Reshaping the federal response to violence: The theoretical foundations and legislative history of the Violence Against Women Act

In 1994, the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) was signed into law and became the first comprehensive piece of federal legislation addressing the problem of sex-based violence. Over the past two decades, VAWA has allocated billions of dollars A for various services and programs aimed at combating sexual and domestic violence. The true significance of the law, however, lies in its establishment of a new legal basis for addressing violence against women, based on the feminist belief that punishment and protection alone would not redress the social and institutional causes of such violence.;Through a study of the theoretical foundations and legislative history of VAWA, this dissertation aims to evince how this popular and extensive modern law has been shaped by a particular vision of society at odds with traditional American social and legal institutions. Therefore, the study first examines the ideological development of the radical feminist view that sex-based violence is a legitimate expression of America's traditional social and legal order. The dissertation then revisits the legislative history of VAWA to demonstrate how the act's authors and primary advocates sought to reshape the federal response to violence based on the radical feminist belief that violence against women is a systematic crime of bias and that any long term plan to eliminate such violence must be based on a complete restructuring of social perceptions and legal institutions. In other words, because supporters of the law believed that patriarchy informs the treatment of women not only in private institutions, such as the family, but also in the legal system itself, they held that violence could not be adequately addressed through a system of legal equality that seeks to punish individual perpetrators of violence; instead, they stressed that the ultimate solution had to be sought in a transformation of the American mindset and a redistribution of legal and financial resources to help women overcome the debilitating effects of sexism. Furthermore, although VAWA's theoretical coherence has become increasingly watered down through multiple reauthorizations, this project aims to show that the original ideological premise continues to govern the nature of many of the policies the law has spawned.