The Future of Change: How Technology Shapes Social Revolutions
Ray Brescia
240 pages, Cornell University Press, 2020
In September 1994, after years of grassroots advocacy, Congress passed the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) and President Clinton signed it into law. VAWA provides federal funding for enhanced law enforcement, social services, and legal services for victims of domestic violence. By its express terms, Congress must reauthorize VAWA every five years. And for the first few reauthorization cycles, bipartisan support to renew the law was common, and Congress even added enhancements to the law over time to expand its coverage. In 2011, the law was up for renewal in a hyper-partisan atmosphere, with a strongly divided Congress and an upcoming election year where President Obama faced a tough reelection fight. At the same time, a diverse group of advocates led by the National Task Force to End Sexual and Domestic Violence Against Women mustered to not just renew the law, but strengthen it in important ways, including ensuring that it offered support to members of the LGBTQ community, expanded protection for Native American women, and increased resources for undocumented victims of domestic violence. While the law expired again recently, and efforts to pass renewal legislation in the Senate have stalled, lessons from the last reauthorization fight, and what they say about social movements and their relationship to technology, are instructive for this and other efforts to advance social change in the digital age. The following excerpt from The Future of Change: How Technology Shapes Social Revolutions picks up the fight in early 2013, after President Obama won reelection, while reauthorization was still pending.—Ray Brescia
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A law that had long had bipartisan support in Congress, the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), lapsed in 2011 and an agreement could not be reached to reauthorize it. But after the Republicans lost the presidential election in 2012 and did not gain as many seats in the Senate as they had hoped they would, an opportunity arose for advocates to seize the moment and press for change. For Pat Reuss, a long-time veteran of VAWA reauthorization fights, the situation created a “rare confluence” of events and offered an opening to advocates to renew the reauthorization campaign. After mostly waiting until the completion of the 2012 election cycle, leaders from a broad network of advocacy organizations worked collaboratively to renew their demand for a reformed VAWA that would be more inclusive. In order to bring about the change they hoped to achieve, diverse members of this coalition harnessed technology, fostered trust, promoted a unifying message, forged a diverse network of members who had more in common than they had differences, and faced down efforts to divide them. The hallmarks of this campaign offer lessons for advocacy in today’s hyperconnected—yet often isolating—world.
One of the strategies advocates used to promote their message to harness the power of social media. Using Twitter and Facebook, advocates urged their constituents to share their stories of intimate partner violence and to express their support for a VAWA with strengthened protections for members of the LGBTQ communities, undocumented immigrants, and Native Americans who had survived such violence. They used the Twitter hashtag “#realVAWA” to share personalized stories of survivors of intimate partner violence and educate the public about what strengthened protections under a reformed VAWA could mean to members of communities who were vulnerable under the wording of the act that had expired. Reuss says that local and state groups pulled these stories together because “almost everyone had been, or knows intimately, a friend or a relative who has been the victim of incest, sexual assault, spousal battering.” The message that the task force tried to convey was a simple one: intimate partner violence “happens to everybody; it’s not just a secret.”
In addition, the language they used to talk about this form of violence also shows the use of effective messaging in their advocacy. In order to combat what might be seen as an exclusive term—“domestic violence”—advocates in the LGBTQ community and their allies promoted the use of the more inclusive phrase “intimate partner violence.” This language is also unifying and promotes greater equality of treatment because it does not seem to privilege one form of relationship abuse or one type of relationship over another. Sharon Stapel, then the Executive Director of the Anti-Violence Project, a group that advocates for the rights of the LGBTQ community, argued in an opinion piece that explicit language referring to LGBTQ survivors was necessary in the VAWA reauthorization legislation to ensure that these survivors would have equal access to services and to help change the general population’s attitude toward that diverse community. “Using ‘violence against women’ as shorthand language for domestic and sexual violence entirely omits gay, bisexual and transgender people from the conversation and renders lesbian, bisexual and transgender women less visible,” Stapel asserted. Such language had a negative impact on the resources that could aid LGBTQ survivors of intimate partner violence, and “many of the interventions we use as a national response to violence are predicated on the idea that (heterosexual, non-transgender) men abuse (heterosexual, non-transgender) women, which makes the models difficult, if not impossible, to use when working with LGBTQ survivors.” This situation could change, she argued, “by explicitly including LGBTQ survivors in VAWA—and by shifting the conversation from ending ‘violence against women’ to ending ‘domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault and stalking’ against all survivors.”
For Reuss, changing the language of advocacy posed a challenge, even for those, like her, who were supportive of the effort to strengthen and expand VAWA. “We had a brand: the Violence Against Women Act,” she notes. There was a concern among some that reorienting the language would dilute that brand. “Crest doesn’t change their brand,” Reuss observed. “When they change their brand, they lose.” However, the members of the task force had “promised that we would be inclusive,” and Reuss assumed a leadership role in bringing all members of the group along. Because of the relationships she had formed over the years and her credibility with more mainstream groups, she could bring disparate organizations across the task force network together around language that was more inclusive and unifying, language that could help hold a diverse coalition together.
The task force also used technology to both promote dialogue among the advocates and mobilize them. Reuss notes that the task force “had the new tools of technology and the beginnings of social media so that when we got on the phone nobody had to pay a phone bill and nobody had to fly in.” In the early years of VAWA advocacy, Reuss remembers, they only had the fax machine to communicate their message. But in the latest reauthorization effort, they used conference calls, social media, the Internet, and e-mails to promote their message and stay connected, even from afar. This meant that the task force could easily draft informative text; share, edit, and post it; and assemble experts who were ready to field questions about particular aspects of the campaign.
Even with the technology that helped them stay connected, Reuss explains that the members of the task force still needed to do “the old-fashioned stuff” like talking in person and having face-to-face and “eye-to-eye” meetings. Such interactions helped strengthen the trust that was built and cultivated throughout the campaign. Sometimes the technology created a virtual living room in which the members of the task force could view important legislative milestones together. According to Reuss: “When there were votes, we were all over the United States and we’d watch C-SPAN like we were in the gallery. They’d call the conference number and the group would watch the vote together,” even though they were scattered throughout the country.
In early 2013, the negotiations entered an intense phase. The legislative process tested the trust the group had developed through these modern and old-fashioned methods. According to several advocates, the Republican leadership in the House attempted to play different advocacy groups against each other in an effort to promote alternative legislation that would not go as far as the advocates wanted. Organizations representing different constituencies were offered deals through which they would get what they wanted in exchange for abandoning their allies from within the task force network. For Reuss, across the task force, the advocates had become invested in the work of the network, and had developed deep personal connections with each other. As a result of the trust the group developed, the advocacy community fought off such strategies.
What is more, as Rosie Hidalgo from the advocacy group Casa de Esperanza explained, many advocates felt it was important that they not be perceived to be acting in a way that would work with just one party. This theme emerged early in the trust-building process among the task force network. “It was really important in our effort that this had to be bipartisan,” explains Hidalgo; “Legislators needed to trust us as well.” For Hidalgo, the task force’s approach would be different: “We wanted to find a solution and wanted to advance VAWA. We weren’t trying to score political points to undermine one party and buttress another. We wanted to send a message to legislators that we were really looking for a solution.”
Some Republicans supported the effort to strengthen VAWA. Representative Tom Cole, a Republican from Oklahoma, who is partially of Native American heritage, offered support for certain aspects of reauthorization. A Florida Republican circulated a “Dear Colleague” letter supporting a strengthened VAWA and encouraging her fellow Republicans to vote in favor of its reauthorization. Task force representatives continued to meet with Republican legislators and staffers to educate “rather than demonize” them. As Hidalgo put it, intimate partner violence and sexual assault are “not about one party or the other, this is about all of us unifying. That had to be the message.”
One of the reasons the diverse network was able to hang together in the face of efforts to divide them was because the groups were able to see how the issues highlighted by other communities affected their communities. “An LGBT advocate said she also worked with undocumented survivors and they wouldn’t let them pit us against each other. Immigrant advocates helped lesbian and gay survivors as well as immigrants.” For Hidalgo, the unifying message was clear: “Every survivor needed to be protected regardless of where they were coming from.” Even when the task force network was told that certain demands would hold up VAWA reauthorization, “we all stood firm. We made this commitment. We are not going to leave anyone behind.”
The state of the eleventh-hour negotiations did not faze Stapel, partly because of the trust that had been developed within the group and partly because of the relatively low expectations the LGBTQ community had set for this round of negotiations on VAWA reauthorization. “Anything would have been progress for us,” says Stapel. “Even legislative history”—the record of congressional deliberations about the bill that showed that Congress was thinking about LBGTQ issues when discussing VAWA reauthorization—“would have been progress.” Thus, much of what the LGBTQ community had set out to accomplish in the reauthorization fight had already come to fruition. “As long as folks were talking about” LGBTQ people, she said, and as long as the task force was “really committed to the inclusion of” the LGBTQ community as fundamental to the task force’s work, it “wasn’t going to be a shocker to us” if the task force was not able to get inclusion of LGBTQ people in the reauthorization. “Our primary priority was to shift national conversation, not to pass legislation the first time around,” Stapel said. As long as the task force members kept talking about LGBTQ people and “as long as we kept getting invited to the table, as long as the Washington Post kept doing stories about” LGBTQ survivors, “and as long as [members of Congress] kept getting asked about whether or not they would include” members of the LGBTQ community, “we had created this incredible success based on our initial goals before the legislation even came up for a vote.” Stapel was pessimistic about the prospects for a fully broadened VAWA until the very end. “Even a week before VAWA passed I didn’t think we were going to get it done.” The best that many in the LGBTQ community thought they could accomplish was to “set the stage” for the following reauthorization.
In the end, the Republican-controlled House supported much of what was in the Senate’s version of the legislation, which passed with bipartisan support, by a vote of 286–138 in the House; eighty-seven Republicans joined 199 Democrats who voted to accept the Senate version of the legislation, which included strengthened protections for survivors from the LGBTQ community, undocumented immigrants, and Native Americans.
The successful VAWA reauthorization fight that culminated in 2013 was fueled by modern technology but was still grounded in personal connections and trust. The members of the task force used modern technology to communicate among themselves and to encourage a national conversation about intimate partner violence. Internally, task force leaders used simple mechanisms, like conference calls and e-mail, to communicate in real time about strategy and to educate each other about developments in the advocacy campaign. They also used these technologies to build trust. More communication between members meant that everyone could be kept abreast of communications with legislative leaders and their staffers, so that no one felt left out of the advocacy conversation. Because groups representing marginalized communities were afraid that their issues might be dropped in favor of narrower demands of more mainstream groups, this type of communication convinced all members of the task force network that no conversations were taking place that could lead to side deals.
While the enhanced ability to communicate in real time over great distances helped build trust, such trust was also facilitated by old-fashioned in-person meetings and by individual advocates sharing their own stories and those of their constituents. This information sharing helped members, in the words of Pat Reuss, “become vulnerable.” In turn, the personalized stories, when shared over social and other media, also helped connect the advocacy to a national effort and a national dialogue.
The inclusive and unifying language that was at the center of the group’s messaging—both internally and externally—accompanied the personalized nature of the communications. By moving beyond the term “domestic violence,” and embracing the broader term “intimate partner violence,” the task force was able to connect to groups that had previously felt excluded from much of the advocacy around these issues. By using more inclusive language, the network was able to both attract the LGBTQ community to the campaign, as well as make a commitment to keeping the issues important to that community at the center of the VAWA advocacy.
As a result of all of these efforts, the advocates forged, activated, and sustained a truly nation-spanning network, a national coalition of groups that reached into every geographic community and many other types of communities based on the identities of their members. This intersectional alliance was built on trust, was stronger together, and stuck together even when its members faced efforts explicitly designed to divide them. This blending of the old with the new—new communications tools were used to foster and strength the efforts of a diverse advocacy network that was built on trust and forged through cooperation, meaningful compromise and mutual support and which promoted a unifying message—may identify what it takes to make social change happen in a deeply polarized and polarizing world.