Violence against women: The law that keeps almost dying
Every few years, one of the most consequential pieces of federal legislation in American history comes up for a vote. The Violence Against Women Act is a law with broad, near-universal public support in the abstract, and yet it has lapsed, stalled, or nearly collapsed at almost every reauthorization since it passed in 1994. Understanding why requires understanding what VAWA actually is, which turns out to be narrower, and stranger, than its name suggests.
What VAWA is
The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) is really two things stitched together: a large bundle of federal grant programs that fund state and local systems e.g. police training, prosecutors, shelters, forensic exams, legal aid, and a narrow set of actual federal crimes that only reach conduct crossing state lines.
The federal crimes are genuinely narrow. Title 18 of the U.S. Code, sections 2261, 2261A, and 2262, criminalize interstate domestic violence (traveling across state lines to injure a spouse or partner), interstate stalking (including cyberstalking) and crossing state lines to violate a protective order. That's it. Nearly every other act of violence against a woman in this country, that is, an assault, a rape or a murder, is prosecuted under ordinary state criminal law. VAWA doesn't replace that system. It funds it, and fills a narrow gap state law couldn't reach: an abuser who skips town to escape a local order of protection.
The Supreme Court case that shaped everything
The original 1994 Act didn't stop at funding. It included a civil rights remedy, which was a provision letting victims sue their attackers directly in federal court, treating gender-motivated violence as a federal civil rights violation, similar to how the law treats violence motivated by race. It was, by design, the most ambitious part of the statute. In 2000, the Supreme Court struck it down. United States v. Morrison held that Congress had exceeded its authority under both the Commerce Clause and the Fourteenth Amendment, that violence against women, however serious, was constitutionally a matter for the states to police, not the federal government. The decision gutted VAWA's most novel legal innovation and locked the law into the shape it's had ever since: funding plus a handful of interstate crimes, nothing broader. Every reauthorization since has worked within that constraint.
What counts as VAWA Violence, and what doesn’t
VAWA's grant programs and the definitions that govern them, codified at 34 U.S.C. § 12291, are scoped to four categories: domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, and stalking. Notably, the statute doesn't define these as a list of crimes. It defers to whatever crimes the state already has on the books, layering federal funding and a specific relationship or conduct requirement on top.
Domestic violence, under VAWA, means a felony or misdemeanor crime such as assault, battery, strangulation, unlawful restraint, violation of a protective order, homicide, whatever the state already criminalizes, committed by a current or former spouse, intimate partner, dating partner, or cohabitant, or against someone with whom the offender shares a child. Dating violence is the same idea, assessed by the length, type, and frequency of a romantic relationship. Sexual assault is "any nonconsensual sexual act proscribed by Federal, tribal, or State law," with no relationship requirement at all. Stalking is defined purely by conduct, a repeated course of behavior that would cause a reasonable person to fear for their safety, also with no relationship requirement.
That split matters. Two of the four categories are relationship-dependent; the other two aren't. A woman assaulted once, by a stranger she's never had a relationship with, in an incident that isn't sexual and isn't part of a repeated pattern, doesn't fit any of the four categories. She's the victim of ordinary assault or battery under state law, a real crime, prosecuted the same way it always has been, but not a “VAWA covered crime,” and not someone with a statutory claim to VAWA-funded victim services in the way a woman assaulted by an ex-partner, or repeatedly stalked by anyone, would be. Contrast that with a woman hit once by an ex-boyfriend she dated only briefly: that's dating violence, squarely inside VAWA's scope, because the relationship element is satisfied even though the underlying act, one hit, is identical.
It's also worth correcting a common assumption in the other direction: despite the name, VAWA doesn't only serve women. A 2013 nondiscrimination provision explicitly bars VAWA-funded programs from turning away victims based on sex, gender identity, or sexual orientation. Eligibility runs on the four conduct categories above, not on the gender of the person walking through the door.
Four Reauthorizations, One Recurring Fight
VAWA's grant programs were never written to last forever. They carry sunset dates, typically five years out, meaning Congress has to actively renew the law's core funding architecture on a regular basis or watch it lapse. It has lapsed. Twice.
The first lapse, in 2011, was quiet: authorization expired, but appropriators kept funding programs anyway until the 2013 reauthorization passed. That fight centered on whether the law would extend protections to LGBTQ victims, undocumented immigrant victims, and expand tribal jurisdiction to let tribal courts prosecute non-Native abusers on tribal land. It very nearly failed over those three issues, and passed only after significant negotiation. The second lapse was worse. VAWA expired during the 2018–2019 government shutdown, was briefly revived, expired again in February 2019, and then stayed lapsed for more than three years while the House and Senate deadlocked over firearms restrictions for domestic abusers, LGBTQ and transgender protections, and tribal jurisdiction. It wasn't reauthorized until March 2022. That 2022 reauthorization is the one currently in effect. It expanded tribal jurisdiction’s list of "covered crimes" beyond the 2013 baseline to include sexual violence, sex trafficking, stalking, child violence, obstruction of justice, and assault of tribal justice personnel — a meaningful expansion of tribal courts’ authority over non-Native offenders. It also created new funding streams for sexual assault forensic exams and the backlog of untested rape kits (the subject of a later piece in this series), and added provisions addressing cyberstalking and the nonconsensual distribution of intimate images.
One correction worth flagging, because it's a common mix-up: the “boyfriend loophole”, which is the gap that let people convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence against a dating partner still legally buy a gun was not closed by VAWA 2022. It was closed by the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, a separate law signed three months later, in June 2022, in response to the Uvalde shooting. The two laws are closely related in subject matter, and easy to conflate, but they're distinct statutes passed under different political circumstances.
Where It Stands, and What's Next
Today, VAWA's grant programs are authorized through fiscal year 2027, and the Office on Violence Against Women is operating on an unprecedented $700 million budget, funding the STOP and Sexual Assault Services Program formula grants that make up the bulk of the law's on-the-ground impact. The 2027 sunset date means the next reauthorization fight is already on the calendar, and history suggests it will not be a formality. The pattern across four reauthorizations is remarkably consistent: nobody in Congress publicly opposes the core mission of funding services for survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, dating violence, and stalking. What derails VAWA, over and over, is the same trio of adjacent fights ; immigrant protections, LGBTQ and gender identity inclusion, and tribal jurisdiction, that have nothing to do with whether the underlying programs should exist, and everything to do with the broader political fights those issues sit inside.
VAWA doesn't die because people disagree it's needed. It nearly dies because it's a recurring hostage in fights that are really about something else. That's worth remembering as 2027 approaches. The law that gets remembered as a landmark 1994 achievement is, in practice, a law that has to survive a political gauntlet roughly once a presidential term, and whether it survives the next one will depend less on its substance than on whatever unrelated fight happens to be attached to it.