The New Violence Against Women Act Aims To Protect Women From State Violence

If you ask President Joe Biden, the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA)—passed as part of former President Bill Clinton’s 1994 crime bill, with expansions authorized every few years since—was an unabashed good that single-handedly taught Americans to take domestic violence seriously. This supremely overstates the case (as I’ve written about at length). In fact, the VAWA’s overreliance on law enforcement approaches and cop-centric solutions crowded out less carceral alternatives to addressing violence and created problems for many victims.

“VAWA married anti-violence feminists to the violent state,” wrote journalist Judith Levine and Northeastern Illinois University professor Erica R. Meiners in their 2020 book The Feminist and the Sex Offender. The act “overwhelmingly leans on arrest and prosecution—in other words, criminalization, an option that fails to serve many women.”

But in a surprising twist, the latest VAWA update actually addresses state violence against women. Introduced in the U.S. Senate last month, the Violence Against Women Act Reauthorization Act of 2022 contains sections on improving conditions for women in federal custody and “closing the law enforcement consent loophole.”

Better Treatment for Female Prisoners

The new VAWA proposes a broad range of reforms for women in federal custody, including better access to menstrual products and a pilot program to let women who give birth while in federal prison not have their babies taken from them.

To this latter end, the law would “establish a pilot program…to permit women incarcerated in Federal prisons and the children born to such women during incarceration to reside together while the inmate serves a term of imprisonment.”

The bill would take several steps to address the needs of incarcerated parents and pregnant women. These include:

• Establishing an office within the Bureau of Prisons to determine prisoner placement that would, “if the prisoner has children, consider placing the prisoner as close to the children as possible.”
• Prohibiting federal prisons from placing prisoners who are pregnant or have recently given birth in segregated housing units “unless the prisoner presents an immediate risk of harm to the prisoner or others” (and requiring any such placement to be “limited and temporary”).
• Providing parenting classes and other resources to incarcerated people who are the primary caretaker to children.
• Training correctional officers and staff on “how to interact with children in an age-appropriate manner…basic childhood and adolescent development information; and basic customer service skills.”

Other provisions in this section address the special health and hygiene needs of female prisoners, including a directive to “ensure that all prisoners have access to a gynecologist as appropriate” and to “ensure each prisoner who requires [menstrual] products receives a quantity the prisoner deems sufficient.” (Inadequate provision of sanitary products has been a major complaint of incarcerated women across the U.S.)

The measure also addresses weird rules regarding v