American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA) and Violence Against Literature review

American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA) and Violence Against Women in US - Literature review Example In this paper, therefore, the dynamics of violence against women will be judged with reference to socio-economic pattern of the USA. In Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women, the United Nations (1993) defined violence as â€Å"any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual, or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion, or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life† (Article 1). Decoding this definition reveals the fact that violence against women includes all types of physical, verbal and sexual assaults that can cause harm to the physical body, sense of trust, of liberty and that of private life of women (Runyan & Peterson, 2013; Alhabib, Nur & Jones, 2010). In the USA, the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) was established in 1994 in order to create a protective shield, restricting rise in violence against women in the country. The VAWA (1994) defined violence as the exertion of any physical force intended to cause an injury or abuse to women. Such definitions ar e applicable regardless of nationality, age, racial orientation and ethnicity of women. In the USA, more than 2 million women are either physically assaulted or raped by their intimate partners (Tjaden & Thoennes, 2000; Matthews, 2004; Grovert, 2008). Alhabib, Nur, and Jones (2010) found that â€Å"the lifetime prevalence of domestic violence† changes significantly with that of geographic locations across the USA. For example, â€Å"the lifetime prevalence of domestic violence† is just 1.9% in Washington, while it is more than 68% in case of countryside in the USA. In the context of the USA, physical violence is probably the most common type of violence that is committed against women (Turner, 2002). In case of physical violence, one person intentionally hurts physical parts of woman that can cause outcomes such as, murder, femicide