Now, 35 years later, the domestic violence movement is a model of how grassroots, feminist activism can transform people’s lives. Advocates for women who were at that time called “battered” founded shelters that provide safe housing for women and their children, established state coalitions and nationwide networks to advance their work, lobbied for hundreds of new laws aiming to stem domestic violence and played a leading role in the development of new procedures for how police respond to calls involving domestic violence.
The most significant reform to date has been the passage, in 1994, of the national Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). The result of more than a decade of intense lobbying by women throughout the country, this legislation made evident the government’s responsibility to protect victims of interpersonal violence. The federal law funds services for victims of rape and domestic violence, provides funding for special training programs for police and court officials and provides for a national 24-hour hotline for battered women. Since its inception in 1996, the hotline has answered more than 1,240,000 calls.
In California, activists have helped pass dozens of domestic violence laws created to broaden the impact of VAWA and improve the lives of women and girls. One of these laws, which was a focus of the Women’s Foundation’s 2003–2004 Women’s Policy Initiative fellows, requires that victims of domestic violence or abuse be informed that they have the right to have a domestic violence counselor or other support person with them when interviewed by any law enforcement authority or district attorney.
Other new laws include mandatory arrest policies for restraining order violations and a requirement that forms for reporting domestic violence be available in languages other than English. Family court decisions must now be made with the presumption that allowing a perpetrator of domestic violence to have custody is detrimental to a child, a dramatic policy-shift decades in the making. Throughout the state, a number of organizations have begun to educate youth and men around the prevention of violence.
The Support Network for Battered Women, in Mountain View, for example, a Women’s Foundation of California grant partner, is providing young women and men with leadership training to prepare them to be peer educators on domestic violence, healthy relationships, community resources and intervention strategies in Santa Clara County schools.
