Saying that domestic violence “is not just an assault against a citizen, but that it does undermine democracy itself,” Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke on the topic at a conference of mostly women on Monday.
“Domestic violence can never again be dismissed, as it so often has in th epast, as part of a country’s traditional norms or as a private cultural set of assumptions about family life,” she said.
Ms. Clinton recently returned from a tour of Latin America, where she spoke on the necessity of acheiving equal political representation for women and ending domestic violence. The Inter-American Development Bank estimates that between 25-50% of women in Latin America and the Caribbean have reported domestic violence.
She praised President Clinton, whose mother suffered from domestic abuse, for making domestic violence a foreign policy issue and vowing to protect American women.