Vice President Joe Biden visited Chicago Monday in part to attend a groundbreaking of a new domestic violence shelter.
Biden joined Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Sen. Dick Durbin at the ceremony in the Chicago Lawn neighborhood to mark the first shelter of its type built in the city in more than a decade.
"There is no prison on earth like the four walls of a woman's home who is battered. No prison is equal to that," Biden said. "These are women who are prisoners in plain sight."
The two-story facility offers a 40-bed shelter, 10 permanent housing units and an employment training site and other services for domestic violence victims and their children.
City officials say $1.8 million of the project's $4.2 million tab will come from settlement funds in the city's lawsuit against VIP Gentleman’s Club.
"We're not going to succeed until society adopts the notion that no man under any condition," Biden said, "under any condition other than self defense, has a right to raise his hand to a woman. Under no circumstance. None. Zero. No means no."
Emanuel teared up at a press conference in May when the project was announced.
The new shelter is scheduled to open in June 2014.
