Violence Against Women Act – The Real War on Women

Article here. Excerpt:

'For months now we’ve heard about the “War on Women” that’s sometimes called the “Republican War on Women.” While close inspection of the claim reveals the WOW to be little more than an election-year bid to keep female voters in the Democratic fold, there is a real war on women and up until this year, it’s been bi-partisan. It’s called the Violence Against Women Act.

How could VAWA, long touted by the domestic violence establishment as vital to women’s welfare, in fact be anti-woman? Let me count the ways.

1. When police are called to the scene of a domestic violence incident, VAWA encourages them to make an arrest whether or not they have probable cause to do so. VAWA funding goes to train police in this mandatory arrest policy, but the result is the opposite of what VAWA advocates imagine. Mandatory arrest policy actually increases a woman’s chance of being injured or killed by a domestic partner. Why? In a domestic violence incident, a woman must decide whether to call the police or not. If she does, she knows her husband or boyfriend will be arrested, jailed, charged and ordered to stay away from her, their children and their property. Faced with that, many women opt out of the system, preferring to remain with their partner and try to handle the situation themselves. That increases her chances of injury at his hands. A 2007 study at Harvard found mandatory arrest policies increase a woman’s chance of death by an intimate partner by almost 60%.

2. One of the leading causes of injury to women in domestic violence incidents is their own initiation of violence. She hits first and he retaliates with far greater force. Dr. Sandra Stith of Kansas State University has called it “a dramatically more important factor than anything else.” Studies conducted for the Centers for Disease Control show about 70% of reciprocal DV to have been initiated by the female partner. Meanwhile, about half of non-reciprocal violence is committed by women. But VAWA is based on the political ideology that men alone commit DV. The unsurprising result is that female perpetrators find it all but impossible to get the treatment they need to stop the behavior that often results in their own injury.'