“I’m so glad that policy courses are part of the MSW curriculum,” she said. “Learning about policy has changed my perception about what we can do to advocate.”

– Michael Garofalo

“They’re my gender justice warriors,” Robles-Román says of the dolls and bobblehead figures that stand guard in her downtown Manhattan office. “I’ve been a gender justice warrior in my heart.”

After only 18 months at the helm, Robles-Román and her team have added to Legal Momentum’s accomplishments. The nonprofit, launched in 1970 by the National Organization for Women to advocate for women’s civil rights, recently won pregnancy accommodations for all New York City employees. It also joined forces with New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, FCRH ’79, on the “Enough Is Enough” bill signed into law last summer to combat sexual assault on college campuses.

These headline-generating achievements are the latest results in a career spent recognizing problems and then finding the political will and the means to fix them.

“Part of my ethos is being a disruptor, in a good, nice way,” says Robles-Román, who served as deputy mayor for legal affairs and counsel to Mayor Michael Bloomberg for 12 years before leading Legal Momentum. “It’s about creating strategic partnerships to make change happen.”

Crusading for social justice comes naturally to Robles-Román, the daughter of Puerto Rican migrants who moved to the New York area in 1956, raising her and her five siblings in Brooklyn and Queens. She remembers watching her mother, Ines, transform the family’s travel agency into an informal legal services outfit, assisting neighbors in battles with bureaucracy, whether the problem was translating a form from English to Spanish or getting a child enrolled at public school. “She was a lawyer without a law degree,” Robles-Román says of her mother, who died in 2012.

The first time Robles-Román began looking for solutions to complex social justice issues was during her senior year at Fordham. She was dating a fellow Fordham student who would later become her husband, the Hon. Nelson S. Román, FCRH ’84. At the time, he was a police officer in the Bronx and had told her some harrowing stories about responding to domestic disputes. Her interest piqued, she did some research into best practices for handling domestic violence calls, publishing her work in Fordham’s pre-law journal. “Ever since then, domestic violence and the treatment of women has been an issue that she’s held very close to her soul,” says Román, who is now a federal judge in the Southern District of New York.

While good grades and test scores are important, networking is just as critical, says Robles-Román, who counts U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor among her mentors and role models. She met Sotomayor, a Bronx native, through the Puerto Rican Bar Association in the mid-’90s. “When I’m in a heated negotiation trying to get that extra $3 million for [a] project and nobody else in the room is advocating for it, I try to channel her,” Robles-Román says.

Like Sotomayor, Robles-Román is generous with her time when it comes to mentoring young people. Though she has a high-profile job and is the mother of a 17-year-old girl and a 10-year-old boy, she still carves out time to help the next generation. Four years ago, she created what she calls her “Girl Power School” talk, which she presents primarily to teens. She focuses on the steps that lead from the classroom into a profession, like writing a resume, getting letters of recommendation, and finding mentors. “Don’t be shy,” she often tells young women. “Do. Not. Be. Shy.”

Robles-Román has never been shy about pursuing initiatives to help the city’s most vulnerable citizens. In late 2001, after overseeing large operations at the New York state court system, she was tapped by Mayor Bloomberg’s transition team to lead legal affairs. The first woman to serve as counsel to a New York City mayor, Robles-Román thrived in the hard-charging Bloomberg administration.

She was a force behind the city’s language translation policy and the multimedia “Let’s Call an End to Human Trafficking” campaign. The accomplishment in which she takes the most pride is the creation of four Family Justice Centers, where victims of domestic violence have access to law enforcement and other social services under one roof.

The opening of the first Family Justice Center in Brooklyn 10 years ago was prompted by city data that found nearly three-fourths of women killed in family-related homicides hadn’t made a prior domestic violence report to the police. The goal is to make the process less frustrating and overwhelming by providing comprehensive services in one location. A 2014 report by the city’s Fatality Review Committee showed that family-related homicides dropped 36 percent since the center opened, and 57 percent of the victims had contact with at least one city agency.

As the end of Mayor Bloomberg’s third term loomed, Robles-Román began thinking about her next act. When she learned that Legal Momentum—which tackles a wide range of gender issues, from violence against women to workplace equity to poverty—was looking for a new CEO, it seemed like the perfect fit. The Hon. Judith Kaye, former chief judge of the State of New York, agrees. “Women of strength, that’s what Legal Momentum stands for,” she says. “They couldn’t have a better representative than Carol.”

Robles-Román aims to build on Legal Momentum’s recent victories. She’s determined to see the “Enough Is Enough” legislation—which requires affirmative assent before students engage in sexual activity—spread to the other 49 states. And she’s looking to build on the pregnancy accommodations victory, won as a result of a discrimination case brought by pregnant New York City police officer Akema Thompson. With support from Legal Momentum, Thompson sued the city after she was denied a chance to take a makeup promotional exam, despite the fact that the exam day coincided with her due date. Thompson will get to take the test—and she won the right to reasonable pregnancy accommodations for all city employees.

As she spoke about the courage Thompson showed in challenging the city, Robles-Román glanced over at Wonder Woman and Princess Leia and had a thought: “I’m going get one of these made in the shape of Officer Thompson!” she said, with an eye toward growing her collection of gender justice warriors.

—Mariko Thompson Beck is a freelance writer based in New York City.

That was the message during a March 4 talk at Fordham by Dr. Yvonne Cagle, a NASA astronaut who called on Fordham faculty and students to help answer the many research questions related to deep space exploration and colonization.

“There are so many spinoff areas of research,” said Cagle, a scientist, medical doctor, retired Air Force colonel, and visiting professor involved in a research collaborative between Fordham and NASA.

As an example, she noted the parallels between reconditioning the body after disease, injury, or illness and mitigating the effects of extraterrestrial jaunts measured in years rather than weeks.

In the absence of gravity, “the heart starts to decondition, your exercise tolerance goes down, your bones demineralize, your muscles start to atrophy,” she said. “Human physiology in space is very different than what we see here on earth.”

And then there’s human behavior, with its fractious side.

“Whatever man’s inhumanity to man that we are struggling with here, it’s not something we are going to be able to escape just because we stepped off-planet. Guess what? We’re probably going to bring that along with us,” she said. “So it behooves us to start looking and trying to reconcile those issues before we go off-planet, and there’s a good chance that what we solve or what we experience off-planet may be its own demonstration platform in teaching moments for us here, on earth, to learn a better way to love and care for each other.”

“Who better than Fordham University to lead that effort and that conversation,” she said, with its “long and illustrious history … [of]waving the banner and raising the bar for social justice, for harmonious community, and for civic responsibility.”

Cagle joined with Fordham last year to launch the Interdisciplinary Collaborative on Health, Environment, and Human Performance, which promotes research involving Fordham, NASA, and other institutions. The collaborative operates under the auspices of Fordham’s Graduate School of Social Service (GSS).

Her talk was part of a panel discussion organized by GSS, the Office of Research, and Fordham’s Clare Boothe Luce Program, which works for greater participation by women in the sciences and engineering. The panel comprised professors of psychology, chemistry, biology, mathematics, biochemistry, and computer and information science—all of them women—who answered questions about how they built their careers.

During her talk, Cagle told a personal story about the first moon landing in 1969. She was impressed by the men who made the trip, but also by the woman, Katherine Johnson, who devised the mathematical calculations that their voyage depended on.

She ended with a call for Fordham’s professors and students to reach out to the research community that has sprung up around deep space travel.

“There are so many ways that we can bridge and interface and interact and connect, in ways that are already funded and resourced, in ways that can lead to panels, publications, posters, presentations, even grant applications,” she said. “The sky is no longer the limit, and possibility is endless.”