Covering Women and Violence: Media Treatment of VAWA's Civil Rights Remedy

This Article analyzes how newspapers described and characterized the civil rights provision over the past decade and shaped the public discourse about the law. The author examines how lower federal courts, and eventually the Supreme Court, categorized the VAWA remedy when deciding whether Congress had acted within its commerce powers. After considering why there may have been resistance in the press and in the courts to VAWA's categorization of violence against women as a civil rights issue, the author concludes by examining the remedies that have been introduced at the state and local level for victims of gender-motivated violence, and discusses the public debate that has surrounded these remedies thus far.