from Associated Press:
The O.J. Simpson case forced domestic violence into the spotlight, boosting a movement
Thirty years ago, as women’s rights advocates worked to pass the 1994 Violence Against Women Act, domestic violence was still something of a hushed topic.
Then Nicole Brown Simpson’s death forced it into the spotlight.[...]
In the years since, the Violence Against Women Act has funded more than $9 billion in grants to combat domestic violence, from police training to social services to the 1996 launch of the National Domestic Violence Hotline. The hotline received 75,000 calls that first year. Last year, it handled more than 400,000 calls, texts and chat messages.
by FRAMERSQOOL:
There really isn't much for me to add to this by way of commentary, other than how I recall the umpteen-squared number of times I had asserted this precise alignment in history, of the OJ Simpson case and the passage that same year (1994) of the Violence Against Women Act.
This may have even been when I'd first been introduced to the axiom of 'correlation does not equal causation' (or the Latinism 'post hoc ergo propter hoc' to describe the former as an erroneous type of conclusion.) These counter-assertions had been aimed at me again and again by domestic-violence-activist types with whom I used to waste my time trying to have discussions online, several pet-issues of mine ago.
The conversations would proceed predictably along the lines of...
Ron claiming that VAWA had passed as a direct result of the saturation media coverage of the OJ case that same year, and that the paranoia and extreme tendencies toward presumption of male guilt I'd encountered a few years later in divorce-custody proceedings shared those same over-reactive roots...
and my radfem-knowitall interlocutors, one after another, becoming indignant and haughty and femsplaining back at me that VAWA had nothing at all to do with the OJ case and how only a residual patriarchalist (or whatever) could come to such a misogynisticalisticistic conclusion, etc, etc...
And now, here is the Associated Press its ownself, corroborating this precise alignment I'd been saying had done me and so many innocent men so very much harm, for so very many years.
One may note that my extensive research into VAWA's grants economy back in the mid-2010s decade had shown repeatedly that VAWA'a primary result had been the manufacturing of casework in service of grant-renewal applications, and that most of this money had gone into personal pockets rather than into helping keep women safe, which was what all my evidence pointed to continually and consistently, as opposed to hardly any which ever may have confirmed that VAWA had ever actually, you know, helped keep women safe from violence.
And one might note that the sum of the claims about VAWA in the AP item above comes out to how many dollars in grants have been issued since 1994, and how many calls some hotlines have taken.
Huh, that.
Go ahead and look for any corroborative evidence that VAWA has ever helped keep women safer: you won't find it here, nor anywhere else. Because such evidence has never existed.
And I had been right about that all along too.
But this doesn't mean, just because it is no longer (according to that benchmark-bellwether indicator of what is currently politically correct, calling itself an Associated Press) a politically-incorrect post-hoc fallacy to point out how the OJ case propelled VAWA through Congress, that it will ever become politically correct to point out the equally all-along-obvious, which was that VAWA has done jack-shit for women, throughout these past thirty years.
Unless they're women on the receiving end of VAWA grants/handouts, that is.
Then, life is easy: fabricate enough casework out of thin air, false claims to police, and mercenary-expert-witness testimony, plus send enough denunciations of criminally-patriarchalist cops and misogynistical judges to the DOJ for them to keep on file for future career blackmail, and life's a gravy train that never stops running.
When they (the ones so mouth-foamingly denying any OJ-VAWA connection a decade ago) kept telling me '...if it helps just one woman....', I gather those were the women they were referring to.
It gives me zero pleasure, given the extreme costs to me and my children and family which VAWA programs and VAWA mindsets have represented, going back to the late 1990s, to say 'I told you so.'
But I did.
And I had been right, all along, for all the good it ever did me, my kids, or anyone else.
READ MORE BY FRAMERSQOOL
Thoughts from an aging bachelor of no particular consequence who is in command of more opinions than facts (but occasionally the facts, or the lack thereof) and can make a thing seem worth writing about.
The phrase 'presumption of male guilt' I used above indicates the primary result of the Violence Against Women Act: I had the misfortune of enduring a custody dispute which first became court business in 2000, involving my son who had been abducted by his mother in 1998 when he was only four months old. Prior to the case finally being brought before the court, after two years of my persistently urging both law enforcement and the courts to look into his mother's having taken him out of the home and over State lines (which is a federal felony), I had been repeatedly astonished that everyone in the official world was reflexively treating me as some kind of suspect or threat to the mother and child, when no evidence to this effect had ever existed. I had made no move to approach my ex or her family members who had colluded in the abduction other than to implore officials to intervene, and be met continually with a refusal to do so.
What I did not recognize until many years later, when I was given a tip about VAWA being before the US Congress for renewal in 2011, was that already by 1998 when my son was taken from me the entire divorce-custody industry had already been heavily influenced by training programs funded by the DOJ's Office on Violence Against Women (OVW). Further research indicated that VAWA's primary function since its 1994 passage had been to create the OVW and to thus distribute grants to thousands of recipients across the USA, ranging from storefront private-sector social-work practices to police departments, district attorneys' offices, tribal organizations and university programs, etc, etc.
I managed to dig up some of the training materials which had been circulated by OVW: these were consistently authored by non-profit groups indicating a radical feminist ideology in which maleness itself was presented as grounds for suspicion, and were always accompanied by an official disclaimer to the effect that neither DOJ nor any other edifice of the federal government was to be held liable for their contents. The organizations which had authored these materials were themselves DOJ-OVW grant recipients, having been paid in advance to compile whatever contents they deemed fitting, which was then categorically disclaimed by the very government which had funded them.
And what I also managed to learn about VAWA and its everyday functions, primarily as a grant-distribution mechanism, and the attendant abuses of those funds across the USA, is a much, much longer and in too many ways extremely personal and painful story.
And I have yet to find any credible evidence that passing VAWA has ever helped keep women safe.
All my findings indicate that presumption of male guilt was thereby made into a universal default policy in the official sector from 1994 onward, mostly by means of personalized career pressures aimed at those who become suspected of adhering to the presumption of innocence for all accused parties, and that nobody is particularly interested in protecting anyone male from THAT.