Fordham BTEP to Mark International Human Rights Day

More than 200,000 women are incarcerated in American prisons. And among that population, 80 percent have school-aged children who are growing up without their mothers.

Next week, as part of Human Rights Day, Fordham’s Be the Evidence Project will host a screening of Mothers of Bedford, a documentary that follows five incarcerated women as they struggle to maintain relationships with their children from behind bars.

Mothers of Bedford screening and Q&A
Monday, Dec. 9
6:30 p.m.
Corrigan Conference Center / 12th-Floor Lounge
Lincoln Center Campus
113 West 60th Street, NY, NY  10023

Directed by Jenifer McShane, Mothers of Bedford follows five inmates with children ranging in age from infancy to adolescence. From the outside, moms Melissa, Tanika, Mona, Rosa, and Anneathia are like all other moms—they worry about their children’s grades, their first dates, whether they’re part of the wrong crowd. Where they diverge from normal is that they must worry about their children from inside the walls of Bedford Hills Correctional Facility.

The film follows the women over four years as they undergo such surreal experiences as celebrating Mother’s Day and their child’s first birthday inside prison, and help their children to understand why they have had to endure years of separation.

BTEP, which is part of Fordham’s Graduate School of Social Service, will screen the documentary on the eve of Human Rights Day, which has been celebrated globally every December 10th since 1950. The day is meant to bring attention to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as “the common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations,” according to the United Nations.

The event is free and open to the public and will be followed by a Q&A with the film’s director, Jenifer McShane. For more information, email BTEP or call (212) 636-6640.

To read more about BTEP, click here.

— Joanna Klimaski