September marked the 30th anniversary of the passage of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). GW Today asked Joan Meier, professor of clinical law and director of the National Family Violence Law Center at the George Washington University Law School, to comment on VAWA, its significance and how it could be strengthened. Meier has published widely on domestic violence issues and conducted a major study on child custody cases involving parental alienation and abuse allegations. In 2003, she founded the nonprofit Domestic Violence Legal Empowerment and Appeals Project (DV LEAP) to provide pro bono appellate advocacy for survivors of domestic violence.
Q: How was violence against women in the United States dealt with prior to the passage of the Violence Against Women Act in 1994?
A: Many people act like it wasn’t recognized in the law and nobody knew about it before the Violence Against Women Act. That is not true. It was absolutely addressed in state laws. There were state civil protection order laws and there were state custody laws with responses to domestic violence in the child custody setting. And there were state criminal prosecutions ever since the late 1980s. So domestic violence was being addressed in state courts under state law, but never effectively enough. There were many of us who were domestic violence lawyers long before the Violence Against Women Act, and that’s how the VAWA came to be adopted—thanks to the advocacy of domestic violence lawyers and advocates.
Q: What were among the key provisions of the law?
A: The major thing that the law did was that it established a huge amount of federal funding, a huge start as compared to zero, for both criminal prosecution and some civil resources for abuse victims and survivors. It put over $1 billion in the hands of prosecutors and criminal courts. And it supported the right of immigrant victims to self-petition, meaning they didn’t have to have someone else petition for them for temporary status, legal status. That was a very big deal, because usually people came here thinking their spouse or partner was going to petition for them. But when there was abuse, that’s the last thing their partner was going to do. They needed to be able to self-petition, and they had to prove domestic violence in order to do that. That’s still true.
There was one other very significant provision, which went away because the Supreme Court struck it down—the civil rights remedy. This was a provision that said the survivors could sue in federal court for a violation of their civil rights caused by violence against them based on their gender.
Joan Meier was installed in April 2022 as the inaugural holder of the National Family Violence Law Center Professorship. Here, she is shown sharing a moment at the ceremony with Provost Christopher Bracey.
Q: How did VAWA improve the lives of survivors of gender violence?
A: First of all, it created a lot more public awareness of the problem. It funded a lot of new resources, which was important, not just criminal, but civil resources. It funded civil legal services. It funded, to some extent, immigration services.
The other thing that was important to us at the time was that it was called the Violence Against Women Act. Capturing that domestic violence was a form of gendered abuse was kind of radical then. I mean, we all thought of it that way, those of us in the field, but it wasn’t legally seen that way. So, getting a federal law called the “Violence Against Women Act” was important just in terms of giving credibility to the fact that it's a form of gender abuse. So, yeah, the funds, the civil resources, the immigration resources and the title itself were very important.
Q: How can the law be strengthened to improve protections?
A: Violence against women is defined, obviously, as being about adult women. But the reality is that many women who have children would give their lives to protect their children. And so, if we’re not taking care of their children, we’re not taking care of them. I would like the larger domestic violence field and the world at large to understand that women’s and children's safety and well-being are completely intertwined in homes where there’s a father who abuses. The idea that they’re separate issues and can be dealt with separately is completely false. I'd like to see the field come together around that, which hasn't really always been the case, and work together in protecting both women and children rather than seeing them as separate constituencies, as separate missions. VAWA could be very helpful in this regard.
VAWA has been reauthorized repeatedly, and it's been strengthened every time. There have been extensions of the immigration provisions, expansions to same-sex couples, significant expansions to tribal abuse on tribal land (by the way, the majority of it is committed by whites, not tribal members). The next to last extension funded tribal courts and allowed tribal courts to adjudicate cases, which they previously weren’t allowed to do—all those cases went to state courts.
The most significant thing in the 2022 re-authorization, in my eyes, was a provision that I helped write called the Keeping Children Safe in Child Custody Act, otherwise known as Kayden’s Law, named after a child who was murdered by her father. And that was the first time that the Violence Against Women Act included a provision that was aimed specifically at what’s happening in child custody litigation in family courts, when abusers and protective parents are litigating over the children. Frankly, family courts are doing a very poor job and too often not believing in women and children and sending children—sometimes to their deaths—sometimes just to extensive abuse. Courts are simply reluctant to recognize paternal abuse and its seriousness. This new provision is aimed at trying to get state courts to do a better job.
It defines four provisions that it asks states to adopt in their custody laws. It aims at some basic procedural things that should not be controversial. And it requires training for judges and other family court personnel.
Since the adoption of Kayden’s Law in 2022, the National Family Violence Law Center, especially my colleague Danielle Pollack, has been working to get those provisions adopted state by state.
Q: How has the passage of VAWA affected your research?
A: I can’t say that the Violence Against Women Act has affected my research per se. My work has continued all along. All of the cases that I review and deal with are in state courts. And the Violence Against Women Act doesn’t address those generally. But now that we have Kayden’s Law in the Violence Against Women Act, that is affecting my work because I am supporting the states that are looking into whether they should adopt it and helping them understand why Kayden’s Law was written and what my five-year empirical study showed was happening in family courts. It showed that the majority of allegations of abuse by mothers and children are rejected in family court and mothers are losing custody at great rates to alleged abusers.
I do, however, get involved in cases that come up under parts of VAWA. Recently, I did an amicus brief with the Domestic Violence Legal Empowerment and Appeals Project in the Rahimi case, in which an abuser challenged a firearm prohibition under the Second Amendment. And we did a brief that described in great detail—not the harm to adult women, which many other amicus briefs were thoroughly addressing—but the harms to children, which I think is less well known—how much harm abusers with guns cause to children, how often they kill children, how often children are exposed to trauma.
