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Arkansas Granny

(31,483 posts)
Thu Jan 24, 2019, 11:33 AM Jan 2019

The Trump Administration Quietly Changed the Definition of Domestic Violence

and We Have No Idea What For

Without fanfare or even notice, the Department of Justice’s Office on Violence Against Women made significant changes to its definition of domestic violence in April. The Obama-era definition was expansive, vetted by experts including the National Center for Victims of Crime and the National Domestic Violence Hotline. The Trump administration’s definition is substantially more limited and less informed, effectively denying the experiences of victims of abuse by attempting to cast domestic violence as an exclusively criminal concern.

The previous definition included critical components of the phenomenon that experts recognize as domestic abuse—a pattern of deliberate behavior, the dynamics of power and control, and behaviors that encompass physical or sexual violence as well as forms of emotional, economic, or psychological abuse. But in the Trump Justice Department, only harms that constitute a felony or misdemeanor crime may be called domestic violence. So, for example, a woman whose partner isolates her from her family and friends, monitors her every move, belittles and berates her, or denies her access to money to support herself and her children is not a victim of domestic violence in the eyes of Trump’s Department of Justice. This makes no sense for an office charged with funding and implementing solutions to the problem of domestic violence rather than merely prosecuting individual abusers.


For varied reasons, many survivors make an informed choice to not initiate a criminal case.
Restoring nonphysical violence to the definition of domestic violence is critical. As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports, over one-third of U.S. women (43.5 million) have experienced “psychological aggression” at the hands of an intimate partner. Experts have long recognized that the manipulative behaviors identified in the Obama-era definition as restricting a victim’s liberty or freedom can cause greater and more lasting damage than physical harm. I know this from my experiences over a decade working with survivors of domestic violence. In nearly every case, the bruises and broken bones eventually heal, but the psychological scars can last a lifetime.

Trump has attempted to brand his administration as one of “law and order,” so shoehorning domestic violence into a criminal justice framework may seem to him like a sensible way to recast the issue. But it isn’t. The assumption that domestic violence must involve a criminal justice response demonstrates a myopic understanding of abuse. Many survivors—particularly those from minority or marginalized communities—are reluctant to report domestic violence to law enforcement. Race, class, sexual orientation, and immigration status can significantly affect whether a survivor decides to seek outside intervention when suffering violence in the home. A call to the police may make a survivor less safe if, for example, doing so intensifies the abuser’s anger or the arrest of a primary breadwinner renders her homeless. Some survivors do not report because they do not want their abusers to face criminal punishment or because they generally distrust law enforcement. For varied reasons, many survivors therefore make an informed choice to not initiate a criminal case.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/01/trump-domestic-violence-definition-change.html


Maybe I missed it, but I don't recall hearing anything about this before. So much of what this administration has accomplished has been overshadowed by the outrageous day to day bs that emanates from the White House that it's next to impossible to stay up to date on everything that's happening in Congresss.
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The Trump Administration Quietly Changed the Definition of Domestic Violence (Original Post) Arkansas Granny Jan 2019 OP
Incredibly disturbing angrychair Jan 2019 #1
Who would benefit from changing these definitions? All I can think of is the abuser. Arkansas Granny Jan 2019 #3
K&R... spanone Jan 2019 #2

Arkansas Granny

(31,483 posts)
3. Who would benefit from changing these definitions? All I can think of is the abuser.
Thu Jan 24, 2019, 12:17 PM
Jan 2019

Why would anyone want to protect the perpetrators of domestic violence?

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