BATTERED WELFARE SYNDROME

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.