Versus The System

Institutional barriers are different from personal ones. Nobody has to mean her harm for a system to work against her, a foster care system that moves a child through six homes before she turns twelve, a courtroom that was not built with her in mind, a corporate ladder with rules nobody wrote down but everybody enforces. The obstacle is structural, which makes it both harder to see and harder to fight.

These stories are about learning a system's rules well enough to work inside them, and in some cases, well enough to start changing them for the next person.

We tell these stories because "the system" can sound abstract until you see exactly how it touched one specific life. Naming the structure, not just the individual struggle, is part of being honest about what these women were actually up against.