SUMMER 2021
After Four Decades of Federal Legislation
n March 17, 2021, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 244 to 173 to renew the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), with 29 Republicans joining all House Democrats in support of the bill. President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. has made it a priority of his administration to strengthen VAWA and has personally urged the Senate to “bring a strong bipartisan coalition together” in support of the law. The President has emphasized the need to reauthorize VAWA and to strengthen it, due to the excessive increase in the rate of intimate partner violence (IPV) during the COVID-19 crisis, an increase that has made the reauthorization of VAWA more important than ever before. To understand the need to renew VAWA, it is important to consider the context of intimate partner violence and two other federal responses to it, the Family
Violence Prevention and Services Act (FVPSA) and the Victims of Crime Act (VOCA).
Intimate Partner Violence
While definitions vary among statutes that govern different community responses to domestic violence, in general, “intimate partner violence,” “domestic violence,” and “domestic abuse” are largely synonymous terms that refer to physical violence, stalking, and/or psychological coercion by a person against a current or former intimate partner or spouse. “Physical violence” encompasses acts by which a person, directly or through an agent, harms, or attempts to harm, the other person by using physical force. “Sexual violence” includes both physical violence by means of which the perpetrator forces, or attempts to force, the
other person to participate in a nonconsensual sexual act, and also nonphysical conduct such as “sexting,” in which the actor sends, or demands that the other party provide, sexually explicit material via electronic means. Birth control sabotage and sexual or reproductive coercion by male partners in order to make female partners become pregnant – or, conversely, to force termination of a partner’s pregnancy against her wishes -- also constitute IPV. “Stalking” is defined as “a pattern of repeated, unwanted attention and contact by a partner that causes fear or concern for one’s own safety or the safety of someone close to the victim.” “Emotional abuse” includes verbal and non-verbal acts intended to harm the other person mentally or emotionally in order to exert control over them. Each year in the United States, IPV impacts an estimated 5.3 million women ages 18 and older and causes 2 million injuries, of which 550,000 require medical attention. On average, victims lose nearly 8 million days of paid work annually and between 21 and 60% of victims lose their jobs due to the abuse.
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