Sheila Jackson Lee: “Let me thank the gentleman very much for his work, and again let me thank my colleague, Congresswoman McBath, a member…”

“Let me thank the gentleman very much for his work, and again let me thank my colleague, Congresswoman McBath, a member of the Education and Labor Committee and a member of the Judiciary Committee. Madam Speaker, I rise to support my amendment, and all of the other amendments, which in particular my amendment provides an outreach that I think is extremely crucial to providing an outreach to populations that have been unnecessarily victims of domestic violence. I do want to, again, emphasize the issue of Sergeant Preston, who died in the course of a police encounter with a domestic abuser with a gun, and to emphasize that an average of 24 people per minute are victims of rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner in the United States; more than 12 million women and men over the course of a year. Nearly 3 in 10 women, or 29 percent, and 1 in 10 men, in the U.S. have experienced physical violence and/or stalking. This reauthorization is long overdue. Just under 15 percent of women, 14.8 percent, and 12 percent of men in the U.S. have been injured as a result of intimate partner violence that included rape, physical violence, and stalking by an intimate partner. More importantly, how many of them have been killed? In my own district, we had a circumstance of a domestic violence incident where the woman was killed in the bed, and laying next to her was her newborn infant. The stories are without comparison.…”