Law and Justice

... Using the strict scrutiny standard of review, the court held that under the state's Equal Protection Clause, women and men are "similarly situated" with regard to domestic violence and, therefore, the language in the code should be revised to make state funding for domestic violence shelter services under that code gender-neutral. ... By failing to acknowledge the important role that gender plays in domestic violence, the Woods decision set a precedent that threatens to erode the already inadequate laws and services specifically created in response to the quantitatively and qualitatively different types of violence faced by women, men, and children. ... Finally, Parts V, VI, and VII will discuss why, even assuming men and women are similarly situated, the California statutes meet the strict scrutiny standard because the state's program of women's shelters is narrowly tailored to meet the compelling state interest in protecting women from the immediate danger of injury and homicide and the long term social and economic effects of intimate partner violence. ... Women and men are dissimilarly situated with regard to domestic violence for three primary reasons: the historical acceptance of men's violence against women; women's lesser access to material resources relative to men; and women's grossly disproportionate risk of violence from male partners. ... Unlike female victims for whom domestic homicide was most common, the 1.6% of homicides of men that were domestic violence related comprised the smallest category of homicides of men. ... The increasing recognition by the courts and state legislatures across the country that domestic violence is gender discrimination that mainly occurs against women strengthens the argument that the gender-based classification in Woods is permissible to remedy past discrimination as
set forth in cases like Califano and Miller.

Luke’s Place Support and Resource Centre for Women and Children (Luke’s Place) is an organization that was created to address the unmet needs of abused mothers following separation. It is unique in Canada and we know of no similar organization in the United States. This chapter will introduce readers to Luke’s Place in order to share a much needed and innovative model for assisting survivors of violence and their children in negotiating family law processes.

Despite plentiful efforts to identify perpetrator, victim, and incident characteristics correlated with reporting violence against women to police, few studies have addressed the contexts that shape such reporting. Even fewer have examined variations in these contexts across geographic areas. Drawing upon National Crime Victimization Survey data from 1992 through 2009, this paper uses conjunctive analysis of case configurations to identify and investigate the dominant situational contexts of reporting of violence against women to police across rural, suburban, and urban areas. Our findings show that context matters and the importance of incident, perpetrator, and victim characteristics vary across geographic areas.