History of Feminism
Related: About this forumWho’s Playing Politics with the Violence Against Women Act?
Posted by Michelle Kinsey Bruns | April 25, 2012
It was first passed with bipartisan support in both houses of Congress in 1994a year not otherwise noted for its harmonious relations between the parties. Twice sincethen, it has been reauthorized with support from Democrats and Republicans alike. The most recent reauthorization for the Act, being discussed on the Senate floor this afternoon, has sixty-one co-sponsors from both sides of the aisle. But that hasn't stopped Senate Republicans from throwing together their own slapdash substitute proposal only days before the Senate was due to take up S. 1925, the original reauthorization bill crafted over months under the guidance of many hundreds of anti-violence advocates and service providers. Incredibly, it is Republicans and their allies in the "waron women" (and LGBT folk and people of color and immigrants and the not-rich and...) who are now accusing Democrats of playing politics on the topic of gendered violence.
What Republicans call "playing politics" is the strengthening of protections against violence for members of communities who are subject to unique risks of gendered violence: immigrants, women on Native American reservations, and those in same-sex relationships. In a conference call with reporters this week, National Organization for Women president Terry O'Neill points out that immigrant women's abusers often deny them access to their own passports or visas in order to restrict their mobility, that women on reservations are caught in a jurisdictional grey area between state and tribal authorities, and that same-sex abuse victims are often turned away from shelters or services that are unprepared to accommodate them.
The 2005 VAWA reauthorization specifically instructed agencies operating with VAWA funds to gather data to identify which demographic groups who were most urgently in need of the services funded by the Act. That law required that grantees "recognize and meaningfully respond to the needs of underserved populations and ensure that monies set aside to fund linguistically and culturally specific services and activities for underserved populations are distributed equitably among those populations." By definition, "underserved populations" will be marginalized groups; marginalization cannot be overcome without specific identification and inclusion.
Right-wing objections to "culturally specific services" are built on the proven-false assumptions that a victim is a victim, and no one victim's risks or needs are any greater than any other's. If this line of thinking sounds familiar, it's because it's a close cousin to the belief that "color-blindness" is preferable to acknowledging that not all colors are created equal in the U.S.A. To allow the Republicans to pass their substitute proposalwhich they would call color-blind, sexual-orientation-blind,and national-origin-blind, but anti-violence advocates would call deeply, unfixably flawedmeans that the same privileged populations who were always first in line for services will stay there. Any debate, in the media or in the Congress, overtheimmigrant, Native American, and same-sex provisions of the Violence Against Women Act must start from a point of acknowledgement of that fact.
iverglas
(38,549 posts)Why does legislation have to be "reauthorized"? Is this a funding issue?
Here, all this is covered by the budget. The funds are allocated and the public service finetunes the policy aspects. If they think that particular attention needs to be paid to, say, immigrant women victims of violence, that obviously falls under the mission of whatever govt. department and particular unit handles funding proposals and grants, and they set the parameters for applications accordingly.
We certainly have the current right-wing Canadian federal government defunding whole programs, like the Court Challenges Program (to fund constitutional challenges by equality-seeking groups, including and maybe especially women). But interfering in the nitty gritty of small project funding isn't something they've become adept at yet.
So the nub of the problem is:
On top of the refusal to recognize specific disadvantage (which of course leads to dire things like affirmative action, too), there is probably a little touch of the "they're getting something I'm not getting" attitude that is unfortunately more prevalent in the US than elsewhere. Never "they need more because they have less", always "those people always want more than they deserve".
redqueen
(115,096 posts)I suppose they thought they could eliminate domestic violence and then they'd no longer need it. And yes I believe it is tied to funding.