If you ask President Joe Biden, the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA)—passed as part of former President Bill Clinton's 1994 crime bill, with expansions authorized every few years since—was an unabashed good that single-handedly taught Americans to take domestic violence seriously. This supremely overstates the case (as I've written about at length). In fact, the VAWA's overreliance on law enforcement approaches and cop-centric solutions crowded out less carceral alternatives to addressing violence and created problems for many victims.
"VAWA married anti-violence feminists to the violent state," wrote journalist Judith Levine and Northeastern Illinois University professor Erica R. Meiners in their 2020 book The Feminist and the Sex Offender. The act "overwhelmingly leans on arrest and prosecution—in other words, criminalization, an option that fails to serve many women."
