Legal Momentum is the oldest nonprofit organization in the United States dedicated to advancing the rights of women and girls by using the power of the law and creating innovative public policy. Founded in 1970 as NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund and renamed in 2004, a principal focus of Legal Momentum’s work is eliminating all forms of violence against women: sexual assault, domestic violence, dating violence, and stalking.
Legal Momentum helped drive passage of the historic Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) and leads the efforts to reauthorize this critical legislation. Legal Momentum created and chairs the National Task Force to End Sexual and Domestic Violence Against Women that was instrumental in the drafting and passage of VAWAin 1994 and its 2000 and 2005 re-authorizations. VAWA has secured nearly $9 billion for services for survivors, including immigrant victims, improved law enforcement and prosecution, judicial education, prevention education, and research.
Legal Momentum’s Immigrant Women Program (IWP) advocates for legal protections, social services, and economic justice for battered immigrant women while reforming laws, policies, and practices that may harm them. IWP leads a national advocacy campaign that secures access to legal immigration status, benefits, and legal services for thousands of victims of violence against women and foreign fiancees. It conducts trainings for attorneys, advocates, police, prosecutors, and judges to build skills and knowledge that are critical to immigrant women receiving legally correct, culturally competent assistance from professionals in their communities. IWP also paves the way for immigrant women to acquire legal work authorization, housing, child and/or spousal support, and college loans to enhance economic security so that they can escape abusive homes and employers.
Legal Momentum works to ensure that welfare policies recognize and respond to the special needs of domestic violence victims. Women are much more likely to be poor than men are, and a significant percentage of impoverished and homeless women are battered. Their poverty may force women on to the welfare rolls, where federal antidiscrimination laws do apply. Staff attorneys work to ensure that welfare recipients are also protected from violence.
Legal Momentum’s staff attorneys focus on employment and housing rights for victims of gender-based violence. Legal Momentum uses targeted litigation, legislative advocacy, and training to protect victims from employment and housing discrimination and help employers and landlords understand how they can assist survivors and promote safety. Legal Momentum has won landmark court decisions holding that employers may not fire domestic violence victims for taking time from work to seek court protection and landlords may not evict victims of domestic violence for “allowing” violence on the premises.
Legal Momentum’s National Judicial Education Program (NJEP) promotes gender fairness in judicial decision making and courtroom interaction across the spectrum of civil, criminal, family, and juvenile law. NJEP has available extensive educational materials for judges, prosecutors, law enforcement, forensic sexual assault examiners, advocates, and the community. These written materials, videos, DVDs, and Web-based curricula provide the legal, social science, and medical knowledge necessary to conduct fair rape trials, counter societal myths about nonstranger rape, and respond to the co-occurrence of domestic violence and sexual assault.
