VAWA – the Threat to Working Women
If you’re a woman who is employed outside the home, and are looking for help in a domestic violence situation, don’t bother to look to any of the thousands of VAWA-sponsored agencies in this country.
They will not help you.
They do not want to help working women.
I was recently told about the case of a woman in the state of New York, which as you would imagine has many shelters for domestic violence victims. By the time I heard about this, she was living in her car with five children, after calling so many agencies she needed a notebook to keep track of her calls.
All agencies refused her. Not due to the sex of her children, which also happens, but due to the fact that she has a full-time job. This happens everywhere, every day, but of course the public is not supposed to know that.
Why this happens is complicated.
Their primary excuse is that working women threaten the safety of the others in the facility. Not by themselves, mind you, but by the fact they have somewhere to go every day, and their abuser is likely to know where that is. Thus, shelter advocates project all kinds of possible disasters stemming from that, focused on the scenario of an abuser following his (yes, they always presume the abuser to be male) victim to the shelter and causing trouble of some kind.
Because these programs have done their level best to create an adversarial relationship with law enforcement, they also presume they will not expect any help from them. They also fear the super-secret location of the facility might be (gasp) disclosed. (As personal experience attests, they do not even reveal the location of their facilities to funding organizations.)
Never mind the reality of their scenario has never been tested. It’s just easier to refuse help to working women. Could it be these women themselves pose a threat to the shelters?
What proponents of these backward and damaging programs will not tell you is that they are based on a set of ideas that may have had some elements of validity three decades ago, when women’s shelters originated, but time has rendered their ideas useless. State coalitions and individual agencies have refused to change with the times.
Back in the day, not as many women worked outside the home as today, so it was not unreasonable to set up programs that required a woman to be sequestered for a period of weeks or months. Today however, a woman’s career is likely to be highly important to her, and she is not going to be willing to leave that behind in order to accept the brand of “help” provided by shelters.
Yet this is what she must do if she wants help for a situation of abuse or violence. It’s either the job, or their help. What kind of a choice is that for a woman in crisis?
To accept working women would pose all kinds of problems for shelters. It would threaten the very philosophy on which their programs are built, that women are essentially dependent and unable to make their own decisions, and therefore must be guided. Self-reliant, and already producing their own income, working women would resist accepting government handouts, would resist allowing themselves and their children to enter a life of dependence and poverty, which is the result of many shelter programs.
Perhaps they would question the feminist dogma permeating the so-called counseling, and would not be as willing to subject their children to “prevention” education, which consists of nothing more than blaming and shaming males of all ages.
No, it’s easier for shelters just to refuse working women. They’re more trouble than they’re worth.
VAWA is not about helping women – it never was.