Earlier this week, the Senate voted on re-authorizing the “Violence Against Women Act,” and some Republicans caught flak for voting against it. The Internet lit up with predictable jokes about how the GOP is so anti-woman. Journalists even wrote articles like “Why Would Anyone Oppose the Violence Against Women Act?” as if the virtues of the bill were so patently obvious that it required a special investigation to uncover the mysterious motives one must have for opposing it.
This is a classic case of judging a bill by its title, which has become increasingly dangerous in recent years (Why would anyone not want to be a PATRIOT? Who wants to Leave Children Behind? Don’t you want Care to be Affordable? Etc. Etc.) Oddly enough, this bill has precisely the wrong title for such judging, yet everyone still manages to commit the same fallacy anyway!
The bill should be titled “Preventing Violence Against Women Act,” so anyone who opposes it could be accused of not wanting to prevent violence. As it stands, headlines like these don’t sound so bad: “Marco Rubio opposes Violence Against Women…” Yet everyone still implicitly understands that the joke is on the Republicans. Somehow it’s obvious that the bill’s goal is actually the opposite of its title, but it’s not at all obvious that the bill’s provisions may not be related to either one!
But enough about the title. I thought violence against women was already illegal, anyway. So what does this bill actually do?
As best I can tell, VAWA mostly does two things: 1) making violence against women more illegal (e.g. harsher penalties, more prosecutions, etc) and 2) funding resources for victims of abuse (e.g. crisis centers, hotlines, etc). In principle I might believe this kind of stuff is better done locally, but it wouldn’t be high on my list of federal programs to demonize. As someone who cannot even fathom physically harming my family, I find it heartbreaking that so many men do, and it is well within the property of government to at least try to protect the life and liberty of threatened women.
Of course, the devil is always in the details, and I’m not surprised to read accounts of unintended consequences…
The act’s grants have encouraged states to implement “mandatory-arrest” policies… A 2007 study found that states with such laws saw increases in intimate-partner homicides — perhaps because they made victims, who may have wanted the police to intervene without making an arrest, less likely to report abuse before it could escalate out of control.
… fraud…
a Department of Justice audit found that out of 22 randomly selected VAWA grantees, 21 had violated the terms of their grants.
…and overhyped results.
2002 study found that VAWA saved an estimated $14.8 billion in net averted social costs in its first five years alone… refers to a cost-benefit evaluation that makes the dubious assumption that “all reduction in violent criminal victimization of women after the implementation of VAWA-I was attributed to the VAWA-I program.”
Additionally, there are new provisions in the bill. I don’t get why these things must constantly be “re-authorized,” but I’m not at all surprised that Congress often uses these opportunities to make the programs even bigger, and never smaller (it seems that kind of check is left to the judicial branch).
This particular version adds some possibly unconstitutional provisions about Indian reservations, along with coverage for “LGBT victims” that I am just too ignorant to understand. (I thought women needed a special bill because they are more likely to be abused by men… but if women are also being abused by women, then are men also being abused by men? What about men by women?) Why don’t we have a Violence Against Everyone Act? It almost feels like someone (feminists?) are trying to have their cake and eat it too, or like there’s some sort of money grab somewhere in the funding funnels and somebody’s trying to expand theirs. (Naw, I’m probably just ignorant.)
So where does that leave us? We have a bill with good intentions that has maybe helped and could continue to help lots of abused women, in spite of the bill’s inevitable governmental diseases of fraud and constitutional overreach and the insatiable lust for continually expansionary power.
If violence is down and states have expanded their own laws and programs, maybe the federal government doesn’t need to keep making its program bigger. It almost makes me optimistic that a good half of the Republican Party now seems willing to dare oppose a bad bill with a flashy title. It’s just a shame the Democrats are still so much better at signaling.