Families at Work: Expanding the Bounds

14: Living with Violence: Women’s Reliance on Abusive Men in Their Transitions from Welfare to Work

302 14 Living with Violence Women’s Reliance on Abusive Men in Their Transitions from Welfare to Work Ellen K.Scott,Andrew S.London,and Nancy A.Myers The 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), commonly referred to as “welfare reform,” poses special problems for women who are the victims of domestic violence. The ideological foundation of the new form of aid, known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), is “work-first.” In addition to the goal of getting welfare recipients into jobs or activities geared toward getting them jobs quickly, three additional goals aimed to change aspects of recipients’ reproductive, marital, and parental behavior. These other goals established by the TANF legislation were (1) to provide temporary assistance to needy families to help support work and child care; (2) to “prevent and reduce the incidence of out-of-wedlock pregnancies,” and (3) to “encourage the formation and maintenance of two-parent families.” Ultimately, PRWORA aims to promote “self-sufficiency ,” or shift support from the state to reliance on informal networks. The federal legislation allowed states to establish sanctions for failure to comply with various provisions of TANF, including the loss of cash benefits, Medicaid, and food stamps. However, states were also allowed the option of implementing various forms of “good cause” exemptions from work requirements and sanctioning policies. Acknowledging that there is a high incidence of domestic violence among welfare recipients (Raphael, 1999), and that for many victims of domestic violence welfare constitutes a critical safety net allowing them to leave abusive relationships, Congress amended PRWORA with the Family Violence Option. The FVO allows states to create a good cause exemption for women who have experienced domestic violence. For those states which choose to adopt such a good cause exemption, they could opt to exempt women from work requirements, time limits, and/or the requirement that women report paternity for their children. However, to date, not all states have adopted this form of exemption, and there is little information about how those that have are implementing them. Ohio, where the research for this article was conducted , is one of the states that have not adopted the FVO. Given that many women do not disclose past or present domestic violence to welfare caseworkers (Raphael & Tolman, 1997), many advocates are concerned that even in those states which have adopted the FVO, these exemption policies will not be able to reach those they are intended to help. For many women who leave violent relationships, welfare receipt is a critical resource. Domestic violence is a common reason for the initiation of welfare, which Domestic Violence in the Context of Welfare Reform 303 many women utilize for relatively short periods as they establish and transition to independent living arrangements (Davis, 1999). Using data from the ethnographic component of Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation’s Project on Devolution and Urban Change (henceforth Urban Change), we sought to investigate domestic violence in the context of welfare reform. Because most of the literature we were familiar with focused on the manner in which domestic violence constituted an obstacle to women’s ability to meet the mandated work requirements within designated time limits, we too initially focused our own research on that set of concerns. Interestingly , inductive analysis of our qualitative data (which we detail below) revealed an additional concern which has not been a particular focus of attention thus far in the literature on welfare reform and domestic violence, one that we also did not anticipate . That is, the extent to which women’s attempts to meet the mandated work requirements inadvertently increased their dependence in a variety of ways on informal social networks, which, for formerly or currently battered women, include abusive partners. In analyzing the data from a small sample of welfare recipients in Cleveland , we found that a significant number of women told stories that led us to believe they were increasing their dependence on men who had been abusive to them as they diligently attempted to follow the requirements of the new welfare regulations. This dependence was practical and instrumental; these were not relationships which were likely to be formalized in marriage. Although the explicit policy goal of the federal welfare legislation is for women to marry as a route out of their “dependency” on the welfare system, due to past experiences of abuse, many of the women in our study were not willing to marry or to remarry former husbands. Given the limited options available to them and their...