Violence Against Women's Act Of 1994

Domestic violence has been going on for many centuries. For many years it was seen as only a private matter and the government had no business getting involved with it. Because of there willingness to get involved with these matters it caused much abuse to women of these families. The traditions and customs found in these societies continued up until the last few decades and left these wives and sometimes the children at the mercy of their husbands. It wasn’t until the 1990’s when the government started to do something to protect women from this kind of violence. That’s when the Violence Against Women’s act of 1994 happened. This act is also knows as VAWA. This act started the marker for societal changes as well as governmental changes. These

(Ball 2002) These husbands were allowed to inflict injury as long as the result was not life threating. These laws ended shortly after in 1870. The situation improved for married women but not very much. In 1824 Mississippi became the first state to allow wife- beating with its “rule of thumb” which allowed men to be the disciplinarians and any forms of black eyes and any welts were not in violation of the law ("Under the rule of thumb, 1982). This rule of thumb stated that a man was allowed to beat his wife with a stick that was no thinker then the diameter of his thumb. By allowing these things to happen this gave the husbands the right to use physical force to be able to control their wives behaviors. Women were yet again left at the mercy of their husbands. State laws continued to support the wife’s husband that allowed them to beat them through the 1800’s. It wasn’t until 1895 that women were given the right to get divorces from their husbands no matter what the reason

Prior to 1981 New Jersey had no specific laws protecting victims of domestic violence. This law was a national law that addressed the problems of domestic violence and sexually assaulted against women (Legal Services of new Jersey, 2006)This act indented to require all states to enforce valid restraining orders from other states, allowing victims to keep their protective order even when they relocate to somewhere else (Legal Services of new Jersey, 2006)Violence against women’s act was a very important first step when it comes to creating a comprehensive and national response system in order to deal domestic violence. This bill was most known as the “Most comprehensive federal effort to address gender-based crimes” (Weissman, 2013, p. 225). This act helped in two very important ways, first it took gender-based violence as a fundamental civil rights issue and second it showed domestic violence as a cause of economic impairment. (Weissman, 2013, p.