A bill to reauthorize a revised Violence Against Women Act will be reintroduced to Congress next week to provide critical resources to domestic violence survivors.
Iowa Senator Joni Ernst, who is also a domestic violence survivor, is working for bill's reauthorization since it last expired in 2019. The law was initially signed in 1994 and established the National Domestic Violence Hotline and covers everything from legal protections for victims and funding for shelters.
The law calls for reauthorization every five years, but it had not been reauthorized since 2013. A short term extension was approved in 2018, but expired in 2019. Other provisions such as stricter gun restrictions have played a role in pushing back the law's reauthorization.
"It is frustrating because I did work in a shelter environment," Ernst said. "This is not a gun control bill. It is a violence against women bill."
A group of bipartisan lawmakers modernized the law in December through a framework agreement. In addition to Ernist, those involved include Senators Dick Durbin, Dianne Feinstein and Lisa Murkowski.
The modernized law would strengthen rape prevention and education efforts and expand and authorize programs to ensure access to survivors in rural areas, those who seek culturally specific services and LGBT survivors. It also aims to expand criminal jurisdiction to tribal courts, covering non-Native perpetrators of sexual violence and other offences. This expansion is a development on the 2013 reauthorization.
According to the group, people's live are at risk without the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act.
According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, there is ab estimated 10 million people experencing domestic violence every year. About one in four women and one in ten men experience sexual violence, physical violence and/or stalking by an intimate partner during their lifetime. In California, there were 166,890 domestic violence-related calls to law enforcement in 2018; many other incidents went unreported and 46 percent of reported incidents involved weapons.
