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Vice President Biden, Attorney General Holder Announce Domestic Violence Initiative in Rockville
Vice President Joe Biden and the U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder were in Rockville on Wednesday to announce a national domestic violence initiative modeled after a Maryland program.
1in6 Thursday: Restrictive Residency Rules and the Illusion of Public Safety
Patti Giggans, Executive Director of Peace Over Violence, discusses the negative effects of increasing restrictive residency rules for sex offenders while reducing their access to resources, monitoring and increasing the risk of recidivism. In her piece, she highlights the latest strategy to restrict where convicted sex offenders live is to create parks where none exist to force registered sex offenders to move out of a neighborhood. The City of Los Angeles plans to build three pocket parks in the communities of Harbor Gateway and Wilmington. California state law prohibits sex offenders from living within 2,000 feet of a park, playground school or a daycare center. Some states restrict living within 1,000 feet or near certain bus stops. The concern? That these over-restrictive policies can backfire, actually increasing recidivism and reducing public health and safety.
The House now turns to the Violence Against Women Act
Even as most of the headlines coming out of Washington these days contain the word sequester, another bill is moving along, making progress without quite so much drama. But the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), passed in the Senate and due for action in the House, is no less important.
Thousands of untested rape kits lying in storage in Detroit
A disturbing story about law and order today. In the city of Detroit, the woman who holds the job of Chief Prosecutor discovered that thousands of sexual assault cases have been in limbo for decades because evidence from so-called rape kits is languishing on forgotten shelves. It is not a problem unique to Detroit, but it is one that has seen serial rapists, and even murderers, exist undetected for years.
Senate Passes VAWA Reauthorization
After several days of debate, the Senate voted on Tuesday to reauthorize and strengthen the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) in a 78 to 22 vote. The reauthorization includes protections for LGBT and Native American survivors. It also include the SAFER Act, which provides state and local governments with funding to audit the untested rape kits in their facilities and creates a national registry to help track those audits. It also amends current law to require a greater percentage of federal grant money be spent directly on analyzing untested rape kits. Next, VAWA will head to the House.
50 Facts About Domestic Violence
Sunday was the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women and the launch of this year's16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence. In the time it takes me to write this paragraph, 26 people--given our statistics probably all women--will be assaulted by an intimate partner in the U.S. In the roughly 48 hours between my writing and posting, at least six women in the US and hundreds if not thousands around the world will be killed by violent spouses.
1in6 Thursday: "I'll Never Forgive You."
For several days, one sentence has continued to trouble me: "I'll never forgive you." Those words were spoken by the man identified only as Victim 4 at the Jerry Sandusky sentencing on October 9, 2012. His words say several things to me.
1in6 Thursday: Men Who were Abused as Boys
Men who were abused as boys were abused by individuals, not by a caricature. I find it disheartening that some have suggested we have to work hard to protect our children from other "Sanduskys."
1in6 Thursday: Worse Than Denial - Institutional Betrayal
After The LA Times reported that between 1965 and 1985 The Boys Scouts of America took very little or no action about suspected child sexual abuse, it announced it would review 5,000 cases spanning the past fifty years. The Times investigation found that Scouts’ officials did not report to police hundreds of cases of alleged sexual abuse and that as many as 1,662 male child victims were impacted. This scandal will continue to make headlines as hundreds of files are released from the BSA’s own collection of cases known as "perversion files."
1in6 Thursday: A Scout Is...
Growing up in East Austin, there was little refuge for me from the gangs, drugs, and violence in my barrio, so when an opportunity arose for me to join the Boy Scouts as a teen, I jumped at the chance. I went from feeling trapped by the violence I was witnessing in my own home to the freedom of exploring the outdoors. Through the guidance of my Scoutmaster, I acquired camping and survival skills, but I also learned how to navigate through my adolescence using the Boy Scout Oath and Law as a compass.
