New Perspectives on Partner Abuse
15 years of the Violence Against Women Act: its tragic consequences
Commentary by Trudy W. Schuett - Originally published 10/15/2009
Vice President Joe Biden speaks at a reception commemorating the 15th anniversary of the passage of the Violence Against Women Act, at the Naval Observatory, Tuesday, September 29, 2009.
Official White House Photo by David Lienemann
As the 15th anniversary of the Violence Against Women Act arrived last month, supporters from the president and vice-president, to people in charge of small, local programs lauded the Violence Against Women Act as something special – as if it was a real solution that was vitally necessary.
From the beginning, VAWA was based on little more than anecdotal evidence and supposition, provided in ample quantity by the set of horror stories collected by then-Senator Joe Biden’s staff at police stations, battered women’s shelters, and rape crisis centers. Then they took that information, ignored the fact it was often incomplete, had been collected under unusual circumstances in truly isolated conditions, and applied it to the entire population of women in the United States. The report generated by Biden and his staff in this exercise was entitled, Violence Against Women: A Week in the Life of America.
Biden says in his autobiography, Promises to Keep, “If we could have included unreported crimes it would have been 7000 pages.” This is one of many statements he makes demonstrating his ignorance – of not only the issue, but of information gathering as well. What local non-profit agency of any kind would not be entirely happy to tell a Senatorial aide precisely what he or she wanted to hear? What police department, sensing future availability of funding, would not be honored to cooperate by sharing any information they happened to have, even if it was raw data with little or no supportive information?
On another page in this book, he conflates animal shelters with women’s shelters, which is not even an “apples and oranges” statement. It’s more like comparing apples to computers; as the only thing the two items have in common is that the same word is sometimes used to describe them. Somehow the fact that there are more animal shelters than women’s shelters is less than compelling, when one recognizes the lack of relationship. One could also say there are more bus shelters, but that likewise has no relevance to women’s shelters.
VAWA establishes feminist pork
Despite the fact that no one has ever been allowed to challenge VAWA in various Congressional hearings since they began, VAWA was rejected several times by Congress, and in late 1991 Chief Justice William Rehnquist warned that the law would be used as leverage in divorce cases. Yet Biden rejected that idea out of hand. His worry of the time was the American Bar Association would not approve of VAWA. Like the feminist organizations that ignored VAWA until very late in the game, the ABA also began to see dollar signs and the opportunity for much money to be made. Of course they came on board, too.
When it was finally signed into law by President Clinton, it unleashed a veritable army of radical feminist operatives onto an unsuspecting American public. In those days their numbers were comparatively small. Today they are probably not much fewer in number than the 300,000 federal jobs eliminated in the political scheme outlined in Biden’s book to mollify the Republicans at the time of the initial passage of VAWA.
Suddenly, feminists with no training or qualifications for work of any kind became employable with nothing but a previously-worthless college degree in feminist studies to recommend them. There were federal, state, and local agencies to be staffed; indoctrination programs to be devised. Women who had devoted their lives to the destruction of their mythical “patriarchy” were now able to exercise their anti-male, anti-family agenda with the blessing – and paycheck – of the government. The philosophy that men are pigs and women are idiots, and only feminists know what is best for everybody was now considered not only reasonable, but a viable means for approaching a problem affecting a much smaller number of people – men and women alike – than these political zealots ever wanted to believe.
The lives of Americans have never been the same. In July 1995, Joe Biden entered a statement into the Congressional Record, among other things apologizing to the men in Bosnian concentration camps, apparently blissfully unaware he had set in motion the possibility for the same future conditions for American men. One cannot help but wonder how someone so disingenuous, so gullible, could ever attain the position of Vice President of the United States. Unless, of course, there was another agenda behind this piece of legislation.
