Robert Torricelli: “Mr. President, this is not the first time that I have joined with Senator Wellstone in legislation to help women who are…”

“Mr. President, this is not the first time that I have joined with Senator Wellstone in legislation to help women who are the victims of domestic violence. In the last Congress we successfully led an effort to deny access to handguns to people who have convictions of domestic violence. We return here today because the plague of domestic violence has not abated. It is believed that there are 3 to 4 million women every year in America who are subjected to domestic violence. Every 18 seconds another victim is struck. Indeed, during the course of a lifetime, half of the women in this country will be abused by a husband or a boyfriend or someone with whom they live. One of the tragic ironies of this terrible situation is that in the moment when women need the help of the law the most they are denied. The Legal Services Corporation last year handled a quarter of a million cases of domestic violence and yet those women who may have needed the help the most could not get Legal Services assistance because the income of their husbands, the very people who might be striking them, the person from whom they are seeking a restraining order or a divorce, made them ineligible. The amendment we offer today would eliminate this tragic contradiction.”