Civil Rights/Discrimination

Civil Rights Remedy in the Violence against Women Act and United States v. Morrison

The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) passed in 1994 was the first federal attempt to address comprehensively the challenges faced by victims of domestic and sexual violence. VAWA addressed the problem of domestic violence and sexual assault from many perspectives, such as increasing funding available for services to survivors, improving law enforcement response to domestic and sexual violence, mandating research on violence against women, and facilitating nationwide enforcement of protective orders. VAWA also created a new legal right-the civil rights remedy- that permitted an individual victim of gender-based violence to sue the perpetrator of the violence in federal court. The civil rights remedy was modeled on other civil rights legislation, such as prohibitions on [Page 128]discrimination on the basis of race or sex in the employment and housing contexts.

The VAWA civil rights remedy gave important new legal rights to victims by permitting them to sue a perpetrator of gender-based violence for compensation. Victims could bring a case in civil court; they were not dependent on a criminal justice system that had often proved unresponsive to domestic violence and sexual assault. Since the injury was framed in a discrimination context, plaintiffs could present circumstantial evidence of discrimination (such as gender-based epithets or gender-based bias) to support their claim. This kind of evidence would likely have been ruled irrelevant in traditional personal injury claims. Additionally, the VAWA civil rights remedy was available even in states that still had prohibitions on marital rape prosecutions or on personal injury claims between spouses.

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