Every minute in the United States, 24 people fall victim to intimate partner violence.
“That means in this hour alone, over 1,400 people are going to be victims in this country,” Kaitlin Sidorsky ’10, Ph.D., told Bryant University community members during her Constitution Day lecture on September 17.
Sidorsky, an associate professor of political science and public policy at Ramapo College, seeks to better understand domestic violence within the U.S. and looks at ways to better protect victims. Drawing from her research and co-authored book, Inequality Across State Lines, Sidorsky explored how domestic violence politics and policies have failed to protect women and offered pathways to reform.
During the event — which was sponsored by the Office of the Provost and the College of Arts and Sciences’ Politics, Law, and Society department and History, Literature, and the Arts department — Sidorsky explained that approximately 36 percent of women and 28.5 percent of men are victims and domestic violence is more likely to occur among African American couples, African American women, and Native American women.
The first major piece of domestic violence legislation, Sidorsky noted, arrived with the enactment of the 1994 Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), which aimed to address and prevent violence against women — including domestic violence, sexual assault, and stalking. Noting that an important area within domestic violence policy relates to firearms, Sidorsky highlighted that VAWA makes several points about guns: First, if a person has been charged and arrested and has been convicted of a domestic violence felony, that individual cannot have access to a gun; second, if a person is under a restraining order — a common tool used in domestic violence situations — that person cannot have a firearm either.
When a firearm is present in a domestic violence situation, it increases the risk of homicide of women by 500 percent, said Sidorsky. The danger extends beyond individual households and can be a precursor to broader tragedies. Sidorsky noted that approximately 60 percent of all mass shootings either start with a domestic violence incident or involve a perpetrator who has been convicted of a domestic violence charge in the past.
Sharing several examples of domestic violence incidents that led to killings via firearms and discussing how the most dangerous time in a domestic violence situation is right after a woman leaves or right after she gets a restraining order, Sidorsky explained that federal and state governments have been passing and implementing inadequate policies with little accountability for either level of government. Granted, there are good domestic violence laws on the books, but if those who are implementing the law don’t understand it or don’t implement it well, it remains ineffective.
“We've got a domestic violence problem in this country, and it's not being fixed or looked at the way we need it to,” Sidorsky said, adding that many domestic violence cases go unreported. “It also raises major questions of who is actually responsible and who owns this policy area because, right now, it seems to be everyone and no one at the same time.”