This thread is about attitudes, and I think there’s a lot to say about those, but I hope you’ll forgive me responding along different lines which I think are illuminating.
The services that you’re talking about, and the attitudes that are “supposed” to be present, are measurable and material things. I think it’s really important to recognize that the entire infrastructure there – the existence of an advocate, the existence of the agency the advocate works for, the expectation that the police & prosecutor have dedicated & trained personnel who are following certain evidence-based protocols regarding taking statements from survivors – is a funding question. Before the Violence Against Women Act, there was about a 30 year pitched battle about the need for those services. VAWA funded the services, and now they exist - now the answer to your question “isn’t there supposed to be …” is yes, there is.
The reason I think the distinction between popular attitudes and concrete material support for services is important is that I think attitudes follow trends over time and geographically. It is very (very) similar to the increased fragility of abortion services over the last decade or so. There are lots of places in this country that are actively hostile to the attitudes preserved in VAWA-funded services. But they have the services anyway, either because they have to, or because the money is there for the small minority of people willing to do it, against popular sentiment. I have experienced the conditions created in places like that by even a temporary interruption in funding. I didn’t like them!
All of which is to say that, while I don’t necessarily have an opinion about related changes in attitudes (look at the guy who signed the bill), in material terms, things dramatically improved for victims the instant VAWA went into effect, and created a society that looked a lot more like one that wanted to protect people from being abused and hold abusers accountable. If it were no longer in effect, I do not know that the things that are “supposed” to be true would be true anymore.
As an aside, Republicans tend to allocate more dollars for victims of domestic violence and sexual assault than Democrats do. Some of our best pass-through funding was during the Trump years and it was only the relative increase in funding during those years that has enabled us to weather the drastic cuts in funding under Biden. This would be VOCA (Victims of Crime Act.) ARPA (American Rescue Plan Act) helped too, but those are temporary funds related to COVID challenges. We were flush with government funding during COVID years, but now we are seeing a rapid decline in that support, lower than pre-pandemic levels. Figuring out what the hell to do about that is part of my job. (Note: this is funding for nonprofits. I don’t know how this funding affects law enforcement beyond giving our agency the dollars to educate them.)
Which isn’t to say conservatives love how we’re doing our work. At the same time, we’re facing challenges for school-based prevention programming by right-wing extremists. I suspect at least some of this is based in an ideology that sees women as weaker than men and thus needing protection. Any attempt at education regarding the harm of rigid gender norms is eschewed for a more black and white worldview in which bad men abuse their God-given authority over women. That’s just my theory.
Why Democrats are so bad at funding these programs, I couldn’t tell you. Though I give credit to my Democrat-controlled state for including, for the first time in history, a budget line item for DV and SA funding. It’s a pittance relative to our federal dollars, but it’s something, and it only happened after our state coalition garnered lobbying efforts from domestic violence and sexual assault services agencies across the state.
As a general personal opinion observation, I’ve seen rape culture coming from anyone, liberal or conservative, that has their identity invested in not believing the victim. I’m a little bit cynical about that and I’m not sure I am immune. I voted for a man accused of sexual assault. A lot of us did.
In supplying an answer to the OP’s question, I wonder if technology has played a role.
In regards to police brutality, and its exposure, I believe it was Will Smith who said “It’s not increasing. It’s just being recorded.” Cell phones made it easier to capture the incidents.
Similarly, I wonder if the use of online social media made it easier for women to share their stories. They had a larger pool of people to speak with, and could disclose intimate details without needing to be face to face. Suddenly, what might have seemed shameful, or rare, becomes an obvious and all too common trend.
To be fair to you, and to the rest of us, our choices were between a man accused of a sexual assault and a man accused of many sexual assaults who bragged on tape about getting away with sexual assault.
Yeah, that was certainly a factor, as was Biden’s outspoken support of victims during the Obama administration. I didn’t really mean that in a casting aspersions way, I just try to think honestly about why I make the decisions I do. I’m not much for celebrity worship but boy did I ever love Chris Hardwick until an ex accused him of abuse. I haven’t been able to return to his podcast, not because I definitively believe he’s guilty, but because grappling with my conflicted feelings is more emotional work than I want to do when listening to podcasts.
Then again, Obama tripled VOCA funding all in one swoop at one point, which might have been the all-time highwater mark. My memory of the specifics is not great, but didn’t Trump’s budget raid the crime victim fund to move money toward services without actually spending the money out of his annual budget? That’s how I remember it, which would pretty effectively make it look like he was fully funding services in the short term. And then, of course, of the people who want to stop VAWA from being reauthorized pretty much 100% of them are Republicans.
Definitely agree that if you’re walking in to a Representative or Senator’s office to ask for funding for gender-based violence, knowing what party they’re from is not a useful way to predict how they’re going to respond. It’s complicated.
I’m not sure. I wasn’t managing federal funding at my agency until October 2022 and I am going by the raw funding numbers reported by the Division of Victim Services in their short 2023 presentation explaining why we’re running out of money. They took money from the Trump years to apply during the Biden years because they anticipated this would happen. As such they’ve managed to keep funding close to equal through 2024-2025, at which point VOCA dollars move to a competitive model. For a while sexual assault and domestic violence dollars were split into two VOCA grants, annoying everyone because of the tediousness of tracking whether a given session was domestic violence-related or only sexual assault-related. There is so much overlap between domestic violence and sexual assault, this move didn’t make sense. This year, due to popular demand they combined them again, but surprise! Significantly lower total allocation. What a time for me to start this job!
It does stand to reason that there are probably a lot of complexities behind those raw numbers that I don’t know about. Thanks for pointing this out to me. As I’m learning the ropes I tend to get focused on the details that matter the most without necessarily grasping the larger picture.
I could not do your job even for a day. The ED and accounting person at my agency always took it easy on me when it came time for grant applications and budgeting and stuff, but even the very limited amount of that I had to do was too much for my (whichever side of the brain is the one that isn’t good with paperwork)-sided brain. It really is a staggering amount of work just to be able to figure out what money is available to do the work.
Trying to refresh my memory about the Trump budgets and VOCA and of course it’s pretty impenetrable trying to decipher exactly when funding practices changed and how. They did take a little less than $2 billion out of the Crime Victims Fund for 2018, and per NCADV,
It also funds almost all of VAWA in addition to several other programs from the Fund, reallocating money that is statutorily directed toward victims and survivors to fund law enforcement and other activities.
which is the part I was remembering. Same again in 2019:
The Administration claims the budget ‘fully funds’ the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA); this claim is false. The Administration budget funds VAWA at $100 million below the level authorized by Congress. Rather than showing a commitment to decreasing gender-based violence by investing taxpayer money in VAWA, the budget pays for the entirety of VAWA with a transfer from the Crime Victims Fund, a fund that is financed by fines and penalties paid by convicted federal offenders, not from tax dollars. This transfer is anticipated to decrease funding available to shelters and other direct service providers by up to almost 26%.
Then Biden passed the VOCA fix bill which is supposed to keep the CVF balance healthy over time, which obviously requires that they not take 20% out of it every year to pay for stuff they don’t want to pay for otherwise. That seems like it would explain why Trump seemingly was freer with cash for a few years and then Biden became stingy. Those all seem like facts, although I readily admit that I don’t have the tools or the inclination to have really examined this stuff when it was happening; I took the objections at face value. As with a lot of policy stuff from the Trump era it’s pretty much impossible to tell what actually happened and what was supposed to happen.
It doesn’t help that every year they change the name of the grants and each grant has multiple names. I’m managing about ten grants through the state DVS (it’s pass-through, so technically VOCA et al are considered state funding). VOCA is one of five grants we receive under the heading “DV - 2024” and they all have names that sound the same, I honestly couldn’t tell you the difference between them all without looking up the contract. And it will change again next year. Especially because they are always changing the rules about allowable and unallowable expenses. This year they decided that the “SFMI Sexual Assault FVPSA Mitigation grant” can’t be spent on Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners, which… what? Your grant says sexual assault right in the title but paying for the salary of someone conducting sexual assault examinations is right out. No, it can now only fund counseling services for survivors of sexual assault not related to DV.
These are the puzzles we have to work out every year so we don’t have to fire anyone. What this job offers in flexible hours it more than makes up for in stress. Fortunately I am not alone in figuring this out. Thank Og for our accountant!
Today I attended a state coalition member meeting, where they said in so many words, Trump took money from VAWA to pay for VOCA. So no, it wasn’t a magical increase in funding, it was robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Things we reviewed that the coalition achieved this year:
$30,000,000 line item to our state budget for the first time ever
Abolished child marriage
Extreme Risk Protection Orders - my understanding of this new law is limited, but it will give law enforcement extra leverage to remove guns from people who are threatening to harm themselves or others, for a specified period of time
On the drive there, I was listening to this Death Sex & Money podcast with actress Ellen Burstyn who was 81 at the time of the interview. She talks about her marriage to Neil Nephew in 1964. He was a good man whose experimentation with drugs triggered permanent psychosis, after which time he underwent a radical personality change and became violently abusive. At one point, he strangled and raped her. When she called police, they said, “We only become involved if a crime has been committed.” (Because, at the time, there were no laws to protect married women from abuse or sexual assault.) She said, “Are you telling me that if he kills me, I can come to you then?” “That’s right.” Because nobody would allow her control of finances or insurance due to her gender, she ended up stuck with him until he died. (It’s a great interview, btw, and is not solely focused on that trauma. She has a lot of interesting things to say.)
It’s so difficult to imagine what it would like to live in that reality. As bad as things can be for some people, I really can’t fathom something like that happening today.
For me it’s just easier to cope psychologically with current systemic problems by being engaged with the work that is being done. It’s a heartening experience to me to sit in a room with 100 people who all work on this issue and have coordinated efforts to continue to change things. Not everyone is turning a blind eye to this.
I don’t know who she meant, or who the DrDeth thought she meant. I wasn’t thinking she voted for Trump, but maybe she did in 2016. Biden was accused of sexual assault for smelling a woman’s hair or something I didn’t really take seriously. Many people voted for Al Franken and even after the accusations which fall somewhat short of criminal assault many wish he hadn’t resigned from the Senate. A lot of people have held their noses to vote for the lesser of two evils, and sometimes the greater, but that doesn’t equate to turning a deaf ear to rape.
So what exactly were you responding to? And maybe the Doctor of dying and the Spice dispensing varmint could clarify also.
I was referring to Biden, who was accused of rape.
I really, really, really do not want this thread to devolve into an argument about this particular topic, so please leave it. This thread is about changing attitudes (or not) about sexual assault.