BD: Exactly.
JS: Why do you think Congress had this mentality shift?
BD: I think it reflects some of what we’re seeing on [Dartmouth] campus – a wellspring of frustration from the ground up that says the problem of sexual violence against women, and in this case the problem of sexual violence against Native women, is epidemic. The rate of sexual violence against Native women outpaces any other group in the US. Three out of four are likely to be sexually assaulted during their lifetimes. Congress heard the data loudly and clearly.
The Department of Justice documented this. This was very much on the radar. We have to applaud the success of grassroots activists and others like Amnesty International, which provided a very detailed report in 2007 and updated in 2008 to highlight just how dire this situation was. The problem in itself was extremely glaring.
What was equally glaring was the ineptitude and the lack of will on the part of state and federal prosecutors to do anything about it. Federal studies showed that the rate of declination, that is the rate that US attorneys decline to hear a case, was at the highest levels in some of these sexual assault cases.
Now in fairness to US attorneys, they may say there are good reasons why they could not go forward in several of those cases, because by the time federal investigators arrived at a crime scene, it had already been corrupted. The site had not been well preserved and the victim may have been questioned by other people. Other information may have gotten to her so it’s unclear whether or not federal prosecutors were getting accurate information that could hold up in court using a beyond a reasonable doubt standard, so they would point to reasons why those rates of declination were so high.
On the state side, it’s less clear why there was such apathy but that’s the general picture that Congress saw. The problem itself was epidemic and the response was virtually non-existent and something had to be done, so I think in response to that dual scenario, some modification using VAWA as a vehicle was seen as the best way to get this done.
I thought it was a brilliant move by senators, including Senator Leahy from Vermont, my home state, to attach this provision as a rider to VAWA so that senators voting against it would essentially have to vote against VAWA and that was a very politically dicey thing for them to do. But it was enough to hold up the passage of VAWA for an entire year. It didn’t pass in 2012 but it did pass in 2013.
So I think the national attention given to this issue, and the insistence on grassroots activists to not let this issue go by the wayside again. I think we’re seeing parallels of that right here on campus in terms of the freedom budget and so forth that students and other members of the community including faculty feeling that the problem of sexual violence on this campus has gone too long ignored and somebody has to do something about it. And that’s what Congress was facing when they reauthorized VAWA.
The Department of Justice documented this. This was very much on the radar. We have to applaud the success of grassroots activists and others like Amnesty International, which provided a very detailed report in 2007 and updated in 2008 to highlight just how dire this situation was. The problem in itself was extremely glaring.
What was equally glaring was the ineptitude and the lack of will on the part of state and federal prosecutors to do anything about it. Federal studies showed that the rate of declination, that is the rate that US attorneys decline to hear a case, was at the highest levels in some of these sexual assault cases.
Now in fairness to US attorneys, they may say there are good reasons why they could not go forward in several of those cases, because by the time federal investigators arrived at a crime scene, it had already been corrupted. The site had not been well preserved and the victim may have been questioned by other people. Other information may have gotten to her so it’s unclear whether or not federal prosecutors were getting accurate information that could hold up in court using a beyond a reasonable doubt standard, so they would point to reasons why those rates of declination were so high.
On the state side, it’s less clear why there was such apathy but that’s the general picture that Congress saw. The problem itself was epidemic and the response was virtually non-existent and something had to be done, so I think in response to that dual scenario, some modification using VAWA as a vehicle was seen as the best way to get this done.
I thought it was a brilliant move by senators, including Senator Leahy from Vermont, my home state, to attach this provision as a rider to VAWA so that senators voting against it would essentially have to vote against VAWA and that was a very politically dicey thing for them to do. But it was enough to hold up the passage of VAWA for an entire year. It didn’t pass in 2012 but it did pass in 2013.
So I think the national attention given to this issue, and the insistence on grassroots activists to not let this issue go by the wayside again. I think we’re seeing parallels of that right here on campus in terms of the freedom budget and so forth that students and other members of the community including faculty feeling that the problem of sexual violence on this campus has gone too long ignored and somebody has to do something about it. And that’s what Congress was facing when they reauthorized VAWA.
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