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Joyful Heart Research Paper

Decent Essays

Imagine, you are a vibrant fresh – faced sixteen year old girl from the suburbs of Memphis, TN. Everything in your life is going well until one night everything changes. On May 19, 2003 you find yourself home alone when a strange masked man ravages your body without an ounce of sympathy. Once this brutal degradation of your body has surpassed, this masked man leaves you with a threat of death if you go to the police. Now, you have to make the difficult decision to stay silent, or potentially lose your life in the pursuit of justice. This is the nightmare that was Meaghan Ybo’s life (Haas). Meaghan decided to pursue justice in an attempt for closure for the crime committed against her. Meaghan was given an extensive four to six hour physical …show more content…

The first step in promoting recovery while also keeping agencies accountable is the creation of agencies such as the Joyful Heart Foundation. This foundation was created by Law & Order: Special Victims Unit actress Mariska Hargitay. Hargitay created this foundation after reading numerous never before told fan testimonials of the struggles they had suffered as rape victims. The mission of Joyful Heart is to eradicate sexual and domestic abuse throughout communities through reform, legislation, and funding. They are founded on three main principles: healing, education, and advocacy. Joyful Heart wants to aid in the healing of survivors so they can re-claim a joy of life. They want to educate everyone on the statistics, facts, and legislation in regards to sexual assault and domestic abuse issues. Finally, Hargitay aspires to open up peoples’ eyes and get them interested in being an activist for Joyful Heart’s causes (“Our Story, …show more content…

House Bill 1388’s demise was a lack of funding (Parkinson). Republicans shot down a bill that proposed $2 million to begin eliminating some of the backlog. Republicans felt as if the $2 million was a band – aid for the situation, and rather wait another year before making a way for funding the complete processing of the backlogs statewide at once. It is perplexing that there was so much resistance to this proposal after considering the amount of readily available resources within the general assembly’s reserve account. The general assembly’s reserve account has $40 million waiting to be spent (Terkel). That is a menial 5% of the reserve state’s account. Similarly on a federal level, President Obama proposed a bill that would grant $41 million in the 2015 budget to a new program that would help lessen the backlog in states and communities. The bill was passed by the House, but when it entered the Senate things began to take a turn for the worst. Republicans wanted unnecessary irrelevant amendments added to the bill, so a Democrat pulled the bill (Eichelberger). People are concerned that both nationally and locally a distribution of funds will never

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