Violence Against Women Act: Essential and Expired
Kamille Hall
Hamline University
February 2013
GPA 8000: Foundations of Public Administration
Violence Against Women Act: Essential and Expired
The following is a composite story of what happens to a woman somewhere each day in the United States to women and shows why the Violence Against Women Act must be renewed in 2013. A 30-year-old woman screams in her apartment. She knew he was coming home. Her husband has been on a drinking binge for days. When she receives an angry text message from him, she places the children in another room: they fear for their lives. They have seen this behavior all too often. The kids cower in the closet, a place that gives them some sort of refuge during the storm. In this case the storm is their dad’s misdirected anger toward their mom. They fear for themselves, but not as much as for their mother, their sole support in this chaos. They hear their father come home, yelling for several minutes. The mother tries to calm him down and pleads: “Please don’t hurt me, I’ll give you whatever you want…” Then they hear piercing screams. The front door slams. The children, ages 8 and 6, come rushing out of the closet, only to see their mother lying in a pool of blood – stabbed multiple times. Their father murdered her (what is known as femicide). The Violence Against Women Act works to reduce and prevent domestic violence.
Every six minutes in the United States a woman is raped, and most often it is not by a stranger (Biden, 1993). In fact, domestic violence is more common than diseases (e.g. cancer, heart attacks), vehicle accidents, and other types of assaults combined. For a long time, domestic violence carried the stigma that it is a private issue, not a public one. While this is still true to a certain extent today, a landmark legislation passed in 1993, became effective in 1994, and