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Gender-Motivated Violence: Developing a Meaningful Paradigm for Civil Rights Enforcement

NCJ Number
179121
Journal
Harvard Women's Law Journal Volume: 22 Dated: Spring 1999 Pages: 123-158
Author(s)
Julie Goldscheid
Date Published
1999
Length
36 pages
Annotation
This article discusses two Federal laws that consider gender-based crimes as bias crimes and presents an approach for assessing the role of gender motivation to guide courts in determining when violent acts are sufficiently gender biased to justify Federal civil rights intervention.
Abstract
Congress enacted a civil rights remedy as part of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) in 1994. Congress also recently debated the Hate Crimes Prevention Act. An analysis of the first cases litigated under the civil rights remedy of the VAWA and of other case law related to hate crimes reveals that circumstantial evidence of bias readily identifies bias motivation underlying violent crimes. This is possible regardless of whether the bias is based on race, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, disability, or gender. Further analysis also indicates that the handling of gender-bias crimes through Federal civil rights remedies is important because of the frequent unavailability of traditional civil and criminal recourse and because a civil rights approach more accurately frames the nature of the crimes to reflect the underlying gender bias. Thus, the new Federal laws provide needed remedies for women and, through the resulting court analyses of gender-based bias crimes, should help advance understanding of the nature of gender-based violence. Footnotes

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