Looking back at the Violence Against Women Act after 30 years of protection

A crowd of politicians, advocates, administrative officials, and domestic violence survivors gathered on the South Lawn of White House on Sept. 12 to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). The event featured many speakers, including President Joe Biden, who talked about his efforts to get VAWA written and passed in 1994.

"The Violence Against Women Act is my proudest legislative accomplishment in all the years I've served as senator, vice president, and president," Biden said. "I mean that from the bottom of my heart. ... [It] broke the dam of congressional and cultural resistance, brought this hidden epidemic out of the shadows, and began to shift the legal and social burdens away from the survivors onto the perpetrators where they belonged."

Among the crowd was Jacquelyn Campbell, a professor at Johns Hopkins University's schools of Nursing Public Health and one of the act's original contributors. Campbell attended a variety of events that same week to celebrate VAWA's anniversary and discuss new initiatives with other leaders in the field.

Image caption: Jacquelyn Campbell

"It was really joyful for all of us to see each other again," she said. "We all know each other."

As many as one in four American women experience domestic violence in their lifetime. For many of those survivors, VAWA is their lifeline out and their shield from further violence. The act offers resources and protections for women experiencing domestic violence, intimate partner violence, stalking, or sexual assault. It was the first federal legislative package designed to end violence against women, eliminating barriers to justice by attempting to bring the entire country onto the same page.

And, according to the numbers, it was effective. Annual rates of domestic violence dropped by 67% between 1993 and 2022. Rapes and sexual assaults declined by 56%. The National Domestic Violence Hotline, which was created by VAWA in 1996, has received more than 7 million calls.

Before VAWA, very few police departments had special victims units. There was no national hotline for people experiencing domestic violence. Shelters had less funding. State laws varied widely in terms of the protections afforded to women and the help they could expect from law enforcement, especially if survivors or abusers crossed state lines.

It was in this climate that Campbell began taking a weekly commuter train into Washington, D.C. There she would meet Pat Reuss, one of the original drafters of VAWA, to help create the act.

"Many of us worked really hard in very small pieces," Campbell said. "My research had been on homicide of women. ... Being a nurse, doing it from a nursing science lens was different. Most of the other people that were working on this were lawyers or advocates."

Campbell pushed to increase the health care system's role in the bill, but she remembers that Biden insisted on making crime the main focus.

"Senator Biden was very strategic in making it a crime bill. If it had been from any other perspective, it never would have passed," Campbell said. "[Biden would say] 'it can't be about women's rights. It has to be about crimes against women. That way we'll get congressional support,' which he did. He's always been very savvy in terms of how the Congress works, how to get a bill passed. He still is."

Many Americans in the '80s and '90s considered domestic violence to be a private family matter, best settled behind closed doors, Campbell says. She recalls how critics accused Biden of "breaking apart the American family." As a result, VAWA contributors had to be careful in how they framed the act. For example, funding domestic violence shelters was not about enabling wives to leave their husbands, but helping victims of assault escape their attackers.

VAWA was introduced by U.S. Rep. Jack Brooks in October 1993. After receiving bipartisan support in Congress, President Bill Clinton signed it into law on Sept. 13, 1994.

Alongside new laws and resources, VAWA also provided funding to researchers, including Campbell. In 2003, Campbell and her colleagues published a now widely-cited study in the American Journal of Public Health that found that abusers with access to guns are five times more likely to kill their partners.

"It's a little bit more than five, but five is what sticks in people's head," she said. "All kinds of people cited that research. Now, they didn't cite me, and most of them don't know where that came from. And people say, 'Oh, Jackie, doesn't that make you feel like you're not given your propers?' And I'm like, 'If a piece of research that I did is so well known that everybody talks about it as fact, then I'm proud.'

"I was a small cog, but somewhat related to my pushing and my research on the health outcomes of domestic violence, we were able in the [VAWA] reauthorizations to get more funding for research and for health care related to domestic violence."

VAWA, which needs to be reauthorized every five years, has grown significantly in scope and funding since its initial passage. But its success and longevity do not make its policies untouchable. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court case United States v. Rahimi challenged a law that restricted firearm possession for people convicted of domestic abuse. The Supreme Court ultimately upheld the law in a 8-1 decision, but the case still rattled many women's advocates, including Campbell.

"The majority of domestic violence homicides are with guns," she said. "It's always been true. But because of some of the provisions in the VAWA Act, the proportion of domestic violence homicides that were with guns did decrease. ... It made a difference."

Campbell believes there are things to be optimistic about looking forward. VAWA was reauthorized in 2022, complete with increased support for marginalized communities. New government initiatives are in the works to create an interagency domestic violence task force and an improved Danger Assessment to determine how at risk a woman is for future violence. Closer to Hopkins, Campbell hopes to receive a National Institutes of Health grant to study the long-term effects of strangulation and head injuries among survivors.

For Campbell, this month's celebrations were a reminder of both how far the nation has come in protecting women and how far there is to go.

"It was thrilling and amazing and wonderful to be [at the anniversary celebrations] and to find out who the new players are," she said. "And also sort of daunting. I guess I can't totally retire yet because there's so much more policy stuff that I can be helpful in."