But while we applaud much that is in the bill, we are concerned that like its predecessors, the bill focuses a significant amount of funding on criminal justice responses and much less on economic and racial justice initiatives that would support efforts to stop domestic violence.  We urge Congress to do more to address economic and racial inequalities that make poor women–particularly poor women of color, immigrant women, and Native American women, more vulnerable to intimate violence.  We urge Congress to recognize that economic policies that result in widespread unemployment and downward mobility increase domestic violence.  We further urge Congress to recognize that as important as criminal remedies may be for some victims, a focus on criminal justice remedies will never be sufficient to empower women. Many women who experience domestic violence do not want the current limited menu of criminal justice responses.  We urge Congress, therefore, to consider and support programs that explore alternatives to the current criminal adjudication models, and that address the underlying causes of abuse.

What VAWA Does Right

The VAWA reauthorization bill provides funding for critical services and includes important law reform that will improve women’s access to justice.  The bill expands the public housing protections that were introduced in VAWA 2005, expands protections for immigrant victims and for foreign brides, and makes it clear that tribal courts have jurisdiction over non-Indians who commit acts of domestic violence on tribal land.  The bill continues the requirement of setting aside a percentage of funding to assist tribal governments and coalitions.  Native women experience significantly higher rates of domestic violence and sexual assault than do other women, much of it perpetrated by non-Native persons.  Strengthening the capacity of Indian Nations to protect Native women is a critical step in addressing this gross injustice.  The bill continues funding for civil legal assistance, training for family court judges and custody evaluators, and efforts to beef up the criminal justice response in tribal jurisdictions and rural areas where it is particularly hard to get police to respond at all.  The bill also provides important assistance for anti-domestic violence programs for youth, expands protections for sexual assault victims, and funds efforts to reduce rape kit backlogs.  The bill expands non-discrimination provisions and clarifies that funding is available for programs that meet the needs of LGBT victims.  The bill provides additional protection against sexual abuse and exploitation for prisoners and probationers by prohibiting someone with criminal justice authority from engaging in sexual activity with a person under his or her authority. The bill also makes national standards for the elimination of prison rape applicable to immigration detention facilities.

Beyond VAWA

Congress should do more to stop violence against women by focusing more on the structural inequalities that make women vulnerable to violence.  Funding for criminal justice intervention makes up the largest portion of VAWA funding.  The primary criminal justice grants are the STOP (Services, Training, Officers, Prosecution) grants – funded at $222 million, and the GTEAP (grants to encourage arrest and enforce protection orders) funded at $70 million, creating a combined total of $292 million focused on the criminal justice response.    Compare this with the $57 million dedicated to civil legal assistance, or the $22 million dedicated to training family court judges, or the $40 million dedicated to housing for battered women and their children.

Congress Should Focus Efforts on Economic Justice

Research shows that downward mobility and economic inequality weakens social controls in neighborhoods, giving rise to increases in domestic violence. Research also demonstrates that unstable male employment in heterosexual couples is linked to significant increases in domestic violence.  In response to these threats, federal legislation should encourage jurisdictions to link job training or job placement with batterer treatment programs, incorporate domestic violence awareness and programs within every community-based response to the economic crisis, provide more meaningful and targeted funds to help women achieve economic stability, and amend the Trade Adjustment Assistance and Workforce Investment statutes to include domestic violence screening and services.

Poor women are particularly vulnerable to domestic violence.  Congress should increase dramatically the total funding that goes to assisting poor women with material assistance from housing to emergency financial assistance to small business creation to micro-finance.  The current VAWA bill provides $40 million for housing assistance (a reduction of $10 million compared to prior funding levels), another $2 million to meet the needs of “underserved” populations (augmented by a 2% set-aside from STOP), and $1 million for the National Resource Center on Workplace Responses to Domestic Violence.  While these provisions are important, Congress should do more – much more.

For example, Congress should change the focus of TANF – from a program that focuses on placing recipients into low-wage dead-end jobs, to a program that provides a bridge out of poverty.   In addition, given the clear link between women’s reproductive rights and their ability to live free from violence, Congress should help alleviate abuse of women by fully funding reproductive health care and by eliminating prohibitions on federal spending for abortion.

Congress Should Expand Criminal Justice Options Beyond Arrest and Prosecution

Research demonstrates that the failure of police to respond to domestic violence – as well as the likelihood that police will respond in an over-aggressive manner- is related to racial characteristics of the neighborhood in which the violence occurs.  The VAWA bill addresses this concern by incorporating a strong anti-discrimination provision, by providing grants for training law enforcement and victim advocacy in “underserved” communities, and by providing funding for tribal governments and tribal domestic violence coalitions.   In addition to these efforts, Congress should expand its current focus to fund law-enforcement strategies that encourage a shift from post hoc responses to preventative initiatives with a focus on community problem-solving as an alternative to crime surveillance and arrests.  Many women who experience domestic violence are interested in alternative forms of adjudication than those currently provided by the criminal justice system.  Congress should help women to find justice beyond the limited options currently available in the criminal justice system by funding pilot projects that investigate the effectiveness of restorative justice, truth commissions, and other “alternative” programs in cases of domestic violence.

Congress Should Spearhead Efforts to Stop Mass-Incarceration

Congress should spearhead efforts to change the trend of over-incarceration of both men and women and should fund more prisoner reentry programs that incorporate anti-domestic violence initiatives.  Mass incarceration destabilizes neighborhoods and increases unemployment – effects that are linked with higher rates of domestic violence.  Dehumanizing prison conditions further reinforce violent behavior rather than curtail it. Congress should change federal sentencing guidelines that result in unfairly long sentences for low-level drug offending and encourage states to do the same.   Congress should lead efforts to do away with “war on drugs” practices that result in the over-surveillance and mass incarceration of poor persons.  These policies have had a devastating impact on low income communities of color.  The incarceration and criminal justice oversight of significant numbers of adults, many of them parents, leaves neighborhoods unstable and creates the circumstances for more intimate violence.  The concentration of disenfranchised ex-felons who face significant obstacles to employment further weakens the social fabric of neighborhoods and increases the likelihood of more domestic violence.

Congress Should Increase Funds for Civil Legal Assistance

Congress should increase funds for civil legal representation for poor women.  Poor women of color, immigrant women and undocumented women, and Native American women face substantial bias both from service providers and courts, particularly in child abuse and neglect proceedings and in family court.  It is critical that victims of domestic violence have zealous advocates who can ensure equal access to justice.

Since 1994, VAWA has broken new ground in federal and state responses to domestic violence, sexual assault and stalking.  At this juncture, rather than continuing to prioritize the criminal justice response to domestic violence, Congress should increase the focus on creative and innovative ways to stop domestic violence, and address the structural inequalities that make women vulnerable to violence, and the myriad needs of those subjected to abuse.

Sincerely,

Caroline Bettinger-Lopez, University of Miami School of Law, clopez@law.miami.edu  http://www.law.miami.edu/facadmin/cbettinger-lopez.php

Donna Coker, University of Miami School of Law   dcoker@law.miami.edu http://www.law.miami.edu/facadmin/dcoker-php

Julie Goldscheid; CUNY Law School goldscheid@mail.law.cuny.edu;

http://www.law.cuny.edu/faculty-staff/JGoldscheid.html.

Leigh Goodmark, University of Baltimore School of Law, lgoodmark@ubalt.edu

http://law.ubalt.edu/template.cfm?page=572

Valli Kalei Kanuha, Department of Sociology, University of Hawaii, kanuha@hawaii.edu    http://socialsciences.people.hawaii.edu/faculty/?dept=soc&faculty=kanuha@hawaii.edu

James Ptacek, Department of Sociology, Suffolk University jptacek@suffolk.edu

Deborah Weissman, University of North Carolina School of Law, weissman@email.unc.edu  http://www.law.unc.edu/faculty/directory/weissmandeborahm/

Selected Reading

This is an abbreviated list of related resources.  Any list of resources is likely to miss a great deal.    Please accept our apology for any omissions.  For additional resources, please contact the authors.

Report of the Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, Its Causes and Consequences, Mission to the United States of America, available at http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G11/138/26/PDF/G1113826.pdf?OpenElement

Violence Against Women in the United States and the State’s Obligation to Protect: Civil Society briefing papers on community, military and custody, submitted to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, Rashida Manjoo (2011), available at www.law.virginia.edu/vaw

Caroline Bettinger-Lopez, Human Rights at Home: Domestic Violence as a Human Rights Violation, 40 Columbia Human Rights L. Rev. 19 (2008) available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1310316

Clan Star – Restoration: Increasing Safety for Native Women (magazine) available at http://www.clanstar.org/restoration-magazine/

Donna Coker, Shifting Power for Battered Women: Law, Material Resources and Poor Women of Color, 33 U.C. DAVIS LAW REVIEW 1009 (2000) available at http://www.law.miami.edu/facadmin/pdf/dcoker/Shifting%20Power%20for%

20Battered%20Women.pdf

Marilyn Fernandez, Restorative Justice for Domestic Violence Victims: An Integrated Approach to Their Hunger for Healing (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010)

Sarah Deer, Bonnie Clairmont, Carrie A. Martell, Maureen L. White Eagle, eds, Sharing Our Stories of Survival:  Native Women Surviving Violence (AltaMira Press 2008).

Julie Goldschied, Domestic Violence and Sexual Violence as Sex Discrimination: Comparing United States and International Approaches, 28 T. Jefferson L. Rev. 355 (2006) available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=950127

Lisa A. Goodman and Deborah Epstein, Listening to Battered Women: A Survivor-Centered Approach to Advocacy, Mental Health, and Justice (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2007)

Leigh Goodmark,  A Troubled Marriage: Domestic Violence and the Legal System (New York: NYU Press, 2011)

Rebecca Hall, Utah Domestic Violence Council Economic Justice and Empowerment Project, Final Report (May 31, 2011), available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1962781

Angela Harris, Beyond the Monster Factory:  Gender Violence, Race, and the Liberatory Potential of Restorative Justice, 25 Berkeley J of Gender, Law & Justice 199 (2010) available at http://genderlawjustice.berkeley.edu/beyond-the-monster-factory-gender-violence-race-and-the-liberatory-potential-of-restorative-justice-by-angela-p-harris/

INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, The Color of Violence: The Incite! Anthology by (2006); see also http://www.incite-national.org/index.php?s=35

Valli Kalei Kanuha, Keynote Address, Annual Conference of Washington State Coalition Against Domestic Violence (Sept. 23, 2008) available at http://web.mac.com/valkaleikanuha/iWeb/Kalei%20Web%20Site/CV%20&%20Publications_files/08Conf_valkanuha_speech.pdf

Mimi Kim, The Community Engagement Continuum: Outreach, Mobilization, Organizing and Accountability to Address Violence Against Women in Asian and Pacific Islander Communities (2005) available at http://www.vaw.umn.edu/documents/communityengagementcontinuum/dvcommunityengagement.pdf

Jessica Lenahan (Gonzales) et al v. United States, Case 12.626, Rpt No. 80/11, Merits, July 21, 2011, available at www.oas.org/en/iachr/decisions/2011/USPU12626EN.doc;

Susan L. Miller, After the Crime: The Power of Restorative Justice Dialogues between Victims and Violent Offenders (New York: NYU Press, 2011)

Lisa Pruitt, Place Matters: Domestic Violence and Rural Difference, 23 Wis. J.L. Gender & Soc’y 347 (2008) available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1276045

James Ptacek (ed.), Restorative Justice and Violence Against Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010)

Beth Richie, Compelled to Crime:  The Gendered Entrapment of Battered, Black Women (1995)

Deborah Weissman, The Personal is Political  – and Economic: Rethinking Domestic Violence, 2007 B.Y.U.  L. Rev. 387 (2007)  available at

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=937110

It takes a community to end violence against women, and we are honored to be part of one that values women and seeks to make families a safe and secure place for children to grow and flourish.

Twenty-two years ago, before we received our first foundation dollars, we relied on our community to help support our transformative work.  Today, we hope we can count on you.

Best Regards,
Tiloma Jayasinghe
Executive Director

With your support in 2011, we:

Provided 463 women a range of services,including crisis intervention, safety planning, legal advocacy, ongoing emotional support and monthly support groups.

Helped 19 women obtain jobs, and resolve 14 women’s family court cases.

Launched a Teen Healthy Relationship project, to reach our youth- working with both boys and girls to address and prevent violence.

Expanded services by having a regular presence at the Brooklyn Family Justice Center.

What can your generous gift do?

Your gift of $50 enables 5 survivors to attend our monthly support groups.

Your gift of $100 provides a survivor one month’s travel expenses to our different service locations.

Your gift of $250 provides for two immigration law clinics per month.

Your gift of $500 provides for one survivor to attend a 6-week ESL course.

Give today via Google (link is to the right)!

In her new book Outdated, Samhita Mukhopadhyay, Sakhi Board member and Editor of Feministing.com, offers a personal account of what she calls a ‘feminist critique’ of dating and love in our world today.
“I felt a tremendous frustration with what I felt were the dominant narratives about romance in the mainstream media.  I really saw the book as an intervention.  Not really rewriting the fairytale, or this is how you live happily ever after, not necessarily a follow these guides into the relationship of your dreams, but to really critically analyze the dominant mess that we have internalized about romance and to really serve as an intervention into what I felt was making young people unhappy.”

Outdated gives voice to the daily pressures and fears media, society and family instills in young women, such as the pressure to have a successful long-term, heterosexual relationships that will lead to marriage, the ways consumerism and media shape our ideas of romance and sex.  Samhita responds insightfully to the myth “feminism hurts your love life” and addresses the need to collectively redifine feminity, masculinity and romantic relationships.  Get a copy of Outdated.

Learn more about Samhita, the writer, the activist, the technologist and the Sakhi.

For survivors of domestic violence, financial barriers are another obstacle to overcome when dealing with abuse.  As the economy falters, it becomes clear how vital economic stability is to our future.

Survivors of domestic violence face numerous hurdles when confronting abuse. Women in physically and emotionally violent relationships often also face financial abuse by their spouse or partners which can take many different forms.

While the physical manifestation of domestic violence is often the most obvious one and there is widespread recognition of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse as forms of domestic violence, there remains a lack of awareness around the dynamics of economic abuse and financial control tactics used by abusers. To make matters worse, while the impact of financial abuse can be devastating, it is often difficult to identify, document, and rectify.

Sakhi is committed to fighting for women to be free from economic violence and we are putting pressure on local law makers and decision makers to help alleviate and remedy this important issue that affects our community. If you wish to learn more or get involved in this campaign, please contact Suha Dabbouseh, Policy Advocate at suha.dabbouseh@sakhi.org.

Through a participatory process, Chhaya engaged with approximately 100 stakeholders in determining the greatest needs and desires for having this community center, as well as best location.  As a result of these focus groups, it was determined that the Northwest area of Queens was the most highly trafficked and densely populated South Asian area, and the best location for the center. It was noted that there is a sizable South Asian population in Richmond Hill and western Queens, but that the region was too inaccessible and isolated to locate the center there.  Several of the most requested needs for space and programming of the Center included recreation space, kitchen and eating area, performance space, child care and space for services to be brought to our population.

Sakhi participated in order to gather information as to whether this space could be used for any of our services, and to also pass on this information to the women we serve.  We asked that there be more emphasis on ensuring that child care would be made available, and whether any confidential space could be created.  It is unlikely that Sakhi will seek that any space be held aside for our direct service work, as confidentiality and safety is of prime importance.  However, this space would be an ideal location for our services to be advertised and for outreach and awareness raising.

This is an amazing endeavor undertaken by Chhaya CDC and its partners, and we look forward to supporting it in any way we can, so that the Community Center can be made a reality soon.

Learn more about Chhaya CDC.

In the last few months, Occupy Wall Street has shown us that Americans have tapped into the global movement against negligent economic policies. Americans are fed up with the aggressive capitalism that is hurting the middle class and resting on the backs of the poor.

Unjust economic policy is the cause of much of the violence and disruption seen in many of our communities and specifically poor, immigrant communities. As Mayor Bloomberg fights to clear out the occupiers- we must remember the real issue is not the encampments, but what they represent- which is the fight against regressive economic policies that are hurting our communities and stopping us from living sustainable, happy and healthy lives.

As members of the Sakhi community and committed to the eradication of violence against women, let us use this momentum to push for change in our communities that reflects the needs of our own 99%.

As with the Occupy movement, it is clear that the time has come for concrete actions to be taken.  We must push for the kind of change we want to see.  At Sakhi, we are using this momentum to continue our work, strengthen our partnerships, ramp up our prevention programs and enable and support our communities.

Over the past year at Sakhi, we:

* Formed partnerships with the Anti-Violence Project for our staff to be trained on working with the LGBTQ community

* Expanded our scope of services to permit safe friends and family of survivors to attend some of our economic empowerment workshops, recognizing their similar isolation and vulnerability to violence

* Launched a teen dating violence project, for the first time ever reaching our youth – working with both boys and girls so that we can address and prevent violence

* Continued to reach previously unreached South Asians in New York City through community outreach activities

* Held our first Summit,  ‘Preventing Violence, Promoting Justice’ and brought together social justice leaders across movements to figure out how we can bring our collective voices and strengths to end violence against women

As the year ends, we already have plans to build on the energy surrounding the Summit and will host the first in a series of follow up events in February 2012 at the Barnard Center for Research on Women.

To join us in this collective work, please reach out to us at contactus@sakhi.org.

Preventing Violence, Promoting Justice provided the opportunity to explore and mobilize around the intersections between domestic violence, immigration, economic justice, health and other related movements for social justice between current frameworks, and toward building a movement rooted in our community values.

Our goals for the summit were to:

(1) Create spaces for conversation to occur across communities, movements, where we can share our struggles and successes, learn from each other, and bridge isolation to strengthen networks of support, creativity, and innovation.

(2) Capture as much community narrative that can help inform our vision for strengthening the anti-violence movement for social change.

(3) Begin to identify strategies on working together as we build momentum towards shaping an anti-violence movement that is inclusive, intersectional, and holistic.

Stay tuned to this website as we will upload inspiring videos from the summit and summaries of the different panels!

For more information on the campaign, go to http://16dayscwgl.rutgers.edu/.

In 2006 , as part of the global campaign, we asked members of the Sakhi community to share their thoughts about activism and violence against women. We sent selected responses for each day of the campaign by e-mail. Listed below are the questions which participants answered:

1. What does activism mean to you?

2. Why is activism for women’s rights important?

3. How is violence against women a human rights issue?

View the responses from the community.

In early April, I attended a national conference put together by South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT) an advocacy organization committed

to elevating the voices and perspectives of South Asian individuals and organizations to build a more just and inclusive society in the United States.

The Summit held during the first week of April brought together a wide range of South Asian organizations from around the country,

providing an opportunity for all to raise issues concerning South Asian communities, and collectively strategize for solutions and future collaborations.

Attending the SAALT summit really got me thinking about the broader implications of the work I do everyday at Sakhi.

As an advocate at a grassroots, community based organization; the Summit helped me draw connections between my day-to-day work and broader social justice work.

One of the panels I titled ‘Connecting the Local to the Global: From South Asia and the Middle East to the Border and Our Backyards’ articulated the importance of the need for local grassroots organizations (specifically those working with immigrant populations) to integrate local community-specific visions in a broader context. One of the panelists,Hansdeep Singh from United Sikhs explained how discriminatorynational laws and negative public attitudes can affect an individual and a community’s psyche, how it increases an individual sense of alienation,reduces job prospects, impacts a community’s standard of living and education and leads to an increase in violence against women.

In context of the work I do everyday to combat domestic violence, I understood how important it is to address the roots of violence from the‘bottom up’ and at ‘top down’ at once. For example, by building connections with home countries and educating women about their rights even before they arrive in this country as new immigrants,

we can do preventive work, and by working towards improving immigration and national policies that affect the daily life of immigrants, we can ensure that survivors of violence can have access to their human rights. Harsh immigration laws reduce women’s choices and impedes (especially immigrant women) from finding alternatives,

leaving abusive relationships if they choose to and establishing independence from their partners.

Further, mainstream non-governmental and governmental agencies such as the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) and various law enforcement organizations lack a nuanced understanding of the impediments immigrant women face. For example, violence against women in the South Asian context is manifested in various forms including child marriage, polygamy, dowry, female infanticide, marital rape, depriving women of basic education and other such human rights violations. In such experiences, it is imperative that mainstream service agencies understand the abuse in this context. For this to happen there needs to be a lot more cultural sensitivity in both in organizations/social service units both in the US and the home country.

Other important points brought out during the conference included the importance of community interaction and dialogue. Another SAALT panel titled ‘Transnational Issues and the South Asian Community’ featured government representatives from South Asian consulates and provided a great avenue for dialogue between organizations and home governments on the above issues and ways to address them.

Tiloma Jayasinghe, Sakhi’s Executive Director spoke on this panel and made a very important point. She asserted the criticality of dialogue between community organizations and broader global entities like the UN for truly bringing about women’s empowerment. Initiating dialogue of this kind creates a nurturing setting necessary for all women to actively participate in the mainstream development process.

As an advocate assisting women who have experienced violence in their lives, I really appreciated the opportunity to discuss the complexities of my cases with other advocates from around the country. For example at Sakhi, I see many cases in which abusive husbands threaten their wives by refusing to help convert a conditional green card to one that would give her permanent status. In having discussions with my counterparts in other organizations, I was informed (and disheartened) to hear the further limited choices that H-4 visa spouses have in this country. In these scenarios, the ‘dependent’ clause within the H-4 visa severely debilitates and restricts a woman’s right to move around freely and establish independence from her husband. For example, a woman with an H-4 dependent visa often needs her husband’s accompaniment and support to acquire a driver’s license, open bank accounts and more.

SAALT’s Summit offered me the opportunity to have a broader understanding of how immigration status and its related nuances can adversely impact the choices that a survivor of domestic violence can avail of.

I thank and applaud SAALT for its work to create a platform for individuals and organizations to come together and share valuable insights with agencies that may have varied focuses, but have a common goal fo social justice and equal opportunity for all.

• Learn more about SAALT and its work