Women Against VAWA
March 19, 2012
WAVE, or Women Against VAWA Excess, is an excellent resource for those who want to know more about the domestic violence bill, the Violence Against Women Act, which costs taxpayers roughly $500 million a year and is currently up for reauthorization by the Senate. A new version of the bill would extend benefits to illegal immigrants and homosexuals.
In the latest post at WAVE, Wendy McElroy writes about the false notion that men are the sole perpetrators of domestic violence. In fact, more than 200 studies have shown that women and men are equally guilty of verbal and physical aggression in the home. Domestic violence against women is extremely serious and women are injured and murdered by their spouses or intimates more often than men. But conflict is often initiated by women. McElroy writes:
Professor Martin S. Fiebert of the Department of Psychology, California State University, Long Beach has compiled a bibliography examining “282 scholarly investigations: 218 empirical studies and 64 reviews and/or analyses, which demonstrate that women are as physically aggressive, or more aggressive, than men in their relationships with their spouses or male partners.”
A DV statistic frequently quoted by PC feminists comes from a 2009 Department of Justice report: 1.5 million women in the U.S. become victims each year. But the same report claims there are 834,700 male DV victims each year. The male statistic is not mentioned. The male victims are ignored.
Our society holds it sacrosanct: no one should be treated unequally because of gender, race, or sexual orientation. And, yet, close to a million victims of domestic violence are dismissed because of their genitalia. The dismissal is driven by PC feminists who preach equality but practice a vicious form of discrimination.
And why wouldn’t they? Billions of tax dollars are at stake. Consider just one source of such funding to PC feminists: VAWA. At its enactment in 1994, VAWA received $1.6 billion over a four-year period. When it was reauthorized in 2005, the Washington Times commented, “VAWA comes with a $4 billion price tag and a convoluted grant system. Grants are controlled by domestic violence coalitions made up of the same organizations, or their sister organizations, that receive the grants and erect barriers to new, outside applicants.” Domestic violence has become ‘closed shop’ and a lucrative source of income.
