Women's Rights Network

Leadership & Board of Advisors

Founding Co-Directors:

Carrie Cuthbert
Carrie Cuthbert graduated from Amherst College in 1990 and from Harvard Law School in 1995. She has been involved in the women's movement since her first year in college, where she served as a peer counselor, educator and advocate around rape and sexual harassment issues, and volunteered at a shelter for homeless women with pre-school age children. After college, she studied and taught English in Taiwan, and later moved to Seattle, WA where she worked for Citizen Action as an advocate for the passage of state family leave and affordable child care legislation. As a law student, Carrie continued to focus her academic and clinical efforts on issues affecting women, girls and families. She was an advocate in the Battered Women's Advocacy Project, an educator for the Teen Violence Education Project, and a researcher for the Children & Family Rights Project. She also served as Co-Executive Editor of Book Reviews for the Women's Law Journal. Through her clinical work, she represented women in divorce, custody, guardianship, and domestic violence cases at the Legal Services Center in Jamaica Plain, MA; advocated against trying juvenile offenders as adults at the Juvenile Rights Project in Portland, OR; investigated racially discriminatory housing practices at the ACLU Foundation of Maryland; and worked on mediation cases for separating gay and lesbian couples at the Cambridge Dispute Settlement Center in Cambridge, MA. In 1995, she co-founded the Women's Rights Network (WRN).

Kim Slote
Kim Slote received her undergraduate degree from Wesleyan University in 1989, and her law degree from Harvard Law School in 1995. Kim has been doing women's rights work for approximately 15 years, both in the U.S. and overseas. After college, she spent two years in Japan working in the Japanese women's movement, particularly around the issue of sexual violence against Asian migrant women workers, as well as several months in the Philippines on an intercultural Asia-Pacific training program for women's rights activists. In 1992, she returned to the US to enter Harvard Law School, concentrating her studies and clinical work on family violence, refugee and immigration law, and human rights. During her years at Harvard, Kim also did political asylum work at the Women Refugees Project; legal analyses related to trafficking for Human Rights Watch/Asia; and research on domestic violence in immigrant and refugee communities for the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office. Kim also edited for the Harvard Human Rights Journal, organized for the Women & International Development Group, and advocated on behalf of sexually-abused children as a Guardian Ad Litem in Boston Juvenile Court. Upon graduation from Harvard in 1995, Kim Co-founded the Women's Rights Network (WRN).

Policy Director:

Monica Ghosh Driggers

Ms. Driggers currently serves as the Policy Director for the Women’s Rights Network (WRN). She has had ten years of experience in policy development and legislative analysis as well as seven years of experience designing, evaluating, and administering grant-funded projects.

As Policy Director for WRN she has acted as a liaison between WRN’s Battered Mothers Testimony Project and the court system, and performed an analysis of court personnels’ understanding of women who suffer post-separation violence and seek custody of their children. She has also researched the status of gender bias in courts throughout the United States and co-authored WRN’s recent report, Battered Mothers Speak Out: A Human Rights Report on Child Custody and Domestic Violence in the Massachusetts Family Courts.

Prior to joining WRN, she served as a Senior Policy Analyst for the Supreme Court of California, Administrative Office of the Courts, specializing in alternative and therapeutic courts such as drug courts, domestic violence courts, and youth courts. She spent four years successfully developing policy strategies to help the courts accomplish their reform-oriented initiatives, ending in a large statewide funding program for alternative courts, an evaluation project for these courts, and a Supreme Court committee dedicated to courts that value collaboration and community involvement.

Her familiarity with the court system’s internal processes has led Ms. Driggers to work on projects that analyze court efficiency and management, case processing statistics, and management of media in the courtroom. All of these projects have been motivated by the need for reform and have therefore been designed with research and evaluation components in order to facilitate policy-making and gain and sustain funding.

Ms. Driggers has also collaborated with organizations that work with the courts such as legal service organizations and justice research institutes in order to improve conditions and preserve funding for disadvantaged litigants and re-entering prisoners.

Before working with court systems, Ms. Driggers worked with a variety of organizations including West Publishing and the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund. Ms. Driggers holds a Juris Doctorate from the University of Denver.

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Board of Advisors for WRN:

Elaine Alpert
Boston University School of Medicine Boston University
School of Public Health

Sarah Buel
University of Texas Austin School of Law

Charlotte Bunch
Center for Women's Global Leadership

Radhika Coomaraswamy
U.N. Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women

Rhonda Copelon
International Women's Human Rights Law Clinic
City University of New York Law School

Chris af Jochnick
Center for Economic and Social Rights

Linda Mills
New York University School of Social Work
New York University School of Law

Martha Minow
Harvard Law School

Mala Rafik
Rosenfeld & Associates, P.C.

Nancy Ryan
Cambridge Commission on the Status of Women

Cheng Imm Tan
Office of New Bostonians

Dorothy Q. Thomas
Shaler Adams Foundation

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Board of Advisors for the Battered Mothers' Testimony Project:

David Adams
Director Emerge

Judy Beals
Executive Director
Jane Doe, Inc.: the MA Coalition Against Sexual Assault & Domestic Violence

Jacqui Bowman
Associate Director
Greater Boston Legal Services

Kate Cloud
Executive Director
Political Research Associates

Felicia Collins-Correia
Executive Director
Domestic Violence Intervention Services

Quynh Dang
Program Director
Asian Task Force Against Domestic Violence

Peter Jaffe
Director
London Family Court Clinic (Ontario, Canada)

Ellen Lawton
Staff Attorney and Project Director
Family Advocacy Program, Dept. of Pediatrics, Boston Medical Center

Hope Lewis
Professor of Law
Northeastern University School of Law

Cynthia Mesh
Independent Research Analyst

Kristian Miccio
Professor of Law
Western State University College of Law

Jennifer Robertson
Director
Advocacy for Women and Kids in Emergency (AWAKE)

Florinda Russo
Regional Deputy Director
Amnesty International USA

Rita Smith
Executive Director
National Coalition Against Domestic Violence

Connie Sponslor
Training/Safety Audit Coordinator
Battered Women's Justice Project

Chuck Turner
Council Member
Boston City Council

Joan Zorza
Editor
Domestic Violence Report

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The Battered Mothers' Testimony Project Steering Committee:

Carrie Cuthbert, J.D. and Kim Slote, J.D., Founding Co-Directors of the Women's Rights Network (see above).

Lundy Bancroft, B.A. is a nationally known expert on batterers and their children, with books on the issue forthcoming from Penguin Putnam and from Sage Publications. He has published articles in the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of Contemporary Psychology, and has spoken on domestic violence and its impact on children across the northeast and in Canada and Costa Rica. He is a former co-director of Emerge, the first program in the United States for men who batter. He currently works as a Guardian ad Litem and court investigator for various Massachusetts courts. He also speaks widely on domestic violence and trains court personnel, police, child protective workers, therapists, and other professionals on responding to men who batter and their children.

Jacquelynne J. Bowman, J.D. is a graduate of the University of Chicago and Antioch University School of Law, and has handled cases involving family and children's issues for over fifteen years. Jacqui is currently Deputy Director of Greater Boston Legal Services (GBLS). Her past experience includes working as Senior Attorney for Family and Juvenile Law, and Managing Attorney of the Family and Individual Rights Unit of GBLS, as well as working as a staff attorney in the area of family and juvenile law for the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute. Jacqui has also been involved in numerous commissions and task forces addressing the needs of children, including the Governor's Task Force on the Unmet Legal Needs of Children, the Foster Care Commission, the Juvenile Justice Commission, the Family Violence Department of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, and the Governor's Commission on Domestic Violence. She is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Massachusetts Advocacy Center (a children’s advocacy organization for vulnerable children) and of Jane Doe, Inc.: MA Coalition Against Sexual Assault & Domestic Violence.

Gillian MacMillan-Smith, B.A. is a battered mother who has been involved in her own child custody and visitation litigation against her abuser in the Massachusetts family courts. She has spent the past seven years in and out of Massachusetts family courts and knows first-hand how the state violates a battered mother's human rights. She
continues to be required by the court to send her child on visitations with the father despite the girl's refusal to go. These personal experiences with the Massachusetts legal system led her to play a crucial role in founding and designing the Battered Mothers' Testimony Project. In addition, she has worked in both a battered women's
shelter and a program for men who batter. These experiences put her in the unique position of having worked with batterers, battered women, and the children of battered women. She is currently working on her Masters of Arts in teaching.

Jay Silverman, Ph.D. is a developmental psychologist who conducts activist research on the prevention of violence against adolescent and adult women and their children. He was recently Director of a major cooperative agreement funded by the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention to improve medical providers' identification and intervention with survivors of domestic violence, and is Co-Principal Investigator of a current CDC-funded cooperative agreement to improve domestic violence related services for immigrant and refugee communities.

Dr. Silverman is co-author (with Lundy Bancroft) of the upcoming book Batterers as Parents (Sage). He is currently a Research Fellow at the Harvard Children's Initiative at Harvard University and an Instructor at the Boston University School of Public Health.