US Creates Its First National Plan on Gender-Based Violence

Last week, the Biden administration announced the release of the National Plan to End Gender-Based Violence, the first initiative of its kind in the nation’s history.

The plan lays out an approach that is, among other things, intersectional and rights-based while addressing gender-based violence across the life course through the lenses of public health and public safety.

According to the plan, it is designed to provide “an important framework for strengthening ongoing federal action and interagency collaboration in a comprehensive manner through a government-wide approach, while identifying opportunities to expand access to safety, support, healing, and justice for survivors ... Although the Plan is focused specifically on federal action, it is designed to be accessible and useful to public and private stakeholders across the United States for adaptation and expansion — because all communities are vital to ending GBV.”

The federal government’s first actions on intimate partner violence came in 1984, when Congress passed the Family Violence Prevention and Services Act, which enabled survivors of domestic violence to access help through a 24-hour confidential hotline, and put grant funding in place for community programs and services. That same year, Congress also passed the Victims of Crime Act, which provides funds to tribes, states, and territories to support crime victims funds and direct services. In 1994, then Senator Joseph Biden, with the urging and support of many shelters, women’s rights, and faith-based groups, drafted and led the effort to pass the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), the fifth iteration of which President Biden signed into law last year. VAWA provides funding to all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Native tribes, and the territories to support a coordinated response to domestic violence, sexual assault, dating violence, and stalking.

Since its early days, the Biden administration has worked to advance gender policy, both domestically and globally, first with the creation of a Gender Policy Council, subsequently with the release of a National Strategy on Gender Equity and Equality, which listed ten strategic priorities, among them the elimination of gender-based violence, and then in updating the U.S. Strategy to Prevent and Respond to Gender-Based Violence Globally. Upon the release of the National Plan, Jennifer Klein, assistant to the president and director of the White House Gender Policy Council, connected the plan to the history of federal work, commenting that the “National Plan builds on th[e] legacy [of the Violence Against Women Act] by advancing a whole of government approach to expanding access to safety, support, healing, and justice for survivors.”

The plan itself outlines the scope of gender-based violence in the U.S. For example:

• 41% of women and 26% of men in the U.S. report having experienced sexual violence, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner.
• More than half (54.3%) of women and nearly one-third (31%) of men report having experienced some form of sexual violence involving physical contact by any perpetrator, including intimate partners, at some point in their lifetimes.
• Black, Latino, Indigenous and Native American, Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander people and other survivors of color, as well as survivors from immigrant and other marginalized and underserved communities, are particularly susceptible to intersecting forms of discrimination and bias.
• Black women and American Indian and Alaska Native women are killed by current or former partners at a rate 2.5 times that of white women.
• Black transgender women account for the largest proportion of victims of fatal violence against transgender and gender-nonconforming people.

The plan is divided into seven “pillars,” or interconnected areas of action, including prevention; support, healing, safety, and well-being; economic security and housing stability; online safety; legal and justice systems; emergency preparedness and crisis response; and research and data. Each of the pillars is broken down into goals and objectives.

“This comprehensive strategy represents a striking divergence from our historical focus solely on the criminalization of gender-based violence,” said Michele R. Decker, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who has done extensive research on gender-based violence. “It moves us to a holistic approach that prioritizes both prevention and response … This fuller, comprehensive strategy allows us to apply decades of learning on prevention, survivor support, racial and ethnic disparities, and accountability — all in service to violence prevention and better meeting the needs of survivors.”

Among the most common and intractable hurdles to stability that survivors of intimate partner violence face are limited or no financial resources, and no place to stay. Often, these barriers force survivors to stay with their abusers longer than they wish because they can’t pay for groceries, rent, or child care on their own. Among the recommendations in the area of economic security and housing stability are a focus on strengthening workplace prevention of gender-based violence and support for survivors, including implementing paid family and medical leave and sick leave. Additionally, that section of the plan details efforts undertaken by the Department of Defense to respond to sexual violence in the armed forces, including its plan to transfer authority for cases involving sexual and domestic violence and sexual harassment from commanders to independent prosecutors. The section also describes the interagency work that the Departments of Justice, Health and Human Services, and Housing and Urban Development are engaged in in recognition of the impact of domestic and sexual violence as the leading cause of homelessness for women and children, including strengthening the training and technical assistance being provided to both housing and homelessness service providers and to victims service providers with the goal of improving housing options for survivors and their families. Finally, it recommends funding an array of housing and homelessness services in recognition of the diverse needs of survivors for, among other things, access to flexible funding and cash assistance.

While all programs are subject to the budget process in Congress, the plan outlines several ways in which the administration hopes to strengthen its work to provide responses to gender-based violence that are tailored to the various communities served. For example:

• The Bureau of the Interior recently established a Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons Unit to build on previous congressional and executive branch efforts to respond to the high incidence and missing and murdered Native women.
• The plan proposes providing financial support to enable the National Domestic Violence Hotline to connect survivors with culturally specific community-based resources (services that are specific to various communities, including racial and ethnic communities; American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian populations; deaf communities; rural communities; children/youth; LGBTQI+ populations; and other underserved populations), and separately funded new helplines for the Native and deaf communities.
• The plan also highlights ongoing trilateral work with the governments of Canada and Mexico, as well as Indigenous women leaders, with a focus on gender-based violence against Indigenous women and girls, including trafficking, and economic insecurity. And it envisions initiating bilateral work with Canada under the International Labor Organization Convention on Eliminating Violence and Harassment in the World of Work, which will be led by the U.S. Department of Labor.

With the release of the National Plan, the U.S. joins approximately 80 other countries that have released national plans and tried to move their work to eliminate gender-based violence forward in accordance with such plans. The United Nations considers such plans a “promising practice,” in the global work to end gender-based violence, and the U.S. government looks forward to being able to share the plan both domestically and globally. “Our hope is that the plan will also be useful to local and state governments as well as community organizations across the U.S. to guide and support their efforts to end gender-based violence,” said Klein.