Reform Laws: Ten Years Of Fighting Violence: A Look Back At The History Of The Violence Against Women Act

On September 13, 1994, a sea change occurred in America. On that day, domestic violence was no longer a subject that no one- least of all victims-dared speak about.

It was the day that the Violence Against Women Act, which Legal Momentum had actively promoted for years, was signed into law as part of the 1994 crime bill.

And it started with a single phone call in 1990. Senator Joseph Biden (D-DE) contacted Legal Momentum to support a bill to combat spousal abuse. His staff had asked several national women's rights groups, with no luck.

But Legal Momentum agreed to help Senator Biden. Something had to be done to end violence against women.

Shortly thereafter, Legal Momentum convened the first meeting of the National Task Force to End Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence. It was the first step toward passage of VAWA, which provided $1.6 billion to address gender-based violence.

"We were breaking new ground by having a major federal statute to address the social problems caused by rape and domestic violence," says Sally Goldfarb, associate professor at Rutgers Law School in Camden, NJ and former Legal Momentum senior staff attorney. VAWA confronted the inadequacies of state justice systems in dealing with domestic violence and sexual assault. It also took into account the particular needs of victims who are women of color and immigrant women."

"Equally huge was its impact in terms of getting hundreds of billions of dollars out to the states, particularly state coalitions who we re really on the front lines in responding to this problem," says Lisalyn Jacobs, Legal Momentum's VP for government relations.

VAWA was reauthorized in 2000, with doubled funding ($3.3 billion) for treatment of sexual assault victims, grants to encourage arrest, services for women with disabilities, rape prevention education, battered women's shelters, transitional housing for survivors and research on violence against women.

It recognized the problem of violence in dating relationships and improved protections for battered immigrant women. Support for VAWA in both 1994 and 2000 was bipartisan and nearly unanimous, prompting Senator Dianne Feinstein to call it "a new kind of bipartisanship."

Legal Momentum staff worked closely with both political parties and thousands of coalition groups to ensure passage of both versions of VAWA. There were only a dozen organizations represented at that initial meeting in 1994, but today more than 2,000 groups are part of the task force.

"The unprecedented breadth of the coalition reflected huge outpourings of effort and resources by Legal Momentum," Goldfarb says. "It also reflected the incredible importance of this issue, which galvanized not only women's groups, but also labor unions, civil rights organizations, religious denominations, community groups and others."

Building such a broad coalition was no simple task. In the beginning, "there were a lot of elite people in D.C. who didn't think it was the time or the place," said Pat Reuss, policy analyst for the NOW Foundation and former Legal Momentum VP for government relations.

Legal Momentum kept pushing the issue of violence against women until VAWA was law, and it didn't stop there. "Of course, subsequent to the bill's enactment, Legal Momentum litigated many of the early cases," Goldfarb says. "We helped chart the course for the enforcement of these provisions that we helped to draft and enact."

As chair of the National Task Force to En d Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence, Legal Momentum is again at the fore front in advocating for a third version of VAWA, but is also looking back and celebrating the bill's successes.

"I think it's raised awareness," Reuss says. "There are a lot more services and sensitivity. Men know there are going to be consequences if they beat or rape. We've massively improved the services to victims, we've done early intervention, and we've sensitized law enforcement. So maybe we have prevented a whole lot of violence that was preventable."

Goldfarb agrees that both VAWA and Legal Momentum h a ve come a long way in working to prevent violence against women. "This is an area where Legal Momentum has carved out expertise and credibility," Goldfarb says. "However, it is important to recognize that we haven't closed the book on this issue. Legal Momentum was there at the start of the federal effort and played the single largest role in ensuring VAWA was passed, but we can't rest on our laurels. There's a lot more to be done."