Any Republican running for president in 2016 needs women voters to win, and the last few years of bone-headed statements and even more bone-headed policies – from “legitimate rape” to transvaginal ultrasounds, and from the wage gap to birth control coverage in insurance policies – haven’t made that easy. So perhaps it was inevitable that former Florida governor Jeb Bush would think that if he says “domestic violence” enough times, female voters will magically appear.
The difficulty for Bush is that other policies that he favors don’t protect women from domestic violence: they put victims at further risk.
On Monday, hours before announcing his presidential run, Bush released a video where he said he has “protected women from domestic violence.” Another video shown during his Miami announcement ceremony featured a domestic violence survivor touting her support for Bush, and former Florida lieutenant governor Toni Jennings spoke to the crowd for several minutes about Bush’s commitment to ending domestic violence.
But while Bush passed the Family Protection Act while governor, which increased criminal consequences for abusers, increased funding for women’s shelters and his wife, Columba Bush, made working against domestic violence a big part of her tenure as Florida’s first lady, it’s going to take more to close the voting gender gap than focusing on just one women’s issue. Because one policy that affects women’s lives can’t be cleaved off from all the other, important policies that affect women just because they’re less ideologically convenient – especially when they’re interconnected.
Access to abortion, for example, makes it easier for women to leave their abusive partners. A 2014 study showed that women in abusive relationships who carried an unwanted pregnancy to term were more likely to have ongoing violence in their relationship compared to those who were able to obtain abortions. The researchers wrote, “this finding is consistent with our hypothesis that having a baby with an abusive man, compared to terminating the unwanted pregnancy, makes it harder to leave the abusive relationship.”
But in the same video in which Bush says he supports ending domestic violence, he makes sure to mention that he has “defended life” – code for opposing abortion, birth control and emergency contraception. But access to all of those are crucial and even necessary to ending domestic violence.
Dawn Laguens, Planned Parenthood Action Fund executive vice president, told me, “domestic violence victims are particularly vulnerable and need access to reproductive health care.”
“Far from protecting these women,” she said, “Jeb Bush signed six laws restricting access to abortion and cut funding to family planning programs that provide birth control and other preventive care to women in Florida.”
Not only does pregnancy make it harder to leave a violent partner, it is also often a catalyst for intimate partner mistreatment. According to the National Domestic Violence Hotline, abuse will often “begin or escalate” during pregnancy.
Similarly dangerous for domestic violence victims is easy access to guns. Women whose abusive partners have access to a gun are seven times more likely to be killed. Yet Bush is a long-time gun rights proponent; while governor, he signed Florida’s “stand your ground” law – the same law that failed to protect domestic violence survivor Marissa Alexander when she tried to protect herself against her abusive husband.
And that’s not even to get into what Bush thinks of his party’s continued opposition to the Violence Against Women Act: he simply didn’t mention it.
The truth is that Republican politics mean that Bush’s support for domestic violence will never go beyond funding shelters. And if you want to end violence against women, it’s going to take a lot more than money. It takes an understanding of the way that abusive relationships work and a willingness to help with meaningful, tangible change.
Women in violent relationships have very few choices. Their partners often control their comings and goings, if they can have a job or their own bank account – they even try to force them to become pregnant. Someone who claims to care about domestic violence victims should be trying to end that control, not crafting government policies to help abusers exert more of it.
