In honor of Domestic Violence Awareness Month, October, President Clinton issued directives to the Department of Health and Human Services and the Attorney General, instructing them to encourage states to implement provisions of the new welfare law added to provide some protection for battered women from the overall dismantling of the Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program.

The Family Violence provisions, introduced by Senators Paul Wellstone (D-MN) and Patty Murray (D-WA), allow states to increase services to and waive some requirements for battered women, many of whom depend on welfare as a way to escape abuse.

In addition, Clinton directed the Attorney General to study statutory rape, domestic violence and sexual assault in poor families and recommend solutions to improve the self-sufficiency of poor families. The Feminist Majority and other womenÕs groups had urged President Clinton to address the connection between domestic violence and the reliance on welfare benefits.

‘Approximately half of the women on welfare are victims of domestic violence who are fleeing for their lives. For these women and their children, welfare may be the only means of escape. By ending the AFDC entitlement, the President and Congress are sealing off their only way out,’ said Eleanor Smeal, President of the Feminist Majority upon the enactment of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 in August.

The Clinton Administration also has been granting waivers to states to allow them to circumvent some of the harsher aspects of the welfare law, such as extending the five-year lifetime limit on welfare benefits, and extending the time period in which job-hunting can be counted as employment.

But at least one waiver, for the District of Columbia, has been withdrawn by the Department of Health and Human Services after Republican Senators complained that the District was being given special treatment. Thirty other states have also received waivers.

Smeal added, "The women’s movement will not turn its back on the most needy of women. We will not let the pain of these women and children be forgotten. We will work to overturn this draconian legislation. Newt Gingrich sang the praises of orphanages: are poorhouses the next verse?"

Three top officials on welfare policy in the Clinton Administration have resigned in protest of Clinton’s signing the bill. Mary Jo Bane and Peter Edelman, both Assistant Secretaries at the Department of Health and Human Services, resigned in early September. Wendell Primus, another high official in the Department of Health and Human Services who did a study showing the new welfare law would throw one million children into poverty, resigned in August.

The Feminist Majority joined the National Organization for Women and other women’s rights, civil rights, and social welfare groups in a protest outside the White House on the day Clinton signed the welfare bill.