White House Marks 30th Anniversary Of Violence Against Women Act

The White House’s Office of Public Engagement held a briefing on the 30th anniversary of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) Friday to discuss the Biden-Harris administration’s efforts to address gender-based violence and next steps for prevention and protection.

The Violence Against Women Act, which President Biden introduced in the ’90s when he was a senator, extended historic protections and support to survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault for the first time.

Jennifer Klein, director of the Gender Policy Council, opened the briefing by recognizing Biden’s work over the decades in this space, including the 2022 signing of  legislation that expanded protections to include those against online abuse.

“It’s really important to keep in mind that while we’ve made tremendous progress since VAWA was signed into law in 1994, we also know that much work remains in the fight to prevent gender-based violence,” she said.

To that end, the Biden-Harris administration announced several new efforts this week.

The Department of Justice announced more than $690 million in grant funding to support services for survivors of gender-based violence, including domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault and stalking. Funding will be awarded to more than 40 grant programs and initiatives to help states, tribes, territories, law enforcement, victim advocates and community-based organizations to address gender-based violence.

Additionally, five agencies led by the Department of Housing and Urban Development announced a new office on gender-based violence that will coordinate and implement policies to address safe housing, and economic stability needs of survivors. These include public housing and housing voucher programs, housing units supported by low income housing credits and transitional housing programs funded by the Department of Justice.

“This new guidance addresses survivors’ housing rights under VAWA, identifies potential housing scenarios that highlight the need for these housing protections and affirms these agencies’ commitments to enforcing the expanded housing protections under VAWA,” Klein said.

The Department of Justice is also expanding technical assistance and federal funding opportunities to use federal funding to address firearms and domestic violence by creating training materials for judges, district attorneys and survivors, Klein said.

Arati Prabhakar, director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, discussed efforts to protect against AI-generated deep-fake image-based sexual abuse.  A group of leading AI companies – including Adobe, Microsoft and OpenAI – have responded to the White House’s call to action requesting voluntary commitments to curb the creation of image-based sexual abuse and proactively reduce the risk of new images from being generated without a person’s consent.

“When a person is targeted by these deepfakes, it’s a burden that they have to live with for the rest of their lives,” she said. “Most importantly, I want to thank survivors for all the work that they are doing to provide support and to keep people safe from this abuse.”

Klein added a national hotline has been created specifically for technology-facilitated, gender-based violence.

In response to questions about what the Biden-Harris administration is doing to prevent gender-based violence, she indicated they have focused on funding prevention programming such as medical and legal services and campus sexual assault prevention programs.

“One of the places where there’s been tremendous progress is seeing this not only as a legal issue, but as an issue of culture change,” she said.