The Price of Safety: Hidden Costs and Unintended Consequences for Women in the Domestic Violence Service System

By Sara Shoener

Specialized public resources for survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV) are increasingly common and diverse--from protection order courts and dedicated domestic violence units in police precincts to a vast network of community-based emergency shelters and counseling services. Yet little consensus exists regarding which resources actually work to reduce violence and help survivors lead the lives they would like to live. This book is an account of these resources and IPV survivors' experiences with them in three communities in the United States.

Through detailed observations of services such as court procedures, public benefits processes, and community-based IPV programs as well as in-depth interviews with dozens of IPV survivors and practitioners, Shoener describes how our current institutional response to IPV is often not useful--and sometimes quite harmful--for IPV survivors with the least material, social, and cultural capital to spare. For these women, as the interviews vividly record, IPV has long-term economic and social consequences, disrupting career paths and creating social isolation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
• Release date: Jan 24, 2017
• ISBN: 9780826521231

Sara Shoener

Sara Shoener is an advocate and researcher of strategies to reduce gender-based violence. She received her Doctorate of Public Health from Columbia University.

Book preview

Introduction

KAREN LEFT HER ABUSIVE HUSBAND, Ed, and moved into her own home in 2006, with no intention of ever returning to him.

More than five years later, Karen and I sat on a couch in a transitional housing facility for domestic violence survivors and talked about her decision to rekindle her relationship with Ed in 2009. She spoke candidly and humbly, with a voice that sounded as though she were always smiling, even as she recounted the darkest parts of her past. She radiated a quiet strength and unmistakable grit.

Karen had been living in a small beach town when she met Ed. She was making a living chartering fishing trips for tourists, and Ed owned a bar down the road from Karen’s work, supplying six-packs of light beer and cartons of cigarettes to the bachelor parties and fraternity reunions that composed most of Karen’s customer base. Karen and Ed began dating as one tourist season died down, and by the time the next one began, Karen was pregnant and engaged to Ed.

During my last trimester was the first time he put his hands on me, Karen remembered. So it started real early and got real worse.

Together Karen and Ed were raising three children: two of their own along with Ed’s daughter from a previous relationship. Ed often physically abused the children and would then brutally beat Karen in front of them. He was frequently incarcerated for the violence during their marriage, but for a long time Karen didn’t leave him. I couldn’t possibly understand the fact of moving. I didn’t have anyone to look over my step-daughter, she explained. So I stayed.

Karen tried to get Ed to focus his abuse on her in order to protect the children: When it came to the kids, I had a voice. I remember, I was pregnant with my youngest and [Ed] had [his daughter] by the scruff of her shirt. And he had his arm pulled back. And I was like, ‘Oh, no.’ And I jumped into the middle of it and distracted it. Got the focus on me. That was a daily thing.

Ed’s violence took a psychological toll on everyone in the family. Karen’s step-daughter was having panic attacks at school, and her own children were increasingly angry and rebellious. Karen started taking medications prescribed by her psychiatrist. I was becoming extremely depressed and mentally sick, . . . and by then, I was taking pills, she told me. My doctors would be prescribing me all of these anti-anxiety medications, and that’s how I coped with the world.

Karen ultimately left Ed when he killed the family dog in front of Karen and the children and was sentenced to a year in prison. With Ed a safe distance away, Karen felt that she could file for divorce without Ed taking out his anger on his oldest daughter. Karen successfully relocated, found a safe place for her step-daughter, and won full legal custody of her two children. Once everything had settled down, however, the effects of her trauma took hold, and Karen began abusing her medications.

I didn’t pick up counseling, Karen said, which I know was suggested. But I was just like, ‘I don’t want to deal with it. I just want to put it behind me.’ She continued to take the medications and eventually developed an addiction to them. After a year, she realized that she needed help.

Karen wanted to provide a safe and stable home for her children and became afraid that she was losing the ability to do so. She decided to seek help from a day treatment facility for substance abuse. She recalled:

I opened a case for me to ask for help. And then this was a child endangerment issue. And so they swooped in and put my kids in foster care. . . . I was getting angry. And I love my children too much. I would hate to be pushed to the part where I react on my anger. So I told them, I feel like I might hit [my children]. They used that against me in court [laughs]. The legal system in [this city] failed me. Big time. I thought I was being a good mom.

Karen’s children were put in foster care and then custody was transferred to Ed when he was released from prison.

Before I lost custody, he wasn’t even allowed to see my children without supervised visits. Because he was just very manipulative, saying inappropriate things to the children, and my oldest son feared him. He had nightmares about him. Karen explained, half-laughing, And now [Ed]’s in court saying, ‘Oh, I took a parenting class.’

When Karen finished treatment she sought to regain custody of her children through the court system but was denied. When she lost custody, she also lost the child support payments and public assistance she was receiving. Without a stable source of income and a place to live, the court did not find her fit to parent. She explained:

[Ed] had a place. He was stable. He wooed them. They loved him. Even the children’s caseworker. They looked down on me. They looked at me as a junkie. And that was the hardest thing because I knew in my heart that I loved my kids and was doing what was best for my kids. And I was getting stuck in the system. And when they gave custody to Ed, I was devastated. That’s when I decided, You know what? I’m done listening to the rules.

In an act of desperation and fear, Karen resumed her relationship with Ed in order to coax him into transferring custody rights to her. He ultimately agreed, and once the paperwork was signed, Karen left the state with her children for a second time:

I called him and I said, I really want to reconcile. I have two years of sobriety, it was all me, the marriage ended because I was taking the pills. And he let me back in. And then I was just like, Oh, since you work in [another state], it’s really important that we have joint custody so I can do the doctors’ appointments and the school. So he went to court, gave me my custody. And once I had joint custody, I went to court and said, I want to move to my mom’s in [a different state]. And I left him.

Survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV) across the United States have stories similar to Karen’s. This book is about what I learned from observing and hearing some of these stories, and about the unintended and largely preventable consequences of the way the domestic violence service system is constructed: the violence wrought by the system itself.

Domestic Violence Services in the United States

In summer 2013, the World Health Organization reported that one in three women has experienced intimate partner violence during her lifetime. In the United States the statistics were equally dismal. In 2011, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 35.6 percent of women in the United States have been physically or sexually assaulted by an intimate partner in their lifetime (Black et al. 2011). I was in public health school when these numbers were released, and they left me disoriented: I knew that I wanted to be a public health advocate for survivors of IPV, but I had no idea what exactly I should be advocating for.

I had been working in the IPV field for the previous fifteen years, and had been watching my mother, a battered women’s advocate, for more than a decade longer than that. A single parent, she often brought me with her to her workplace, our town’s domestic violence shelter, where I spent my time playing with the children living in the safehouse while my mother facilitated group counseling sessions and answered crisis hotline calls. Through my childhood I learned that the women who walked through the shelter’s doors were often strong, smart, resourceful people, competent in leading healthy lives. Rather than suffering from some sort of individual pathology, the survivors I saw appeared to be trapped in an external net of competing needs and rules that never seemed to relent. A generation later, these institutional barriers to safety remain stubbornly in place.

The positive effects of the battered women’s movement are ubiquitous. They can be seen in the abundance of domestic violence services in the public service and legal systems, the billions of dollars spent by federal and state governments for domestic violence shelters and advocacy organizations across the country, and the extent to which the problem of domestic violence is included in public narratives and popular culture (Domestic Violence Counts 2013, 2014; Gooden 2014). Why then, in the twenty-first century, are American women as likely to be survivors of IPV as they are to be college graduates (Ryan and Siebens 2012)? Why has IPV against women continued to be so widespread, and what have been the most effective strategies for stemming this social problem?

I embarked on a research project to investigate these questions. Specifically, I sought to better understand the barriers to female IPV survivors’ long-term safety in the United States, and the successes and challenges of local domestic violence service systems in addressing those barriers. I conducted ethnographic research in three communities in the United States from February 2011 to December 2012. At each site, I observed women survivors of IPV and interviewed them about their experiences of abuse and their attempts to achieve long-term security. I also observed practitioners across a wide range of disciplines and interviewed them about their work with IPV survivors.

What I found was that the domestic violence service system was often not useful, and was sometimes quite harmful, for IPV survivors with the least material, social, and cultural capital. This was particularly problematic because many survivors’ experiences of IPV created a continual drain on their resources even after they left their abusers. IPV’s enduring harms restricted survivors’ options throughout their lives and at times made returning to their abusers their most strategic choice for increasing their well-being.

Survivors incurred many social, emotional, and economic losses while in abusive relationships; their experiences of IPV frequently led to broken friendships, poorer mental health, and financial strain. However, some of survivors’ greatest setbacks occurred after they left their abusers, simply because they had been in an abusive relationship. Some losses were the result of postseparation abuse. For example, many abusers spread rumors about their ex-partner to destroy her reputation and keep her isolated from her support network. Some abusers stalked their ex-partner at work, causing the survivor to lose her job and consequently her source of income.

Other losses survivors faced are the residual effects of long-past IPV experiences. For example, Ed’s destruction in Karen’s life continued even as he sat in prison. Her mental health continued to deteriorate, her ability to hold a job declined, and her access to her children, who were in foster care, dissipated.

Frequently survivors’ postseparation suffering was the result of having children in common with their abusers. Whether they decided to or were required to do so by the court system, survivors often maintained contact with their abuser in order to foster the father-child relationship. Many survivors had internalized a public narrative that equated single parenthood with failure. The institutions intended to assist survivors—protection-order courts, mental health services, public benefits programs, and child custody systems—reinforced this stigma with both official policies and ingrained prejudices. Mental health professionals, law enforcement officials, judges, and members of the clergy often showed greater concern for the maintenance of two-parent families than for the safety of mothers and their children. Women who left abusive men were frequently perceived at best as mothers who had not successfully kept their children out of harm’s way and at worst as liars who were alienating their children from their fathers.

The collateral damage of IPV compounded survivors’ experiences of oppression that were unrelated to their intimate partnerships. Social factors, such as survivors’ class, gender, race, mental health, physical ability, sexual orientation, English fluency, and US citizenship status, shaped their experiences of violence and their options for safety. Despite IPV survivors’ range of postseparation losses and experiences of social inequality, the resources and services available to them were often designed in a way that did not account for their structural disadvantages. Instead, the IPV interventions I studied routinely operated as though the restrictions on survivors’ agency were lifted as soon as they left their abusers. Some services placed additional strain on survivors’ lives. As a result, the most disadvantaged survivors at times found institutional resources in the domestic violence service system inaccessible, irrelevant, and even harmful.

Though some of the challenges in the domestic violence service systems I studied could be attributed to isolated incidents of overt negligence or incompetence, the majority could not. Instead, what I often witnessed were overburdened and under-resourced systems in which service providers tended to gravitate toward the most immediate crises at hand. Given the intensity, severity, and complexity of many IPV survivors’ safety needs, practitioners often barely had the means to respond to the day-to-day problems brought to their door. As a result, there was often little time to take up the complicated project of considering the families who were not being reached or stopped returning for services.

Some Clarifications Regarding Terminology

I use the term domestic violence service system to describe the governmental and nongovernmental resources and organizations to which IPV survivors are typically referred when they need help to achieve long-term safety. The domestic violence service system includes civil courts, such as protection-order court and child custody court; criminal court; community-based domestic violence service organizations; family counselors and trauma therapists; public housing; public benefits; and child protective services. This system is by no means homogenous: segments of the service system often work in conflict with one another. Community-based organizations often advocate zealously on behalf of their clients who are engaged in the justice system, family counselors might attempt to reunify families that protection-order courts are working to keep apart, and custody court schedules keep survivors from being able to meet their work requirements for public benefits.

I regularly use the phrase domestic violence service system to describe this messy, contradictory terrain because IPV survivors often described their participation with multiple services as one cumulative experience. For example, later in the book I write about a woman who was regularly scrutinized in the custody court system for her parenting choices. The constant judgment depleted her self-confidence and made her exceptionally sensitive to criticism. She began taking job