The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), a landmark 1994 bill aimed at curbing domestic and sexual violence, which currently has to be renewed every five years, lapsed in February. On Thursday, the GOP unveiled its counterintuitive, anti-Indigenous VAWA replacement.
The 2013 VAWA and the more recent House VAWA reauthorization draft included a number of provisions designed to better protect American women—including Native women, currently threatened by a continent-wide crisis of violence. The Senate version announced Thursday gutted those provisions. Adjacent to the scourge of domestic and sexual violence is the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women crisis (MMIW), a national epidemic defined by high rates of violence visited upon Native women and by a ragtag federal reporting system that allows many cases to slip through the cracks.
The Senate version of VAWA, sponsored by Iowa Republican Senator Joni Ernst, arrived after months of opaque holdups, and walks back this 2013 provision, instituting a series of restrictions on the jurisdictional reach of tribal courts.
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Full article at New Republic
Article submitted by Great Gazoo