BATTERED WELFARE SYNDROME

By Barbara Ehrenreich

Hardly anyone these days recommends punching and slapping as a way of settling marital disputes. On the daytime talk shows, audiences go into frenzies of outrage over batterers and any batterees who dawdle before calling the hotline. In California and Massachusetts, Governors who are feverishly cutting programs that aid women in poverty are proposing actual increases in funds to combat domestic violence. Thanks to Nicole Brown Simpson's sad fate, we tell ourselves, we're all painfully aware of the problem. So why, a rational observer might inquire, are we simultaneously hell-bent on policies that will lock millions of women into violent and abusive relationships?

Because this will be one undeniable effect of welfare reform, as passed by the House and contemplated in many states. One of the first things a woman is likely to do when fleeing an abusive relationship is apply for welfare; officials at some battered-women's shelters report that 60% to 95% of the women they help go on welfare, at least for the short term. These are such women as the San Antonio mother of three profiled in the Houston Chronicle, who fled when her otherwise straight-living, Baptist, teetotaler husband took to slapping her in front of the children. She fled to a shelter, got on welfare and eventually became single and self-sufficient.

Reforms that make welfare harder to get and worth less when you get it will leave this escape hatch a lot narrower. Residency requirements, for example, effectively bar women from fleeing their abusers from one state to another, and work requirements will discourage the woman with no child care from escaping her--and possibly her children's--tormentor.

No one knows exactly what portion of the welfare rolls is made up of refugees from domestic violence, but knowledgeable estimates are startlingly high. In preliminary research on a small sample of Chicago welfare recipients, Susan Lloyd at Northwestern University found nearly half mentioned abusive relationships as a factor in their need for welfare. Arlene McAtee, associate director of Mid-Iowa Community Action, estimates three-quarters of the women she sees come to welfare as a way out of domestic violence. And in some surveys of women in homeless shelters, half the respondents say they're homeless because they fled from a violent mate.

In fact, abuse at any point in a woman's life appears to increase the odds for future welfare enrollment. A recent study by the Washington State Institute for Public Policy found that 60% of women on public assistance had experienced some form of abuse, physical or sexual, as adults. Abuse experienced in childhood was, if anything, even more damaging-predisposing girls to early sexual activity, teenage motherhood and, again, the eventual need for welfare.

All this suggests the "cycle of dependency" that needs to be cured is not so much one of the dependency on government "handouts" as one of dependency on abusive men. Abuse, even of the verbal kind, saps self-esteem; physical abuse can imprison a woman at home, too ashamed to show up for work with a black eye or cigarette burns. No matter where they start out in the socioeconomic spectrum, victims of abuse are especially vulnerable to poverty and--to round out the cycle--poor women are especially vulnerable to abuse.

Welfare can and sometimes does free women from dependency on predatory males, as plenty of welfare alumnae can testify. But welfare benefits have been shrinking for two decades, to a level---a little less than $400 a month per family, on averag--that forces many recipients into financial reliance on any man who can help pay for the groceries. This, according to the researchers, is why one recent study found that 58% of the women enrolled in a Chicago welfare-to-work-training program were current victims of domestic violence.

Some women, of course, can escape their abusers with no help from welfare, and plenty of women who go on welfare have been battered by poverty alone. But only a fool, or a smug male legislator, could think of crafting welfare policy as if domestic violence doesn't exist. The closer you look at the real narratives of women's lives, the more you realize that there is a war going on, a hidden war of men against women--fought with fists and blunt objects, over such issues as why the baby makes so much noise or dinner wasn't ready on time. In this war the wounded don't get much help; they're often stigmatized and reviled for seeking it.

Enter, stage right, the welfare reformers, full of helpful advice for downtrodden women. Get a job, they say, not noticing that some batterers will do anything to prevent that, including stalking their victims at job sites. Get married, they say, not noticing that the potential bridegroom may be a practicing sadist. Even a reasonable-sounding "reform," such as requiring recipients to identify the father of their children, can be enough to trigger his rage and precipitate a new round of abuse.

The fact is that domestic violence, ugly as we pretend to find it, seems to be becoming part of our national policy. Despite our pious concern for the battered, the message from the welfare reformers is clear and cold: stand by your man, they're saying, even when he's knocked you to the floor.