Change VAWA to VAPA

Phyllis Schlafly, a favorite target of Leftist feminists who usually "forget" to explain where and how she is wrong, talks about the problems with the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) in this installment of her column that calls on WAVA to be rewritten.

For 30 years, the feminists have been pretending that their goal is to abolish all sex discrimination, eliminating all gender differences no matter how reasonable. When it comes to domestic violence, however, feminist dogma preaches that there is an innate gender difference: Men are naturally batterers, and women are naturally victims (i.e., gender profiling).

Starting with its title, VAWA is just about as sex discriminatory as legislation can get. It is written and implemented to oppose the abuse of women and to punish men.

Ignoring the mountain of evidence that women initiate physical violence nearly as often as men, VAWA has more than 60 passages in its lengthy text that exclude men from its benefits.

Schlafly isn't just complaining. She has specific recommendations.

For starters, the law's title should be changed to Partner Violence Reduction Act, and the words "and men" should be added to those 60 sections.

The law should be rewritten to deal with the tremendous problem of false accusations so that its priority can be to help real victims. A Centers for Disease Control survey found that half of all partner violence was mutual, and 282 scholarly studies reported that women are as physically aggressive, or more aggressive, than men.

Currently used definitions of domestic violence that are unacceptably trivial include calling your partner a naughty word, raising your voice, causing "annoyance" or "emotional distress," or just not doing what your partner wants. The law's revision should use an accurate definition of domestic violence that includes violence, such as: "any act or threatened act of violence, including any forceful detention of an individual, which results or threatens to result in physical injury."

If refusing meet a wife's every request is considered domestic violence, the concept is trivialized. There are women who are beaten by their shack-ups or husbands, and their plight should be taken seriously, not equated to disagreement.

Women who make domestic violence accusations are not required to produce evidence and are never prosecuted for perjury if they lie. Accused men are not accorded fundamental protections of due process, not considered innocent until proven guilty and in many cases are not afforded the right to confront their accusers.

Here's another specific problem:

Feminist recipients of VAWA handouts lobby legislators, judges and prosecutors on the taxpayers' dime (which is contrary to Section 1913 of Title 18, U.S. Code), and the results are generally harmful to all concerned. This lobbying has resulted in laws calling for mandatory arrest (i.e., the police must arrest someone -- guess who) of the predominant aggressor (i.e., ignore the facts and assume the man is the aggressor) and no-drop prosecution (i.e., prosecute the man even if the woman has withdrawn her accusation or refuses to testify).

She goes on to cite the same thing Michael Barone cited in a column I discussed here.

Victims of actual domestic violence have an obligation to 1) remove themselves and anyone for whom they are responsible from the situation, and 2) document the abuse, and, depending on how serious the abuse is, 3) following through in prosecution. Law enforcement should definitely cooperate, but not abandon the "innocent until proven guilty" approach. This will not only protect the victims (and thus allow them to leave the victim status behind), it will also protect others from becoming victims.