Sustained Outrage

STOP Violence Against Women grants announced

May 19, 2010 by Andrew Clevenger
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On Friday, Gov. Joe Manchin announced the distribution of federal funds from the Office on Violence Against Women, a part of the U.S. Department of Justice. All told, 24 projects in West Virginia received almost $1 million in grant money. The grants are part of the STOP (Services, Training, Officers, Prosecutors) Program, initiated under the Violence Against Women Act of 1994 and renewed in the Violence Against Women Act of 2000 and Violence Against Women Act of 2005.

“The purpose of these funds is to establish or enhance teams whose core members include victim service providers, law enforcement, and prosecution to improve the criminal justice system’s response to violence against women,” the governor’s news release states. “Grants provide personnel, equipment, enhancement of those teams. Additionally, statewide projects are funded to provide training and educational opportunities for all victim service providers, law enforcement, prosecution, and court personnel across the state.”

The funds are administered locally by the state Division of Criminal Justice Services. A complete list of the agencies and the amounts awarded is after the jump.

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New Census data: One in six West Virginians living in poverty

November 19, 2009 by Andrew Clevenger
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povertymap.jpg

More than 300,000 West Virginians lived in poverty in 2008, according to new data from the Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates released by the U.S. Census Bureau yesterday.

That translates into 17.4 percent of all residents (or slightly more than one in six).

For children, the numbers are even worse: 90,000 (23.9 percent) under the age of 18, and 32,000 (31.1 percent) of children under the age of five lived in poverty. (I’ve rounded the estimates but not the percentages.)

Worse still, all of those numbers are creeping up from 2007, after a slight improvement from 2006.

Nationally, only Louisiana (17.6) and Mississippi (20.8) had higher percentages of their population living below the poverty line. And at $37,528, West Virginia had the lowest median household income in the United States.

The data can also be broken down by county and school district. Staggeringly, an estimated 46.3 percent of people under the age of 18 in McDowell County lived in poverty. This is almost two times higher than Kanawha County (23.5), three times higher than Monongalia County (15.2) and four times Jefferson County (11.1, the lowest percentage of all 55 counties).