The bill incentivized collaboration between victim services organizations and criminal justice agencies, offering them grants if they partnered up. Cops weren’t making necessary arrests, and advocates complained criminal justice enforcers didn’t understand domestic violence. “We ripped the Band-Aid off a shameful secret and exposed the ugly truth of domestic violence to the public eye,” he said. They said the bill funneled millions of dollars into the criminal justice system at the expense of meeting urgent victim needs. At the time of VAWA’s passage, some feminists raised the alarm about the anti-violence movement teaming up with a historically racist criminal justice system.

Source: Huffington Post April 07, 2019 11:04 UTC