Nick Kristof recently wrote an article titled ‘Is Delhi so different from Steubenville’, which highlighted the parallelism between the recent horrific rape cases in India and the inaction of the American federal government to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). When I first read this article, I thought it was a bit extreme to compare the two; however, my thinking changed while attending a New York Alliance for Women’s Health meeting. I learned more about the provisions of the VAWA, as well as the reasons why the bill was derailed in Congress.
The VAWA Act, first passed in 1994, is an incredibly important piece of legislature that protects victims of domestic and dating violence, sexual assault, and stalking. With every re-authorization, in both 2000 and 2005, the bill has become stronger; representatives have worked to develop and introduce meaningful measures to combat this type of (mostly) gender-based abuse, including recognizing that men are also victims of this violence. The success of the Act is evident: the annual incidence of domestic violence has dropped more than 50% since the VAWA became law due to strengthened country- and state-wide provisions to hold perpetrators accountable, increase incidence reporting, and provide needed resources for victims’ health and safety.
So why in the world would Congress NOT re-authorize the VAWA? Politics. This time, the bill’s re-authorization (with added strengthening provisions) was introduced in the Senate, passed there, but was ‘killed’ in the House of Representatives in 2011. To break it down to the best of my understanding, the main point of partisan contention was due to a new provision to strengthen services for three underserved communities: the LGBTQ community, Native Americans, and immigrants.
First, this part of the bill provided for increased protection for the LGBTQ community by mandating a non-discrimination policy for federally-funded organizations who serve victims of these crimes. Secondly, this section stipulated an increased number of temporary visas for non-native victims so that they may pursue legal recourse for the violence committed against them. And lastly, this small section of the Act provided for more explicit jurisdiction of Native American Tribal Courts to prosecute non-Native American citizens should they have been involved in alleged crimes involving Native American victims.
For many Americans familiar with the stalemate bipartisan politics of the American legislative branch, you may be able to guess why and how this addition could derail the whole bill. I won’t go into the difference between the priorities and dividing principles of our two main political bodies, the Republican (conservative) and Democratic (liberal) parties, but I will explain that there was support for the re-authorization (and addition) from the liberal side, while the GOP’s, or Republican party’s, representatives generally dissented.
Their reasoning: to the GOP, the LGBTQ language was implicit, so there was no need for such a provision. However, a majority of people who identify as LGBTQ have reported being turned away from help (identifying the great need for this type of specification). Similarly, in the case of tribal jurisdiction, the GOP warned that this could lead to a ‘slippery slope’ of disputes between the jurisdictions of Native American vs. American legal systems. And most obviously, the GOP’s characteristic anti-immigration stance outweighed the other motives for creating more U-visas. With all of this in mind, the Republican party was also able to point to one technicality to block the bill: any revenue-generating bill must start in the House and then go to the Senate. In the case of the VAWA, the U-Visa expansion provision would generate profits, and this time, the bill’s path through Congress occurred the other way around.
To add to these differences in party-line opinions, there were several reported accounts that the Republican representatives felt as though the Democratic party added these stipulations in order to make the GOP look like the ‘bad guy’ for not supporting women’s rights. Whether true or not, the bill was not re-authorized. The GOP created a new bill in 2012, which elicited a hugely negative response from hundreds of advocacy organizations and a promise from President Obama to exercise his veto power; for this reason, that version did not get far. In response, representatives in favor of the Act plan to reintroduce the original bill to the new 113th Congress as it starts its term, removing the immigration-related conditions (while keeping the other provisions) so as to compromise and increase the likelihood that the Act will pass.
What happens next is anyone’s guess, but I hope that you are as infuriated after reading about the realities of this debacle as I am. Bipartisan bickering was able to undermine the importance of protecting the health and safety of women, men, and children in the United States. Instead of considering the larger picture of human rights and the immense need for this type of legislation, our representatives resorted to name-calling and stagnant nit-picking. This pattern is reflected on the global scale only too often, as well; foreign policy often disorients important policies to protect and empower the vulnerable. How can we continue to permit human rights to take second place in these types of policy discussions?