Passing thought on VAWA

Trish Wilson discusses the Bush administration’s beef against the Violence Against Women Office, and (being Trish) makes many interesting connections that I hadn’t even thought of. (Oh, and by the way, happy birthday, Trish!)

So reading Trish’s post got me thinking about the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) VAWA is one of those acts that can easily be derided as sexist – i.e., “so where’s the Violence Against Men Act?” I’ve actually got some sympathy for that question.

The reality, of course, isn’t so simple. The majority of criminal violence against men is “stranger violence”; men are assaulted in bars, attacked by muggers, raped in prison. For women, in contrast, the majority of violence is “intimate violence”; women are beat up by husbands, raped by acquaintances.

Before feminist-led changes – including the Violence Against Women Act – the criminal justice system in the US was, by default, a Violence Against Men Act. Our courts and our cops have been designed mainly to prevent stranger violence – which is to say, the kind of violence that happens mostly to men. VAWA isn’t adding bias to a sex-neutral system; it’s an attempt to correct the flaws of a system which has for centuries been biased towards the needs of men.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that men always have it easy. For the minority of men who are serious victims of intimate violence (men battered by their partners, male victims of rape), support services are even harder to come by than they are for women. And our culture’s complacency with rape in prison – where most of the victims are male – is shameful.

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