Professor Celebrates Milestone of Violence Against Women Act at White House
It’s been three decades since President Bill Clinton signed the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), the first suite of federal laws to address domestic violence, sexual assault, stalking, and other types of gender-motivated violence. To mark this occasion, the White House hosted a celebration on September 12 on the South Lawn, the site of the original signing. Among those in attendance was Rutgers Law School Professor of Law Sally Goldfarb. She was among a handful of participants who were invited to speak with President Joe Biden inside the White House before the event.
Goldfarb played a key role in the writing and passage of VAWA, and was present at its signing in 1994. In the years prior, she founded and chaired the National Task Force on the Violence Against Women Act, a national coalition that lobbied for the act’s passage and remains active to this day as the National Task Force to End Sexual and Domestic Violence. In recognition of her work mobilizing the legal profession against domestic and sexual violence, she was named one of the American Bar Association’s 20/20 Vision Award recipients, alongside such distinguished company as then-Vice President Joe Biden, US senators, judges, and fellow leading advocates.
Decades of Progress
Goldfarb has dedicated her career to advancing women’s rights, having held positions at the National Women’s Law Center in Washington, D.C. and the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund in Manhattan, before joining Rutgers Law School in 1995. She was selected three times to advise the United Nations Division for the Advancement of Women on legal remedies for violence against women, and her publications span topics including women’s legal rights, same-sex marriage, and the impact of disasters on women and families. She has served on the New Jersey Supreme Court Committee on Women in the Courts and the Board of Advisers for the American Law Institute’s Principles of the Law of Family Dissolution. Goldfarb has received four teaching awards at Rutgers Law School, and leads courses on family law, sex discrimination, and torts.
Thanks in part to Goldfarb's work on the legislation, VAWA has provided billions of dollars of federal funds to prevent and respond to domestic violence, sexual assault, dating violence, and stalking. The law created the national 24-hour domestic violence hotline, which receives up to 3,000 calls and messages every day. The statute improved enforcement of domestic violence restraining orders, toughened federal criminal penalties for domestic violence and sexual assault, and reformed immigration law to protect abused immigrants who flee from their abusers. Since its initial passage in 1994, VAWA has been reauthorized and expanded four times, most recently in 2022. This reauthorization strengthened the law by broadening support for victims of crimes committed on tribal land, increasing services for survivors from underserved and marginalized communities, addressing cybercrime, and more.
“Over the past 30 years, the Violence Against Women Act and other federal and state reforms have made a dramatic difference in the way the law responds to violence against women, but there’s a lot more work to be done,” Goldfarb says. “Domestic violence, sexual assault, and other forms of gender-motivated violence are still far too common, and the way the legal system addresses those problems is often inadequate to ensure that justice is served.”
