In 1994, Congress passed the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), to stop domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault and stalking.
The enactment of VAWA was a hard-won, improbable victory. But the pandemic set us back, and there’s much more work to do.
It reshaped our criminal justice system, introducing training for judges and law enforcement, which were largely failing survivors.Enactment of VAWA was a hard-won, improbable victory. In all the years before it, most people facing domestic violence and sexual assault had to rely on friends and family members, seek out shelters that were often underground and barely funded, or simply go without help. Emergency rooms routinely treated survivors and sent them right back home to face further abuse.
So we began the arduous work of demanding a federal response. Reaching out to Congress was thankless and often painful. We were ignored, dismissed, sometimes mocked. Lawmakers complained that we were trying to “take the fun out of marriage.” When we shared the horrific stories of women who had been beaten to death, they shrugged and said that lovers’ quarrels sometimes escalate.
VAWA was transformative. In the years after it was enacted, domestic violence against adult women in the United States declined by more than 60 percent. We fought for changes so that fewer survivors would get caught up in the criminal justice system. We improved VAWA each time Congress reauthorized it, which happened in 2000, 2005, 2013, and again last year.
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