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Making Welfare to Work Really Work
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Domestic Violence
Poor Women Are Often Battered Women
Women attempting to get off welfare and become economically independent face numerous obstacles. One of the most devastating is violence from intimate partners. Research increasingly and dramatically documents the pervasiveness of abuse against all women and the increased incidence among poor women, including welfare recipients. Violence, research shows, has a direct impact in keeping welfare recipients from holding jobs and becoming self-sufficient. For example, a recent study of a representative sample of welfare recipients in Massachusetts found that 65 percent were victims of violence by a current or former boyfriend or husband, and one-fifth had been victimized in the past 12 months (Colten & Allard, 1997). Similar results were found in a survey of welfare recipients in Washington State. There, 55 percent of the recipients reported being physically or sexually abused by a spouse or boyfriend (Roper & Weeks, 1993). Another study of 436 homeless and low-income housed mothers found that 63 percent reported assaults by intimate male partners (Bassuk, Browne, & Buckner, 1996a; Brooks & Buckner, 1996). This rate of intimate violence is substantially higher than that suffered by women in the general population, according to the National Crime Victimization Survey (Bachman & Saltzman, 1995).
Violence Is An Obstacle to Work
Job training providers report that a high proportion of women in welfare-to-work programs are being abused by their intimate partners. This abuse may take many forms, ranging from administering beatings to failing to fulfill child care responsibilities so that women cannot go to work (NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund, 1997; Raphael, 1996). Disruptive and threatening actions by their intimate partners may sabotage women's efforts at financial independence, perhaps out of the partner's fear that the woman will leave the relationship or form other relationships at work (NOW Legal and Defense Fund, 1997). A 1997 study on intimate violence and Black women's health found that rates of severe partner violence are higher for low-income Black women than for higher income Black women. Black women who have unemployed husbands experience particularly high rates of severe violence (Russo, Denious, Keita, & Koss, 1997).
Violence interferes with work, job training, and education and thus undermines women's attempts at economic independence. In addition, pervasive violence may also leave women with physical injuries and psychological consequences that make work difficult. Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and severe depression are common among victims of domestic violence (Koss, Goodman, Browne, Fitzgerald, Keita, & Russo, 1994; T.L. Weaver & Clum, 1995; Woods & Campbell, 1993). PTSD sufferers may feel helpless and terrified, experiencing flashbacks of the original trauma in recurrent and/or intrusive thoughts or dreams, have trouble sleeping and be unable to concentrate. Both physically and verbally abused women may experience PTSD; the more extensive the abuse, the greater the risk of PTSD (Kemp, Green, Hovanitz, & Rawlings, 1995).
Psychological control by the batterer, coupled with the demands of parenting and often by life in a dangerous neighborhood, isolates many victims of abuse (Bassuk et al., 1996a), leaving them without social and material support that could mitigate the psychological consequences of battering and could facilitate employment. Women need a range of psychological, medical, and social and legal services as they remove themselves from abusive relationships. Even after finding a safe environment, they need continuing psychological help to repair the damage to their self-esteem and to prepare them for job training and employment.
Some women may be unwilling to voluntarily identify themselves as victims. The Family Violence Option allows states to take the initiative to do the necessary screening. This initiative can save the lives of battered women, can help preserve their families, and can help them keep jobs and gain self-sufficiency.
Recommendations
- States should adopt the Family Violence Option to the federal welfare law, which allows states to (a) screen welfare recipients for a history of domestic violence; (b) refer these individuals to counseling and support services; and (c) exempt individuals from certain requirements for as long as necessary when compliance would make it more difficult to escape a violent situation (Davis, 1996; Swarns, 1997).
- States should grant extensions or temporary exemptions from time limits to welfare recipients who have experienced a history of domestic violence.
- States should administer "good cause" exceptions which define domestic violence broadly without increasing the burden of proof upon the victim of abuse.
- States should exempt young mothers living in abusive home environments from requirements that they live at home.
- States should eliminate the two-tiered benefit system for welfare recipients who have relocated from other states to escape their abusers.
- States should train job and employment staff to recognize domestic abuse among women applicants and should offer psychological services to women applicants identified as battered; this assistance is needed to support the efforts of these women to get training and to find and keep jobs.
- States should protect battered women from benefit cuts as a result of reporting abuse by a live-in partner. This will mean a waiver of the rule attributing income of the man to the welfare recipient in states in which welfare benefits are available only to single-parent families.
- States should establish "good cause" exemptions to requirements that paternity be established or child support enforced in situations in which it is likely to increase violence by or provoke retaliation from abusers.
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