Leading researchers and commentators have been critical of VAWA:

  1. Sarah Deer: “And when tribal governments receive VAWA funding, they feel compelled to replicate the state or federal justice system. I’ve seen situations where tribes have been discouraged from reinvigorating a traditional response to violence that would involve the community and the women themselves rather than the tribal court.”
  2. Martin Fiebert: “221 empirical studies and 65 reviews and/or analyses… demonstrate that women are as physically aggressive, or more aggressive, than men in their relationships with their spouses or male partners.  The aggregate sample size in the reviewed studies exceeds 371,600.”
  3. Linda Kelly: “Yet, despite the critical importance of first acknowledging and then eradicating the male abuse of women, an equally important but untold story remains. Women can be batterers. Men can be victims.”
  4. Wendy McElroy: “Years ago I was beaten so badly by a ‘partner’ that my right eye hemorrhaged in the line of vision and I have been legally blind in the eye ever since…The DV attitudes in VAWA were a large part of why it took me so long to heal. As long as I bought into suspicion and rage toward all men, I could not make sense of my own reality. Only when I realized one man was responsible and other men would have come to my aid did I grasp the beating as a personal, not a political experience.”
  5. Beth Richie: “Since the anti-violence movement was operating in the context of a larger movement towards criminalization, it was easy to adopt the solutions of arrest, detention and surveillance. This has been very problematic in terms of the number of women who experience violence and are subsequently arrested.”
  6. Murray Strauss: “Researchers who have an ideological commitment to the idea that men are almost always the sole perpetrator often conceal evidence that contradicts this belief…Thus, many researchers have published only the data on male perpetrators or female victims, deliberately omitting data on female perpetrators and male victims.”
  7. Cathy Young: “VAWA-funded training for police and prosecutors encourages the presumption that the man is always the sole or primary aggressor in domestic violence cases. Among past recipients of federal grants for such training are psychologists Dee Graham and Edna Rawlings