Decriminalizing Domestic Violence. Leigh Goodmark
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or utilities because of a poor credit rating can mean longer stays in shelter, returning to abusive relationships, or not leaving those relationships at all.31
Abuse can significantly impair a woman’s ability to work. Although women subjected to abuse are no less likely to be currently employed than other women, they are more likely to have experienced past unemployment and high job turnover. Women subjected to intimate partner violence are much less likely to maintain work over time than other women. Intimate partner violence decreases women’s annual hours worked by more than 10 percent.32
Women subjected to abuse report being late and absent from work more often and have greater difficulty maintaining long-term employment.33 Intimate partner violence reduces women’s job stability by an average of three months. This lack of job stability can hamper a woman’s ability to accrue enough time in a job to earn employment-related benefits, including retirement accounts, health insurance, sick days, and vacation time. The effects of intimate partner violence on employment stability can last for up to three years after the abuse has ended. Fifty-two percent of women in a support group for intimate partner violence said that they were not able to positively change their employment status after the abuse ended.34 Postseparation abuse, stalking, and harassment, which can continue long after women leave abusive relationships, also negatively affect women’s ability to work.
Between 24 percent and 52 percent of women subjected to abuse have lost a job as a result of intimate partner violence; between 44 percent and 60 percent have been reprimanded at work for behavior related to intimate partner violence.35 Intimate partner violence can also cause women to scale down their employment aspirations; about half of the women in one survey reported more modest hopes for employment after separating from their abusive partners.36 Abuse deters some women from working altogether. “I want to work, but I’m afraid. I have gotten messages from my girlfriends. They said he said if he sees me he’s going to kill me. You had better watch your back and all other kinds of stuff, and believe me he’ll do it.”37
Abusive partners prevent people from getting the education they need to qualify for work, finding work, and actually working. People who abuse may damage or destroy work clothes, employment related documents, and other needed items. They inflict visible injuries that make it impossible to go to work. Women are stalked or harassed before, during, and after work. People who abuse fail to provide promised transportation or child care, interfere with a partner’s education and training, and spread lies about their partners to their employers (that they are using drugs or experiencing mental illness, for example). Welfare recipients regularly report being harassed by their partners at work. The majority of welfare recipients have been late to work, left early, or missed work as a result of intimate partner violence. Georgia’s partner was so jealous that he “didn’t want me to work or meet people outside the home. . . . He would call or come to the job or be there when I got off. He would demand that I come over, would call and threaten the boss where I worked. . . . He stole a VCR from [the place] where I was working.” Georgia was fired as a result of her partner’s behavior.38 Although some employers have workplace policies to assist employees subjected to abuse, others are unable or unwilling to provide workers with the job adaptations they need to be safe. Fear of her abusive partner prompted Rachel to resign from her job as a systems analyst. Rachel’s shift ended at night, and “[t]here’s no way I was going to walk through the parking lot at 10:00 at night,” particularly given that the security guards were not willing to walk with her.39
Economic abuse “is the ultimate anti-response to female financial autonomy.”40 It prevents people subjected to abuse from establishing economic security and self-sufficiency. Anxiety about financial instability looms larger than safety concerns for some people subjected to abuse. As Yolanda explained, her fear of losing her only asset, her home, kept her in an abusive relationship for years: “I thought about our property . . . the house we were living in . . . if I left I would lose the property. . . . And I always wanted it for my kids, so they could have it. . . . I thought at least I would have that for retirement.”41 Economic dependency traps some people in abusive relationships. Others leave their relationships without access to money, “unbanked,” with damaged credit, large debts, and few material resources.
HOUSING
The inability to find and keep housing is among the most significant economic problems associated with intimate partner violence. Without stable housing, people are more vulnerable to intimate partner violence. Women subjected to abuse make up a substantial percentage of the homeless population, in part because of the barriers they face in obtaining and maintaining housing.
The difficulty of securing stable housing has long been recognized as a critical problem for people subjected to abuse. In VAWA’s legislative history, lawmakers noted that women subjected to abuse “often lack steady income, credit history, landlord references, and a current address, all of which are necessary to obtain long-term permanent housing.”42
People who have been subjected to economic abuse may lack sufficient resources to cover the up-front costs associated with renting. Although some public housing complexes prioritize housing for people subjected to abuse, most have long wait-lists, making them impractical solutions for people needing immediate housing. Moreover, while waiting for a property to become available, people may relocate or change their phone numbers, making them difficult to contact; if the housing agency can’t reach them when a spot opens up, the agency will move on to the next person seeking housing. Leaving rental housing unexpectedly in response to a crisis has serious financial ramifications and can result in financial penalties for early lease termination, loss of security deposit, or eviction proceedings.
Having an eviction on one’s record creates tremendous barriers to finding new housing. People subjected to abuse may have been evicted as a result of excessive noise, criminal activity on the property, or because a partner has leased the apartment in the person’s name but refused to pay the rent. Landlords routinely screen the credit and eviction histories and criminal records of potential renters. Broken leases and past evictions hurt the credit and rental histories of people subjected to abuse, making it much more difficult to qualify for both private and public housing. A 2008 study found that applicants for housing in Washington, DC, who had been subjected to abuse or were seeking housing on behalf of someone subjected to abuse were given harsher lease terms and conditions than other applicants (56 percent) or denied housing outright (9 percent).43
Once people subjected to abuse have found housing, they face a number of barriers to keeping that housing. One particularly problematic practice is the use of nuisance property laws against people subjected to abuse. Nuisance property laws allow police to penalize landlords for their tenants’ behavior. Imagine that the police have received multiple calls from a tenant for assistance with intimate partner violence. Nuisance property laws permit police and prosecutors to require landlords to self-police their properties to keep law enforcement from having to repeatedly respond to calls, using the threat of fines and license revocations to compel landlords to act. In Saint Louis, for example, prosecutors threatened to fine landlords between one hundred dollars and five hundred dollars for each violation of the nuisance property law, and, if that failed to stop calls to 911, to board up the property. Landlords who aid law enforcement must provide police or prosecutors with plans for abating the nuisance to avoid being penalized. Landlords often include evictions or the threat of eviction in those plans and use those threats to prevent tenants from continuing to seek assistance from the police.44
Nearly a third of the nuisance citations issued to landlords in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 2008 and 2009 involved intimate partner violence. That abuse included hitting, strangling, beating, and throwing bleach in a partner’s face. Forty-four percent of the incidents involved physical abuse, and 14 percent involved a weapon. For those two years, a Milwaukee landlord received a nuisance citation involving intimate partner violence every five days; those citations disproportionately involved female victims, male offenders, and African American neighborhoods. Eighty-three percent of landlords responded to the nuisance citations with either threats to evict or formal and informal evictions. After a woman called 911 when her abusive boyfriend appeared on her porch, for example, her landlord sent her the following letter: