~ A Thank You ~

The Violence Against Women Act Turns 30, Today

* By Professor Dale Margolin Cecka, director of the Family Violence Litigation Clinic at Albany Law School.

Intimate partner violence has worsened in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, with calls to domestic violence hotlines spiking. Affordable and safe housing is one of the biggest barriers that survivors face when leaving an abuser; in fact, domestic violence is one of the main causes of homelessness for women and children – 63% of homeless women have been victims of domestic violence. In 2023, the federal government gave out $43.1 million in grants for transitional housing for domestic violence victims – but this is pennies compared with other federal grants, such as the $7.5 billion currently allotted for electric car charging stations. Having an immediate place to live is a matter of life and death for many victims.

In addition to increasing funding for services, we must enforce laws that are already on the books. When a gun is present in a home where there is a domestic violence situation, a woman is five times more likely to be killed. Nearly half of the 4,484 women killed in 47 major U.S. cities from 2008-2018 died at the hands of an intimate partner. Many victims seek protection for themselves through civil restraining orders, but their abusers still have access to firearms because of poor enforcement, loopholes in licensing laws, such as the boyfriend loophole, and the proliferation of ghost guns. In my twenty years as an attorney representing victims of domestic violence, I cannot recall a single case where a defendant was forced by the courts or law enforcement to give up his guns. Shockingly, we operate on the “honor system,” which relies on abusers to voluntarily relinquish their firearms.

The result is that, this summer in Chicago, a 31 year-old mother of three was shot in the chest and murdered by her ex-boyfriend. Back in 2022, she had obtained a restraining order and requested seizure of his firearms, which the judge outright ignored. In July 2020, a California man shot and killed his wife in front of their children. The victim had an active restraining order at the time, and had informed the court that her husband had a gun and provided details of him threatening her with it in an application for a restraining order. Yet the judge accepted the man’s answer of “no” when asked whether he had any firearms. In 2017, a woman in St. Louis was shot by an ex-boyfriend four times through her apartment window. Police found an active restraining order lying on top of a microwave just a few feet from her body.

Read complete article posted at CommonDreams.org

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Power Play    /    Etta James