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U.S. States to reside in

As leaked by Politico on May 2, 2022, the Supreme Court vote to overturn Roe v. Wade further exemplifies institutional harm towards folx who do not identify as cisgender men. In recognizing a persistent attack on the rights of people of marginalized genders, we created the following tool. Specifically focused on the safety of female assigned at birth (AFAB) and femme folx, an Overall Danger Index has been created to identify US states that have been rendered more or less dangerous for those who are not cisgender men. In creating this tool, we hope to highlight and bring greater transparency to the fact that across all US states, institutional systems of oppression perpetuate gender-based harm.

Interested in understanding what went into this Overall Danger Index? Scroll through the following story to find out. Alternatively, click here to jump to the bottom of the screen and access our tool immediately.

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METHODOLOGY

The analysis behind this visual essay makes use of data from the Guttmacher Institute, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security (GIWPS) and the United States Census Bureau. The indices presented in this piece were calculated as follows:

Erosion of Abortion Rights Sub-Index: For a given state, this Sub-Index reflects its Stance on Abortion Rights Given a Potential Roe v. Wade Overturning. Each state can be assigned a score of 0% (no risk of erosion: abortion is legally protected), 33% (low risk of erosion: abortion is not legally protected but the state does not have trigger laws in place to restrict or ban abortion), 66% (high risk of erosion: abortion is not legally protected and the state has trigger laws in place to restrict abortion rights) or 100% (ban: abortion is not legally protected and the state has trigger laws in place to ban abortion).
Reproductive Health Services Sub-Index: For a given state, this Sub-Index reflects its level of accessibility to reproductive health services. To calculate this sub-index, the average of the normalized values for: (1) the per capita number of Title X centers; (2) the per capita number of publicly funded family planning centers; (3) the per capita number of abortion providers; (4) the per capita public expenditure for family planning; (4) whether the state has mandatory in-person counseling for access to abortion; and (5) the percentage of the state's counties that have a known abortion provider is used.
Violent Crime Against Women Sub-Index: This Sub-Index reflects the rate at which women are subjected to violent crime in a given state. To calculate this index, we calculated the average of the (1) number of homicides per 100k women, (2) number of rapes per 100k women, (3) number of aggravated assaults per 100k women and (4) number of robberies per 100k women. This average is then normalized on a scale from 0 to 1.
Legal Protections Sub-Index: This Sub-Index reflects the degree to which a state offers critical justice-based legal protections for women's rights as outlined by the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace, and Security (GIWPS). To calculate this sub-index, we scored each state on a scale from 0 to 6 based on whether a state has laws for: 1) protection of all workers from sexual harassment in the workpace, regardless of company size; 2) guaranteed unempoyment benefits for victims of domestic violence, sexual assault, or stalking; 3) mandated parental leave; 4) mandated minimum wage above the low-income threshold; 5) ratified Equal Rights Amendment; and 6) required relinquishment of firearms from abusers subject to domestic violence protective orders. Each state's score is then divided by 6.
Overall Danger Index: The Danger Index represents an average score across all sub-indices, and thus reflects an overall level of danger for each state. It is calculated as follows: Danger Index = ((Erosion of Abortion Rights Sub-Index + (1 - Reproductive Health Services Sub-Index) + Violent Crime Against Women Sub-Index + (1-Legal Protections Sub-Index))/4.

The main visual element used in this project (radial bar chart) was inspired by one of W.E.B. Dubois's visionary data visualizations which can be found on the cover of the book W.E.B. Dubois's Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America. Each of the analysis, design, and development elements of this project were conducted in JavaScript. This webpage, along with the data visualizations, is built with the Svelte framework and the D3.js JavaScript library. The scrollytelling functionality was achieved using Svelte's implementation of Scrollama.js developed by Russel Goldenberg and with the help of Connor Rothschild's awesome tutorial. The code behind this application is freely available on Github.