Implementation of the Violence Against Women Act - Hearing Before the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, One Hundred Third Congress, Second Session on the Implementation of the Violence Against Women Act Provisions of th... #269700

I know we will hear how the Criminal Justice System has too often let women down, but also about how the system can be made to work for women. The key as we move forward in implementing this new law is how do we make it work for women. This hearing will also highlight programs that will provide im mediate, practical, and important help to women that is needed now, not down the road in this 6-year program. For example, shel ters provide women and their children not only the physical shelter and the ability to leave home in which they are terrorized — by the way, the vast majority of women don't leave now because there is no place to leave to. I ask the men who are listening, if they were in a similar circumstance and they knew they had to leave without any financial resources and with their children in tow, what would they do. I suspect the same as the vast majority of women who are abused at home do. But these shelters are not merely Shelters. They provide shelter for children as well as mothers, and they provide counseling and legal and other services, but most importantly a safe place to stay. Over the next 6 years, the violence against women law will mean that approximately one million more battered women and their families will have a safe place to go — an important and immediate step in the right direction, especially considering that today the United States, as you have heard me say many times, has more shelters for animals than we do for battered women.