Trump Declares War On Survivors Of Domestic Abuse And Rape

With all that Trump is doing to destroy America’s reputation abroad and our values at home, imagine also living with an intimate partner who beats you to within inches of your life. The statistics on domestic abuse are daunting. According to the National Coaltion Against Domestic Violence (NCADV) 20 people, women and men are abused by intimate partners every minute. That works out to 10 million abuse victims every year.

Only 34% of people who are injured by intimate partners receive medical care for their injuries. That statistic is likely to get worse under a Trump presidency. Trump’s policies in several areas suggest he is trying to normalize domestic abuse and rape. By normalizing them, I mean he is doing everything to make it impossible for survivors to report the crime or get medical treatment for their injuries.

Under the various versions of Trump’s healthcare law that have been scored, we know that millions of Americans will lose healthcare. It’s possible the Senate version will actually protect people with the “pre-existing condition” of domestic abuse or rape, rather than simply leaving it to the states to decide, as was the case with the House version.

But even so, fewer people will be eligible for insurance. That means premiums will inevitably go up pricing more people out of insurance each year.

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Trump’s budget goes further by slashing the budgets of programs intended to help survivors of domestic abuse. So aside from making access to medical treatment for injuries harder, Trump intends to make access to shelters and legal advice harder, if not impossible.

This also means fewer voices to answer 20,800 calls survivors make to domestic abuse hotlines.

According to the American Psychological Association, 74 percent of all murder-suicides involved an intimate partner. Domestic violence is the leading cause of injury related deaths during pregnancy.

Trump joins NRA sycophants in the Republican Party in an agenda to make even more guns accessible to even more people who shouldn’t have them, as reflected in a bill to remove background checks for people with mental illnesses he signed in February. Trump made clear during a speech in April, he is the NRA’s “champion”,

That’s despite the indisputable fact that 50 women are shot to death by an intimate partner every month. The fact is there is a five time higher probability that a victim of domestic abuse won’t live to report it if the abuser has a gun.
Of the mass shootings that occurred between 2009 and 2015, 57 percent of the shooters killed intimate partners or other family members.

The combination of policies will result in fewer victims reporting domestic abuse. Fewer reported incidents creates the illusion of few incidents, further enabling the abuser and silencing the abused.

The same dynamic is likely to occur with rape victims, based on the policies and statements we’ve seen so far from the Trump administration. Betsy DeVoss hired Candace Jackson as the deputy assistant secretary and acting assistant secretary of the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights. The OCR oversees Title IX and sexual assault on Campus. Jackson described victims of alleged sexual violence by Donald Trump as “fake victims.”

Jackson criticized Liberals for wanting to help women and people of color in her book, In Their Lives: The Women Targeted by the Clinton machine.

As you can tell from the title, she joins Trump and Putin in their anti-Clinton crusade. Oh and of course, Jackson believes that she is a victim of racism against white people.

In April, DeVoss met Earl Ehrhart who has tried to pass a law to discourage rape survivors from reporting. Women’s groups outlined that and the rest of Ehrhart’s history of hostility to student rape survivors to DeVoss in a letter, stating in part:
“Representative Ehrhart has further campaigned against student victims’ rights by suing the U.S. Department of Education under a theory that his stepson might someday be accused of rape.”

One of Trump’s tweets from 2013, says it all when it comes to his views on rape in the military.
26,000 unreported sexual assults in the military-only 238 convictions. What did these geniuses expect when they put men & women together?

There is ample reporting about Trump’s own history of harassing, abusing and groping women. That history didn’t leave much to the imagination about the likelihood that Trump would use policy not only to silence the women he abused, but every domestic abuse and rape survivor in America.

Adalia Woodbury

Former contributor.