Commerce, Justice, Science, And Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2008

Floor Speech

COMMERCE, JUSTICE, SCIENCE, AND RELATED AGENCIES APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2008 -- (House of Representatives - July 25, 2007)

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Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Chairman, I rise to offer an important amendment that will help continue our work in Congress to break the cycle of domestic violence from which we still suffer. We started that work in the Violence Against Women Act of 2005. We now need to extend it.

I want to recognize the chairman's strong showing of support for efforts against violence in this fashion by $60 million of funding. We appreciate that. But we do have several new programs that the Congress has authorized, has approved, has recognized as a valid effort that have not had an appropriation to date. We aim to fix that with an effort to provide that appropriation.

It would direct the Department of Justice to administer grants to fund four priority new programs for children and Native women in order to break this chain, this multigenerational chain of violence.

The amendment offered by myself and Mr. Burton would, for the first time, provide Federal funding to local domestic violence programs that provide direct intervention services to children who have witnessed domestic violence in their families. We know how witnessing violence ends up perpetuating violence down the chain of generations. We have to nip this in the bud.

We have to get kids treatment early. We know this amendment will do it. Men who have experienced violence in their families as children are twice as likely to become perpetrators themselves.

This amendment will also, for the first time, fund a competitive grant program for nonprofit organizations to provide community services to teens and young adult victims of domestic violence, sexual assault and stalking. We know girls and young women between age 16 and 24 have the highest rate of intimate partner violence. Teens need to learn at an early age about healthy relationships. This amendment will help that.

My amendment also ensures that we can track crimes against American Indian and Alaska Native women through a national tribal sex offender registry. This is a place where we have been lacking resources in the tribes. One out of every three American Indian and Alaska Native women are victims of sexual assault on reservations.

Currently, every State has a sexual offender registry, but crimes against native women are rarely entered. We need to pass this to fix that problem.

So we know that this epidemic of domestic violence affects every State and community. We know that these VAWA programs can help break the cycle, and we know that we've authorized these programs, but we have not appropriated a dime for them. We have done this with some other new programs in this bill.

We have carefully selected four programs. This has the wide support of groups across the country who have selected these four programs as the highest priorities of those programs that have been authorized but not appropriated.

The Chair's done a good job with limited resources, but we hope that we can extend this effort and these authorized programs to nip and end this circle of violence.

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