by Jyotsna Sreenivasan

The Republican leadership’s punitive welfare reform bill has passed the Senate and is now in a House-Senate Conference Committee, where differences between the Senate and House versions will be resolved. This bill is very similar to their previous welfare bill, which President Clinton vetoed in January. HR 3507, like the vetoed bill, does not guarantee aid to every family in need, and carries a five-year time limit. Legal immigrants would be ineligible for welfare benefits. It cuts $53 billion from welfare spending, the same as what their previous bill would have cut.

President Clinton has indicated he may sign this bill. Due to Clinton’s pressure, two amendments were added to the Senate bill: one to guarantee food stamps for every eligible person, and another to maintain the current Medicaid coverage.

This time, all five of the Democratic women Senators voted against this bill, which would hurt women and children most. Last year when the Senate passed the Republican-led welfare bill, Senator Carol Moseley-Braun (D-IL) was the only woman Senator, and one of only eleven Senators, who stood up for poor women and voted against the bill.

Punitive welfare reform measures ignore the reasons women rely on welfare. A new report suggests that a majority of women on welfare are victims of domestic violence, and that their ability to get an education or maintain employment is severely hampered by the violence and sabotage they experience at the hands of husbands and boyfriends. "Prisoners of Abuse: Domestic Violence and Welfare Receipt" by Jody Raphael of the Taylor Institute relates that domestic abuse often includes actions by the boyfriend or husband to prevent women from continuing their education or getting a job, including: turning off the woman’s alarm; disfiguring her so she is embarrassed to go to work or school; and threatening and stalking her when she gets a job.

The study includes data from AFDC caseloads and welfare-to-work programs. One study in Washington State showed that 60% of women on welfare had been victims of physical or sexual abuse as adults. A Chicago study of women in an employment training program revealed that 56% of the women were current victims of domestic violence. And data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Homeless Families Program reports that 81% of all women participating in the program reported physical abuse by a partner.

Other recent studies show that adult males are often responsible for births to teenage girls. A recent study by Mike Males at University of California — Irvine shows that adult men, an average of six years older than the girls they impregnated, are responsible for two thirds of the babies born to teenage mothers in California in 1993. The study concurs with findings from a 1995 study by the Alan Guttmacher Institute which combined birth certificates with the results of an overlooked 1988 federal survey of 10,000 women. About 27 percent of the births to 10 to 14 year-old girls were fathered by men aged 20 to 24.

Despite this evidence that men are at least partly responsible for the poverty of women and children, the "welfare reform" debate has not taken this male role into account. Instead, Republicans in Congress, state governors, and President Clinton seem to be falling over themselves trying to come up with tougher and tougher restrictions on the poor women and children who depend on welfare.

The Republican Congressional bill includes strict time limits on welfare payments. Raphael, the author of the domestic violence study, feels that time limits are dangerous to victims of domestic violence. "Time-limited welfare reform efforts may well exacerbate domestic violence where it already exists, or cause it to arise," she says in her report. This is because as women get closer to employment, their partners who feel threatened by that employment may escalate the violence before social service agencies can intervene. "Unfortunately, the process of safe removal often takes time," says Raphael. "Among other things, there may be no beds available in a battered women’s shelter. Time limits restrict women’s ability to make and implement safe choices for themselves and their families."

In related state news, Michigan’s rule that teen mothers must live with their parents or another adult in order to receive benefits has turned out to be virtually unenforceable. According to the Washington Post, almost 90% of teen mothers on welfare received exemptions from living with their parents because they had been kicked out of home by their parents, or because they had suffered abuse at home. Teen mothers forced to live in their parents’ home can be at risk for violence.

Virginia’s rule that single mothers must provide the first and last name of the father of their child in order to receive welfare benefits is being challenged in court by the Virginia Poverty Law Center (VPLC). A Virginia judge will allow the two women who brought the suit to continue receiving welfare benefits pending the outcome of the lawsuit. VPLC says the Virginia law punishes children for the mistakes of their parents because it allows for exemptions only in some cases of rape — not if the mother simply does not know the father’s name, or does not wish to reveal it because of the threat of violence from the father.