The Impact of Recent Partner Violence on Poor Women's Capacity to Maintain Work

Abstract

Recent changes in welfare policy that require women to work have been particularly controversial for survivors of partner violence. This article explores the relationship between partner violence and work through time in an ethnically diverse longitudinal sample of 285 extremely poor women. Controlling for a variety of factors, women who experienced physical aggression/violence by male partners during a 12-month period had only one third the odds of maintaining employment for at least 30 hours per week for 6 months or more during the subsequent year as did women without these experiences. The study has important implications for welfare-to-work programming and public policy.

Intimate Partner Violence, Welfare Receipt, and Health Status of Low‐Income African American Women: A Lifecourse Analysis

“…For example, our findings support the literature that implicates IPV as a significant barrier to long-term stable employment for low-income women (Browne et al, 1999;Honeycutt et al, 2001), and suggest a need for mezzo-and macro-level interventions, such as coalition building among organizations aimed at ending poverty and those aimed at ending IPV, community-level IPV prevention/intervention programs, and federal policies that make an explicit connection between elimination of IPV and the promotion of women's economic well-being. Enhanced women's economic well-being, in turn, will reduce the numbers of women on welfare, which is a major policy agenda of previous and current federal and local administrations.…”

“…In a community sample of women from all income levels, low-income women who had experienced physical IPV within the past six months reported significantly poorer physical health symptoms than abused women of other income levels (Sutherland et al, 2001). Among a community sample of low-income women, those who reported having experienced IPV in the past 12 months were significantly more likely than women who had not been abused during that time period to have been hospitalized for physical problems and/or mental health issues in the past year (Browne et al, 1999). In a longitudinal study in Michigan, female welfare recipients who had experienced past-year IPV were twice as likely to have received treatment for mental health problems in the past 12 months and more than three times as likely to report a current need for mental health treatment compared to never-abused women (Tolman & Rosen, 2001).…”

“…While this relationship has been examined in cross-sectional and longitudinal studies (Browne et al, 1999;Sutherland et al, 2001;Tjaden & Thoennes, 2000;Tolman & Rosen, 2001), associations among lifetime welfare receipt, lifetime experience of IPV, and current health status have been examined less. The temporal relationship between welfare receipt and IPV remains unknown.…”

“…Using a specialized methodology, the Life History Calendar (LHC) method (Freedman, Thornton, Camburn, Alwin, & Young-DeMarco, 1988), we obtained lifetime data from respondents on the timing of IPV and welfare receipt, in order to examine the effect of cumulative IPV on subsequent welfare receipt and the effect of cumulative welfare receipt on subsequent experience of IPV. In addition, given that both low income and history of IPV are risk factors for compromised physical and mental health (Browne, Salomon, & Bassuk, 1999;Campbell, 2002;Kessler et al, 1994;Tolman & Rosen, 2001), we investigated to what extent cumulative exposure to IPV and cumulative welfare receipt independently or interactively affect women's current health status.…”

Longitudinal Patterns of Intimate Partner Violence, Risk, Well-Being, and Employment: Preliminary Findings

“…Yet a review of several studies documenting the relationship between domestic violence and welfare concludes, "domestic violence presents a barrier to sustained labor market participation" (Raphael and Tolman, 1997, p. 22). For example, a recent study (Browne, Salomon, and Bassuk, 1999) involving a sample almost exclusively composed of recipients of Aid to Families with Dependent Children found that those who had experienced domestic violence during a previous 12-month period had only one-third the odds of maintaining employment for at least 30 hours a week for 6 months or more compared to those who had not experienced domestic violence during that period. However, this study was not able to examine the temporal relationship between violence and work within the 12-month period or the factors that contribute to battered women's employment difficulties.…”