Op-Ed by Dr. Davidson Mhonde and Dr. Jhumka Gupta
On December 16, 2024, in North Carolina, a routine outing devolved into 21-year-old Ashanti Downey fighting for her life after suffering from third-degree burns. She was approached from behind, doused with a flammable liquid, and set on fire by a man she was living with. This type of violence directed at women and girls, simply for being women and girls, is too common. Unfortunately, as highlighted by a recently released report from the United Nations (U.N.), 85,000 women across the globe were killed by men in 2023 alone.
At George Mason’s College of Public Health, our faculty help drive public health policy. Rochelle Davidson Mhonde, assistant professor of Global and Community Health, was an invited panelist at the inaugural Black Maternal Health Legislative Summit hosted by the Virginia House of Delegates Speaker Don Scott and Delegate Candi Mundon King. Davidson Mhonde shared her expertise in a clinical and policy-making panel titled, “We Have the Data, Now What? Using Data and Statistics to Drive Policy Change.”
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