On Thursday evening, President Joe Biden will mark the 30th anniversary of the Violence Against Women Act — a law he helped shepherd in the 1990s and reauthorized as president in 2022 — by announcing $690 million in Department of Justice grant funding for organizations working with survivors of gender-based violence and a slew of other federal initiatives, the White House said on Wednesday.
The president will also announce that the Justice Department is funding a new “national resource center” for cyber crimes to assist “law enforcement, prosecutors and victim services organizations prevent, enforce and prosecute cyber crimes against individuals, including cyber stalking and the non-consensual distribution of intimate images,” White House Gender Policy Council director Jennifer Klein said on a press call on Wednesday.
And the DOJ will expand the technical assistance and federal funding it offers to state and local law enforcement agencies that work to take guns from domestic abusers. The Supreme Court ruled 8-1 in June that such bans on domestic abusers owning firearms are constitutional.
“We know that access to a gun makes it five times more likely that a woman will die at the hands of her abuser,” said Klein, who is the inaugural director of the White House’s Gender Policy Council, first established by Biden in March 2021.
More than 1,000 gender-based violence survivors, advocates and allies will join Biden at the White House’s South Lawn to mark the anniversary and celebrate the new initiatives on Thursday, Klein said.
“When people were still whispering about domestic violence, an issue that had remained in the shadows for generations, Joe Biden started a national conversation. He gave women a platform, handing them a microphone they never had before to shine a harsh light on their abuse. He listened. He forced others to listen, and he acted with his legislative expertise, strong will and refusal to ever give up,” said Elizabeth Alexander, a longtime Biden aide who worked for him in the Senate, as vice president and now as a White House deputy assistant and First Lady Jill Biden’s communications director.
“Joe Biden fought for years to get his signature legislation passed, the Violence Against Women Act, which saved millions of women from violence, often at the hands of those who were supposed to love them,” Alexander continued. “When we think about the profound legacy of Joe Biden, I think of those women and the generations of trauma since that he likely prevented.”
On the 20th anniversary of the law, then-Vice President Biden wrote in a Time magazine op-ed it was his “proudest legislative accomplishment.” Last November, in a statement discussing the law, he said “ending violence against women has been the cause of my life.”
Alexander recalled Biden’s fight to pass the law, beginning in 1990 with historic public hearings on violence against women. The eventual 1994 law established a National Domestic Violence Hotline and included funding for women’s shelters, rape crisis shelters, housing, legal assistance, and training for police officers, prosecutors, judges and others involved in domestic violence cases.
Among the other announcements Biden will make on Thursday, the Department of Housing and Urban Development is launching a new office focused on gender-based violence to “address the safe housing and economic stability needs of survivors.”
“We know that gender-based violence is a leading cause of homelessness for families with their children, and the Biden Harris administration is committed to enforcing VAWA’s housing protections,” Klein said.
The anniversary comes as Biden’s vice president, Kamala Harris, is seeking to become the first woman elected president in U.S. history. Harris, a former prosecutor, has long said she pursued that career path in part because a high school friend of her's was assaulted by her stepfather.
“My focus then, on protecting women and children from violent crime, is based on a value that is deeply grounded in the importance of standing up for those who are most vulnerable,” Harris said at the presidential debate on Tuesday night.
Shortly after the debate, global pop star Taylor Swift endorsed Harris. Swift, who publicly regretted not endorsing former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2016, started getting involved in U.S. politics in 2018, endorsing a Democratic challenger to Tennessee Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn. Among her many reasons for endorsing against Blackburn, she cited the senator’s vote against the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act in 2013, writing Blackburn’s “voting record in Congress appalls and terrifies me.”
On Wednesday, less than 24 hours after Swift endorsed Harris, nearly 340,000 people visited the Vote.Gov portal through the link she shared, a spokesperson for the United States General Service Association confirmed to Spectrum News.