Violence against women in the United States

In addition to negatively impacting mental and physical health, violence against women can interfere with life at work, home, and school.

[8] According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institute of Justice, about 1 in every 4 women suffer from at least one physical assault experience from a partner during adulthood.

Due to housing regulations that practice a 'no tolerance' policy requiring eviction of all household members when even one person is convicted of any crime, battered women can then be homeless as a result.

Some women who have experienced violence in the home risk the loss of their jobs related to their need for medical treatment, counselling, finding new housing and legal protection.

[18] Law enforcement in the United States also manipulates rape statistics to "create the illusion of success in fighting violent crime" according to a 2014 study.

For sexual assault, the severity of the crime has been determined by establishing the victim's moral character, behavior, signs of resistance and verbal expressions of non-consensual participation.

[26] President Lyndon B. Johnson's War of Poverty, upheld by the logic that the world would not have the resources necessary to care for the entire global population as argued by Dr. Barbara Gurr, a professor at University of Connecticut, led to the creation of the Office of Economic Opportunity that dealt with education, training, and contraception for the poor.

[27] I consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man on the farm ... What she produces is an addition to the capital, while his labors disappear in mere consumption Since the days of European colonization, Europeans who arrived sought to control Native American populations in order to acquire more capital and resources from the newly discovered land.

This resulted in policies of genocide and removal targeting Native American women and girls in order to procure land for settlements.

[29] Native American women have been a minority group that is easier to target for sterilization due to high levels of bureaucratic secrecy and the unique circumstances of colonization and sexual violence that has kept their plight invisible to mainstream feminist movements.

[27] Native American women could not unseal court records that documented the sterilization practices of the Indian Health Service (IHS) at the request of the United States government.

A General Accounting Office (GAO) study conducted between 1973 and 1976 found IHS facilities sterilized 3,406 Native American women in Albuquerque, Phoenix, Oklahoma City, and Aberdeen, South Dakota.

There was often a lack of translators to explain the severity of the procedure to Native American women and doctors withheld information about the irreversibility of the sterilization or other forms of birth control.

[27] Physicians at the IHS were prescribing Depo-Provera, a long-term chemical contraceptive, to Native American women 20 years before it was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1992.

[32] Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes penned:[32] It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kindEugenics and sterilization programs in the United States would later inspire Nazi eugenics.

[42] The high levels of violence that Indigenous women experience has led to multiple academic frameworks to better understand this phenomenon.

Most frameworks account for colonization, white supremacy, and patriarchal norms like sexism, due to the unique history of Native American women as victims of colonial and sexual violence.

[44][45][46][47][42] Rauna Kuokkanen, a professor of Arctic Indigenous Politics at University of Lapland, argues that globalization is an extension of systems of oppression, such as white supremacy, the patriarchy, and capitalism.

Under her intersectional framework that reveals the links between colonization, patriarchy and capitalism, indigenous women face violence due to corporate globalization.

Indigenous women are increasingly recruited into the army due to the fewer choices they have as a result of the privatization of public services and education under globalization.

"Conquest, cultural invasion, divide and rule, and manipulation" relegated Native women to a lower status by being stripped of their political and religious power and often being raped and used as sex slaves by colonists.

Patriarchal colonialism falls under Burnette's larger critical framework of historical oppression defined "the chronic, pervasive, and intergenerational experiences of subjugation that, over time, have been imposed, normalized, and internalized into the daily lives of many indigenous American peoples.

IPV manifests in many forms such as being punched or hit with a hand, being slammed against a wall or a hard surface, being dragged across the floor or room and choked.

[42][38][53][54] Murder is the third leading cause of death for Native American women in the United States as reported by the Center of Disease Control (CDC).

A 2017 study conducted by the Urban Indian Health Institute (UIHI) found 506 MMIWG cases in 71 cities across the United States.

If a perpetrator controls the immigration status, they can then use the threat of deportation to prevent the battered woman from contacting authorities and assistance agencies.

Other proposed policies not yet in effect are designed to stop deportation of immigrants who have experienced domestic violence, sexual assault, and human trafficking.

[56] On September 13, 1994, President Bill Clinton signed into law the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), which was drafted by Senator Joe Biden (D-DE) and co-written by Democrat Louise Slaughter.

The Act granted $1.6 billion of funding for investigating and prosecuting violent crimes directed towards women, making compensation from those convicted automatic and mandatory.

Section 905 provides tribes concurrent jurisdiction with the United States federal government over intimate partner violence.