Not long ago, Amy was precisely the kind of welfare mother people love to hate. She received Aid to Families With Dependent Children for the better part of a decade and had two children while on the dole. She entered job-training programs and dropped out repeatedly. She went to nursing school and flunked out. To many she was a lost cause, trained to be dependent on the liberal welfare state.
During her years on welfare Amy did go through four different jobs, none of which she kept for more than a month. Johnny would jump her at the bus stop in the morning and drag her through the mud. “I would leave the house perfectly dressed, clean, showered,” she says, “and by the time I got to work you would think I slept outside on the sidewalk.” He would also meet her as she came out of work, slap handcuffs on her wrists, and throw her into his van. As a last resort, Amy says, “He said he would call my boss and say, ‘You need to fire that bitch. And if you don’t, I’ll come blow up the whole damn building.’”
It’s Dierdre’s first morning at the Greenhouse, a battered women’s shelter run by the Chicago Abused Women Coalition. When it opened in 1979 the Greenhouse was the first battered women’s shelter in the city. A towering 100-year-old farmhouse that seems pulled from an Andrew Wyeth painting, the Greenhouse has beds for up to 42 women and children. No one can stay longer than 120 consecutive days, as mandated by the state. Today, as usual, all the beds are full.
Sharon left her abuser four times, but each time his contrition was so convincing (showers of candy, flowers, and promises) or her options so limited (another night in a homeless shelter with by now three children) that she always went back to him, even after he attacked her during a pregnancy, causing her to lose the twins she was carrying. “I didn’t know it was abuse,” she says. “I thought it was normal. I thought that since I wasn’t in the hospital I wasn’t being battered.”
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When it comes to women on welfare, finding accurate data about domestic violence is nearly impossible–for the simple reason that hardly anyone has ever bothered to ask. In a July 1995 report from the General Accounting Office assessing welfare-to-work programs in eight states, domestic violence is never mentioned as a factor that might prevent a participant’s success (the GAO report synthesizes the results of nine previously published reports, meaning that none of those nine report authors bothered to inquire about domestic abuse). The Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation–the primary not-for-profit research consortium evaluating employment training programs since the early 1970s–has never inquired about domestic violence. Still, in a 1991 MDRC study of 617 women in New Chance programs around the country, 16 percent identified partner abuse–without even being asked–as a factor interfering with their completion of the program. That percentage is particularly sobering considering the hoops through which even trusted counselors often must jump to get women to speak about the violence in their lives. For its next three-site evaluation, scheduled for completion in 1999, MDRC will for the first time include questions focused specifically on domestic abuse. However, as Barbara Goldman, MDRC’s vice president for research, is quick to point out, “We are just at the beginning phase of understanding how to even measure domestic violence.” Then she adds in a different tone, “If this is the first time we’ve looked at domestic violence, that is pretty sad.”
Since the creation of the first federal welfare programs 60 years ago, supporters and opponents alike have repeatedly insisted upon one thing: the welfare system should–indeed must–encourage families to stay together. As one prominent legislative analyst recently wrote, “Welfare reform cannot be accomplished unless reformers are willing to put fathers back in the home.”
Haynes laughs, something she doesn’t do very often. Having survived 13 years of abuse herself, Haynes says she never learned how to play. She turned 30 last month. At work there isn’t much to laugh about either.
