The problem of violence against women rages all over the world and is a crisis in almost all societies. In the past, this problem was called domestic violence but has recently been changed to violence against women because the term domestic violence does not demonstrate that almost all cases of domestic abuse are men injuring women. In 1994 the U.S. government passed legislation called the Violence Against Women Act to combat this problem, and in 2000 the Violence Against Women Act was enacted again to strengthen the existing Act. The United Nations also has a set of laws and policies that the countries in the UN must abide by to protect women. As I have demonstrated, governments and organizations have tried to make laws and policies to protect and help women, but the violence continues. We need to not only focus on the problem and ramifications but also on how to prevent this problem from occurring in the first place.
             In the U.S. alone, there are many laws that try to help women and keep them safe. In the Violence Against Women Act of 1994, the aim was to create laws that allow a person to be punished for a federal crime and not just be brought to justice by a state or local jurisdiction. According to this Act, " It is a federal crime for a person to travel interstate with the intent to injure, harass, or intimidate that person's intimate partner when in the course of or as a result of such travel of the defendant intentionally commits a violent crime and thereby causes bodily injury." The Act allows " It is also a federal crime to cause an intimate partner to cross state lines by force, coercion, duress or fraud during which, there is bodily harm to the victim." The Act also says that it is a federal offense to have possession of a firearm while subject to a protection order and to possess a firearm after being convicted of domestic abuse (www. vaw.umn.edu). The problem with this Act is that its definition of an intimate partner ...