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The beating of wives or girlfriends is a long-hidden aspect of family life that has existed over time and throughout cultures. There has been a dramatic change in both public and legal recognition at the end of the century that has resulted from the work of feminism. Although many aspects of family law have been influenced by the struggle for gender equality, legal transformation on domestic violence has been spearheaded by the women’s rights movement. This chapter examines some of the crucial aspects of this process and the legal reforms which have resulted. In 1992, the United States Supreme Court recognised the pervasiveness and severity of intimate violence for the first time in Planned Parenthood v Casey, and in 1994 Congress passed the Violence Against Women Act. Planned Parenthood v Casey is widely known as the decision in which the Supreme Court narrowly upheld constitutional protection for women’s right to reproductive choice. In its decision, the Court recounted the seriousness and the pervasiveness of the problem of domestic violence.

This chapter returns to the question of activists' engagement with the state, examining the different forms that movement organizations' relationships with state authorities took during the 1990s and 2000s, when the therapeutic state around child sexual abuse was well‐developed, and shows the kinds of access and compromise these relationships brought. It discusses entry of activists into state agencies, movement organizations' professionalization, and increasing funding to provide services to the state, arguing that some groups became part of a para‐state. It traces organizations' use of crime victims compensation funds and activists' attempts to increase criminal and civil penalties for child sexual abuse Finally, the chapter analyzes newer organizations' involvement with public health initiatives to prevent child sexual abuse. Overall, the chapter argues that activists' involvement with the state was shaped by the priorities and pressures of the state, showing the continued power of medical and criminal approaches over others. Yet activists, particularly in the public health wing, continued to bring larger political goals into their work, illustrating the paradoxical nature of social movement outcomes.

Chapter 4 examines the Violence Against Women Act and the ambivalent alliance that led to it. The chapter shows the influence of feminist organizations on the legislation and traces how support from conservative elected officials formed alongside opposition from conservative activists outside the state. Conservatives and many liberals in Congress sought to be tough on crime and protect women from domestic violence and rape, while feminists sought to reduce the systematic victimization of women and improve the response from law enforcement and others. Congressional testimony promulgated a frame about violence against women as a gendered crime that could be understood in different ways by different sides. The chapter shows how this frame promoted VAWA’s success but feminist advocates’ intersectional goals for immigrants, women of color, and LGBT people were marginalized. The chapter shows how, by 2011, conservative activists’ influence on Congress through the Tea Party movement and feminists’ ongoing push to strengthen VAWA’s intersectional dimensions destabilized agreement on VAWA. The chapter addresses feminist criticism of VAWA as a case of carceral feminism, showing how VAWA’s discourse and legislation promoted both carceral, non-carceral, and intersectional frames and outcomes. VAWA reflects both unprecedented feminist legislative influence countervailing conservative influence.

This chapter provides the intellectual scaffolding for the book. The chapter reviews the explanatory frameworks that together constitute the conventional wisdom about poverty, battering, and the central role of women’s work in addressing them. The hegemonic explanations for poverty and abuse include victim empowerment folklore, criminological expertise and law-and-order logic, the politics of disgust, and work-first common sense. The chapter then presents an alternative approach (drawn from feminist structural challenges to conventional wisdom) that focuses on how women are trapped by poverty and abuse. The chapter concludes the chapter with a critical description of the contradictory dynamics of the institutionalization of conventional wisdom in two key U.S. policies on poverty and battering: the Personal Responsibility Act and the Violence Against Women Act.

This chapter focuses on a discussion of contemporary policy and potential reform. It provides detailed information about recent federal reform in the Tribal Law and Order Act of 2010 and the reauthorization in 2013 of the Violence Against Women Act. These reforms, largely spearheaded by grassroots Native women activists, present a new era in federal–tribal relations and provide a starting point for full reform. While many tribal-sovereignty activists may reject engagement with the federal systems that created the problems they seek to address, it argues the case for working with the federal government to reform a system that has been deeply damaged by the failure to include tribal perspectives.

This chapter examines several complex victim-related issues that were not extensively addressed elsewhere in the book, such as the politics of victimization and topics germane to the social and legal labeling of crime victims and victimizations. It raises unresolved questions about female victims and the politics of the victimization discourse, debating whether the responses are largely symbolic or whether they offer real reform. It also analyzes the policy outcomes associated with Violence Against Women Act monies and reviews several promising state-level prevention programs aimed at reducing the victimization of women and children. In addition, it offers some overall recommendations regarding the future directions of the victims' rights movement aimed at ending violence against women. The chapter concludes by considering alternatives to victims' use of the formal criminal justice system, looking at the potential of restorative justice and other dispute resolution alternatives.

In 2006, the Los Angeles Commission on Assaults Against Women, changed its name to Peace Over Violence. This story introduces a major theme: today’s institutionalization and professionalization of antiviolence work, shaped by foundations, the state, and a “nonprofit industrial complex” that broadened men’s antiviolence work options, while simultaneously depoliticizing the field and eclipsing feminism. Today, veteran members of the Movement and Bridge cohorts strategize and mentor an increasingly diverse group of younger men, a Professional Cohort whose pathways into antiviolence work reflect two general patterns: white men route to antiviolence work largely through women’s studies and networked campus and community organizations; young men of color find their way to antirape and antidomestic violence work through “intersectional pathways” grounded in race- and class-based experiences of violence. Antiviolence curricula like My Strength, events like “Slutwalks” and “Walk a Mile in Her Shoes,” express possibilities and the limits of men’s current ally work.

This chapter examines domestic violence among immigrant Latina women, including prevalence and barriers to accessing services such as fear of deportation, lack of legal status, inability to speak English, and the challenges of separating from family members. Transnational elements for immigrant Latinas experiencing domestic violence is an important concept because of the implications in accessing services and support systems. In addition, help-seeking behaviors, barriers to reporting incidences of domestic violence, and understanding legal rights and services are discussed. Under the Violence Against Women’s Act, immigrant Latina women who lack legal status have legal rights in the United States and can apply for specific visas determining they were in a domestic violence–related relationship. Immigrant Latina women are also eligible to receive public benefits. Finally, an examination of domestic violence programs and interventions in community-based agencies is discussed, specifically, intervention programs for immigrant Latina women.

This chapter examines how South Asian immigrants were affected by the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), which significantly increased the number of deportable offenses and reduced potential deportees' legal rights, and the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), which recognized and institutionalized violence against women as a law enforcement priority in the United States. More specifically, the chapter considers the logics of exceptional violence and of punishment that are deployed in order to produce violence that is legible to the state. It discusses two components of state responses to domestic violence that directly affect South Asian immigrant survivors: the criminalization of domestic violence and the institutionalization of a legally recognized “battered immigrant woman” in VAWA, along with the limitations that transpire for immigrant survivors of domestic violence who are ineligible for membership in this category. It also explores the implications of both state responses for the advocacy work of the South Asian Women's Organization.

This chapter traces the development of the legal response to domestic violence in the United States. It begins with an overview of dominance feminism and its influence on the evolution of domestic violence law and policy. It then considers the concept of governance feminism and how feminists were able to strongly influence the direction of domestic violence law and policy. It also examines the disproportionate support for legal, especially criminal, interventions to address domestic violence among feminists and politicians, along with the passage of the Violence Against Women Act in 1994 and its impact on the societal response to domestic violence. Finally, it explores issues created or exacerbated by the government's embrace of an essentialist vision of women subjected to abuse and the professionalization of the battered women's movement.

This chapter begins with the origins story of what became the largest international men’s antiviolence organization, the White Ribbon Campaign, sparked by the infamous 1989 Montreal Massacre. The WRC story exemplifies men’s ally work during a transitional period during which a mass feminist movement fractured from antifeminist backlash as well as from internal schisms. Meanwhile, feminists built the groundwork for community-based rape crisis and domestic violence centers, national advocacy organizations, campus women’s centers, and women’s studies programs, culminating with the passage of the 1994 Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). The chapter traces the continued work of Movement Cohort veterans who built community-based antiviolence nonprofits, as well as the emergence of a younger and more diverse group of men, the Bridge Cohort, whose pathways to antiviolence work were increasingly paved by women’s studies courses, campus feminist organizations, and the beginnings of a professionalized antiviolence curriculum.

This chapter studies the effort to reauthorize and expand the reach of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). In September of 1994, after years of grassroots advocacy, U.S. Congress passed the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) and President Clinton signed it into law. VAWA provides federal funding for enhanced law enforcement, social services, and legal services for victims of domestic violence. The legislation was originally enacted with a sunset provision that required that Congress reauthorize it after five years, a feature that was repeated in subsequent reauthorization bills. When the law was due for reauthorization in 2011, however, the process did not go as smoothly as it had before. Instead, although VAWA had bipartisan support, advocates wanted to strengthen it with provisions they saw as essential to keeping all survivors of domestic violence safe. These additional protections were met with resistance in Congress. In advance of the 2012 presidential election, advocates sought to amend the legislation in ways that would strengthen the protections offered to Native Americans, undocumented immigrants, and the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) communities. In the last reauthorization battle, the ability of advocates to harness the medium, their networks, and their message provides a contemporary example of the social change matrix at work in the age of social media.

This chapter traces the development of the legal response to domestic violence in the United States. It begins with an overview of dominance feminism and its influence on the evolution of domestic violence law and policy. It then considers the concept of governance feminism and how feminists were able to strongly influence the direction of domestic violence law and policy. It also examines the disproportionate support for legal, especially criminal, interventions to address domestic violence among feminists and politicians, along with the passage of the Violence Against Women Act in 1994 and its impact on the societal response to domestic violence. Finally, it explores issues created or exacerbated by the government's embrace of an essentialist vision of women subjected to abuse and the professionalization of the battered women's movement.

This introductory chapter details the research methods undertaken for this book's study, emphasizing that immigrant women's vulnerability is based not only on their gender but also on nationality, race, ethnicity, language, religion, documented or undocumented immigration status, threatened legal status, situational isolation from family and community, cross-national frames of cultural and legal reference, and socioeconomic status. This activist research is developed in that vein at a nonprofit organization in Texas, in order to learn about the experiences of Latina battered immigrants in their quest for U.S. citizenship through the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) and the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act (VTVPA). Advocates, activists, and scholars alike have considered these laws as successful achievements for women's and immigrants' rights movements.

This chapter discusses the Middle District during the years of the George H. W. Bush Presidency, 1988–1992. The Middle District experienced intense overcrowding due to expanding case load, and the primary cause was the dramatic increase in criminal cases. As Congress had expanded federal criminal jurisdiction, and as the federal law enforcement establishment expanded, so too did the number of prosecutors. Even though U.S. magistrates took on more duties and trial work, the number of judges remained constant. As had been the case in the early 1980s, civil cases were postponed because “speedy trials” for criminal defendants took precedence. And the number of criminal cases grew and grew. These recurring themes continue in subsequent chapters. Population growth allowed the president to appoint more judges but partisan politics with a Republican White House and a democratically controlled Senate made the confirmation of judges difficult to achieve. The cooperation of Senators Connie Mack (Rep.) and Bob Graham (Dem.) was instrumental in having several new judges for the Middle District confirmed. Even with the addition of several new district judges and U.S. magistrates, the chapter ends with a 1993 report show that with caseloads rising beyond any reasonable measure federal court system in Florida was nearing a “meltdown.”