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Well, Lynn has said so much of what I would have said, and as has Kris, but I will say this for
a start. I'm sitting here looking at Barbara Hart, and I can say that 15 years ago when we went
to conferences, a few of us who were concerned about violence against women — and Bernie was
with us and Angela and some others — and we would try to stir up a lot of interest in the
research community about violence against women; and we weren't looking out at rooms this large,
and I am so grateful to all of you who've come and who've paid attention over the years and
who've committed yourselves and your passion to doing this work side by side the advocates and
the practitioners in the field. It has made such a difference, and that has been one of the
true impacts of the Violence Against Women Act, so thank you. As Kris said, and as Lynn said, I
think, you know, the coordinated community response is really more about, I think, the incredible success
that advocates in this country have had in raising our awareness and our understanding about the
dynamics of *** and domestic violence and its impact on our culture. When we talk about
bringing people to the table, that was not an easy thing, and I was there at those beginning
conversations. What made the difference was that you had police, prosecutors, judges and other
criminal justice officials in large numbers sitting at a table with perhaps one or, maybe at the
most, two advocates, but their voices were heard loud and they were heard strong and they were
tenacious and they kept at it. And sooner rather than later, what really, really made a
difference and what made — created an impact was that law enforcement officers, prosecutors,
judges and others in the system, probation officers, joined ranks with the advocates, and they
started to place themselves in the skin of women like the women Paula described in her remarks.
They started to understand what it was like to live in fear, and they started to understand why
victims didn't always present so well in court. And they changed, and that shift continues. We
learned that judicial response matters. We learned that arrest matters, but we also learned that
race matters, and one of the unintended consequences of the VAWA, unfortunately, that I also
came to understand quite directly, is that just like in every other part of the work we do in
criminal justice, we were arresting men of color disproportionately, and that is something that
I think has been, as I said, an unintended consequence of the VAWA and something that we need to
take very much care of in the future. Women of color and men of color who do this work also
challenged us to understand that the impact of the VAWA wasn't the same for everybody, that
access to justice and access to services is different if you are a woman of color, and arrests
and the way you are treated is different if you are a man of color. So we have started in recent
years, I think, to begin to engage in an honest conversation that access to justice and
services is different and must come through community-defined solutions that are not cookie
cutters for every community. The immigration provisions of the VAWA in 2000 provided access to
services, especially legal advocacy to women who ordinarily would never have received it and may
have found themselves back home in another country only to be perceived by their family as
having left their children unintentionally and continue to go — they went back to more violent
situations than they came from. The other thing that the VAWA did in recent years, and it's been
touched on, is the enormous amount of work that's been done in tribal and native communities,
and that cannot be — the way that VAWA has addressed *** violence has been extraordinary. I
want to touch on one other unintended consequence, and that is that I believe that since the
VAWA has — since we've worked and lived with the VAWA all these years, women are losing custody
of their children. Women of color are losing custody in the child protection system, and white
women are losing custody through the courts to their abusers. And that's something that we also
need, as we will talk further, to begin to address, but I think that has been an unintended
consequence. Finally, I think as we become more sophisticated about the impact of *** and
domestic violence in this country, we really do understand that trauma is at the root of so much
of our work, and before she died, Susan Schechter did some terrific work in this field, and I
wanted to name her and acknowledge that today and say that I think that that is something that
as we move forward, particularly as we look at the Attorney General's initiative on
children exposed to violence, we will really be paying close attention to the impact of trauma
and what successful interventions help to make life for children and their non-abusing parent
whole again. And then, finally, I also do want to add that I think we were very successful in
the early days in addressing domestic violence, but I think that we had a lot of catching up to
do and still do to address *** violence. Thank heaven for the *** Assault Services Act
and the *** Assault Services Program, and part of that $730 million that Lynn mentioned
includes $30 million for direct services, for *** assault services, and we can't ever forget
that *** victims are also part of this equation. So those are my few contributions. [Applause.]