On the recordApril 25, 2012
I rise to talk about the Violence Against Women Act. Senator Leahy, the distinguished chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has a bill that has many good parts, and I was listening to the things he said about it and agree with many of them. Because there are some areas of disagreement, I have worked with many of my colleagues to create a substitute that has the same coverage but is better in other ways also. So I hope we will have the ability to look at both and that from that we would be able to pass a bill out of the Senate to address the violence against women we see in our country. Our bill, as Senator Leahy's bill does, actually covers men, who we know now are also subject to this kind of violence. So our bill covers men who have suffered the same kinds of victimization as women and whom we covered 16 years ago. I would like to point out that I have been championing this issue for a very long time. When I was in the Texas Legislature, I learned there were serious problems in the reporting and prosecution of rape in our country. The State statute in Texas in the early 1970s discouraged reporting because of embarrassment to the victim and the difficulty of obtaining convictions because victims were not willing to come forward and report rapes because they felt they were treated like a criminal sometimes. If they actually did report it and agree to help the prosecution, their treatment on the witness stand was so humiliating they often gave up.…
