Editorial

The Women's Freedom Network Newsletter July/August 2000, Vol. 7, Number 4. The Violence Against Women Act Cathy Young

I n May, the Supreme Court struck down a key provision of the 1994 Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), which allowed victims of "gender-motivated violence" to file federal civil rights lawsuits against their attackers. This ruling, predictably deplored by some groups as a setback for women, is actually a victory not only for the rule of law but for real gender equity -- and a blow to a pernicious ideology of gender warfare. While VAWA's civil rights provision was modeled on federal laws targeting racially motivated assaults, it was far more sweeping. Whatever one thinks of the concept of "bias crimes," not all interracial violence is automatically labeled racist. Under VAWA, virtually all rapes and spousal assaults are presumed, by definition, to be "gender-motivated."

"Forensic psychology does not support the belief that rapists are driven primarily by hatred of women, as compared to sexual compulsion or generalized rage. "

One reason orthodox feminists saw VAWA as a major achievement was that it endorsed a key tenet of their creed: that male violence against women is a form of collective political terrorism, both an expression of woman-hating and a deliberate strategy to perpetuate patriarchal dominance. Activists such as Julie Goldscheid of the National Organization for Women Legal Defense Fund (one of the attorneys who argued for VAWA before the Supreme Court) have explicitly praised pro-VAWA judges for recognizing that "domestic violence and sexual assault are gender-motivated crimes" rooted in women's oppression. Such extremist theories may be popular in women's studies courses, but there is no reason they should be incorporated into official policy -- and no evidence that they have any-relation to reality.

For instance, forensic psychology does not support the belief that rapists are driven primarily by hatred of women, rather than sexual compulsion or generalized rage. The feminist analysis of rape hardly explains sexual assaults on boys, or sexual coercion among gays and lesbians. If the claim that "women are raped because they are women" rings true, it's in a biological rather than political sense: when a man's sexual urges are directed toward women, his sexual aggression will be too. Indeed, it's not unusual for rapists to direct their non-sexual aggression at men.

The teenagers who savagely beat and gang-raped a jogger in New York's Central Park in 1989 -- a crime many feminists have cited as a prime example of gender-motivated violence -- also viciously assaulted several men on their park rampage. As for domestic violence, most studies find that it has much more to do with psychological disorders than with patriarchal attitudes; drugs and alcohol, too, are major factors. Aside from the much-debated issue of female aggression toward male partners, it is no longer in dispute that physical abuse is no less common in same-sex couples than in heterosexual ones.

Besides feminist theories, the arguments for VAWA are based on the premise that violence against women requires a federal remedy because 1) it takes a uniquely horrible toll that affects the national economy, and 2) it is not taken seriously by state courts and law enforcement because of gender bias . Both these claims, however, are supported by distorted or false statistics, which Congress bought wholesale when it passed VAWA in 1994.

Take the claim that "battering is the single largest cause of injury to women in the U.S." According to the Centers for Disease Control, all violence, domestic or not, is the fifth leading cause of injury for both women and men, after falls, car crashes, and accidental collisions and cuts. Auto accidents cause nearly three times as many injuries to women than violent crime, and nearly ten times as many as domestic violence.

Congress also reported that 125,000 college women are raped every year (in fact, the Justice Department's National Crime Victimization Survey, which includes crimes not reported to the police, finds that just over 100,000 women of all ages are raped annually) and that over a million women annually seek medical care due to domestic assault (when the figures from the Justice Department and the Center for Disease Control are below 250,000).

"This ruling, predictably deplored by some groups as a setback for women, is actually a victory not only for the rule of law but for real gender equity -- and a blow to a pernicious ideology of gender warfare."

As Chief Justice William Rehnquist correctly pointed out in the majority opinion, if the economic impact of violence against women is grounds for federal intervention, the same can be said of any serious crime. The ruling also noted that while Congress had documented discrimination against female victims by state authorities, it had failed to show that the problem was so systematic and universal as to warrant a federal remedy.

In fact, the evidence of bias is even shakier than the high court suggests. What Congress found is that in several states in 1990, 61% of robbery charges but only 43% of rape charges resulted in convictions or guilty pleas. However, 1988 Justice Department data from other states shows a much smaller gap: 48% of rape suspects and 53% of robbery suspects were convicted or pleaded guilty. If sexual assaults other than rape are included, the conviction rate for sex crimes goes up to 54%. By contrast, only 46% of aggravated assault charges (which involve male victims two-thirds of the time) led to conviction. It is quite true that historically, domestic violence was often shamefully neglected and victims of rape encountered widespread and pernicious bias. But today, many advocates for women want to swing the pendulum to the opposite extreme: any man who is cleared of charges of abusing a woman is presumed to have "gotten away with it." This mentality is profoundly antithetical to one of the cardinal principles of our justice system: the presumption of innocence.

Most Congress members who voted for VAWA probably don't embrace feminist theories of "gender violence." They were motivated by the desire to "do something for women" and perhaps, ironically enough, by the old-fashioned chivalry which holds that harm done to women merits special consideration. Actually, it's unlikely that VAWA's civil rights remedy would have benefitted many women. For most victims of rape or domestic violence, civil litigation makes little sense since the perpetrators have no assets to collect. Only a handful of VAWA suits have been filed in the nearly six years since the bill was passed. Most VAWA supporters candidly admit that the real purpose of the law is symbolic -- to "send a message about violence against women." That message, however, is not a message of equality. It's a message which combines the traditional paternalistic belief that women deserve special protection with the radical feminist fictions of a male "war against women," pitting the sexes against each other instead of treating offenders and victims as individuals. It's a message the Supreme Court has done well to reject.