These numbers are staggering. When you consider the impact of childhood trauma — which tells us that kids who experience or witness abuse are more likely to develop a slew of physical and mental illnesses as adults — those numbers are infuriating. And baffling. Domestic violence can be hard to escape, especially for those who have been in the mire of it for years, but once kids become involved, shouldn’t that be enough motivation to leave?

It’s this question, and the assumed answer, which drives “failure to protect” laws in child welfare programs across the United States. Essentially, failure to protect laws charge a parent with not doing enough to shield their child from witnessing or experiencing abuse. Virtually every state pursues some form of failure to protect charges within the civil child welfare system. These laws are aimed at the non-abusive parent living in an abusive household. Usually, the parent has been subject to intimate partner violence. But the laws can also be used in households in which the child is the victim of one parent but not the other.

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While these laws were written with the intention of penalizing a parent who neglects the safety and/or well-being of their children, they all too often make unsafe environments even less safe by penalizing non-abusive parents living in an abusive household, and can become the basis for temporarily or permanently removing children from the home. They rarely leave room to consider the complexities of intimate partner violence, instead relying on assumptions and stereotypes that are incapable of capturing the nuanced reality of family bonds.

In January of 1999, Sharwline Nicholson decided to end her relationship with the father of her infant daughter. He lived in South Carolina, and had been crossing state lines each month to visit Nicholson and their daughter in New York. But when she ended the relationship, he responded with violence.

She called 911 and made arrangements with a friend for the care of her two children while she stayed overnight at the hospital. The next day, Nicholson was notified by the New York Administration of Children’s Services (ACS) that both of her children had been temporarily removed from her care on the basis that she had failed to protect them from witnessing the violence that had been inflicted upon her by her former partner. At the time, this was considered a form of neglect.

Nicholson would eventually win back custody of her children, but would be placed on a child maltreatment registry. This action kickstarted a lawsuit that would eventually lead the New York Court of Appeals to rule in 2004 that a parent’s inability to prevent a child from witnessing abuse could not be a sole factor for removing a child. Child welfare reform activists celebrated the decision.

“What Nicholson actually did was not just to change the attitude toward victims of domestic violence,” said David Lansner, a civil rights and family law attorney who represented the plaintiffs in the Nicholson case. “Neglect had to be shown as a serious matter; you had to show that … there was imminent danger of serious harm and not just the possibility of harm. … [Child services] and the court had to balance the harm that would result from removal against the risk of leaving the child at home, so you couldn’t just ‘take the safer course’ because removal was harmful to kids and shouldn’t be done unless it was really necessary.”

Unfortunately, New York is relatively unique in that respect; other states, lacking a case like Nicholson, still remove children for the possibility of harm that caseworkers and judges interpret by a parent’s “failure to protect” her children from being in a household where abuse takes place.

Erin Miles-Cloud, who formerly worked as a parent attorney in New York and is currently one of the co-founders of the advocacy group Movement for Family Power, explained the ways in which some of the better-resourced, urban systems can still fail families, even today. “Because New York has this middle ground of family shelters, ACS sees it as an unreasonable option to stay in a home where intimate partner violence is occurring,” she said.

What many people don’t realize is that — in New York City — parents who access a shelter as the result of domestic abuse will automatically be moved to a different borough, meaning a change in school district for their children, not to mention the loss of access to support networks, such as friends and family or trusted child care, lack of which can easily become another maltreatment charge. There’s also no guarantee as to what type of housing the family will receive or for how long. In some cases this could mean dormitory-style living for a year or longer, with no access to even a personal refrigerator.

But even the most comfortable, “home-like” shelters remain government-funded institutions — which means they come with restrictive rules, such as nightly curfews and rigid limits on how many days a parent can be away from the shelter, even to visit family. They are also a source of constant surveillance for the families housed inside. Miles-Clouds calls shelters and hospitals among the “largest offenders” when it comes to calling in new maltreatment reports, and notes that New York ACS often uses shelters as “second or third eyes on a family” when arguing a related case in court.

Because child welfare agencies self-report their data, and failure to protect  is not an independent maltreatment category in itself (these cases typically fall under the “neglect” umbrella), it is difficult to know exactly how many non-abusive parents end up being investigated because they were victims of abuse who sought help, or because their children reported being harmed by someone else in the household. But we do know that most states do not have even the mild protections enjoyed by families in New York. That means a child can be removed if the state convinces a judge they have been or will likely be psychologically harmed by witnessing the abuse.

Some states will also pursue criminal charges against victims of intimate partner violence who have children in the home. In six states – Oklahoma, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, South Carolina and West Virginia – non-offending parents face potential life sentences for failure to protect charges, and in Texas the maximum penalty is 99 years. Last year, the Associated Press reported on the case of Tondalao Hall, a mother whose boyfriend was sentenced to two-years time served (meaning he had already completed his jail time while waiting to be sentenced) for beating her children, including a three-month-old infant. Hall, who was never accused of harming her kids, is currently serving 30 years in prison for not calling the authorities on her boyfriend.

Latagia Copeland-Tyronce, a parental rights advocate and the founder/executive director of the National African American Families First and Preservation Association who spoke to TalkPoverty about her experience, knows first-hand how devastating it can be to be accused of not protecting children from another person’s abuse. She first faced the traumatic confusion of a failure to protect charge in Toledo, Ohio, in 2013.

She was 26 years old and had been involved in an abusive relationship for 10 years. What she did not know, however, was that her daughters’ father was also sexually abusing her three eldest girls. When one of Copeland-Tyronce’s daughters finally disclosed the abuse to her sister, she promptly contacted child services.

Copeland-Tyronce immediately left her children’s father. She also cooperated with the criminal case that would ultimately land him a 30-year prison sentence. But this was not enough for Lucas County child protective services. They claimed she had known about the abuse and had failed to protect her children both from witnessing the violence perpetrated against her, and from the sexual abuse which they had experienced.

“My children never said that I knew anything or that I was involved in the abuse and I was never charged with a crime related to the case,” countered Copeland-Tyronce.

Less than a year after the initial removal, her parental rights were terminated and all six of her daughters were adopted to other families. When she gave birth to a son in 2014, by a different father and with stable housing in place, he was also removed from her custody.

“Because I had a [termination of parental rights] TPR, failure to protect, with my daughters. No other reason,” she said. At the time, the first TPR was still under appeal.

Candis Cassioppi, a mother based in Athens, Georgia, had her youngest child removed from her in the hospital after giving birth, she told TalkPoverty. The removal was prompted by an incident of assault by her child’s father perpetrated against her during her pregnancy.

Although she initially called the police and sought medical attention — causing those injuries to become part of her medical record — she ultimately declined to press charges or testify against her abuser. After her son’s birth, this incident became a reason to claim she was failing to protect her children from harm. Now, she is court-ordered to participate in a slew of activities, including domestic violence groups and parenting classes, in the hopes of regaining custody of her infant.

Like mandated reporting laws, which require certain professionals and institutions to report suspected child maltreatment, failure to protect laws and policies are in place, purportedly, to ensure that child maltreatment does not go unreported. “If a child dies in the home because there was a batterer who was so dangerous that the victim-partner couldn’t protect [the kids] … we’re still liable to make sure that the child stays safe,” explained Mary Nichols, a now-retired administrator at Los Angeles County’s Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS), to the California Health Report in 2015.

But she also admitted in the same article that the laws are confusingly vague: “If you look up California Welfare and Institutions Code 300 and just read the definitions of ‘failure to protect,’ you can see how broad they are … [If] somebody would like to craft legislation to make it more workable, in terms of protections for domestic violence [victims], that would be great. It’s a pretty raw tool that we have.”

As the cases detailed in this article demonstrate, the reality of domestic abuse is far too complex to address with vague, generalized laws. Instead of protecting families, these blanket laws mean that parents who experience domestic violence may end up burdened by a fear of reprisal for reporting that violence. Take Cassioppi’s case, for example. Her baby was born healthy; had she not called the police and sought medical attention after being assaulted during her pregnancy, she likely would have walked out of the hospital with her newborn in arms. And Copeland-Tyronce now asserts that if she were to ever encounter intimate partner violence again, she would “not at all” feel safe calling the police for help.

Lansner said implementation and caseworker attitudes are major problems with the way domestic violence cases are handled within the child welfare system. “The caseworkers just don’t get it,” he said, adding, “the caseworker might go to the home, find the guy there in violation of a protection order and then remove the children instead of calling the police and having him arrested, which is what [the caseworker] should do.”

Parents who experience intimate partner violence also face a number of other complexities that caseworkers and judges don’t always take into consideration when charging these parents as culpable for traumatizing their kids by proxy. For example, one study found that 99 percent of domestic violence survivors had also been subject to economic abuse, a form of financial control that can leave them stranded without the resources necessary to secure independent housing or provide for their children’s basic needs. Because lack of appropriate shelter, clothing, and food also fall under the child services maltreatment category of “neglect,” this leaves many non-abusive partners trapped between the crosshairs of a failure to protect and a failure to provide charge. Either way, they’re ending up on the maltreatment registry for neglect.

By necessitating that caseworkers identify concrete harm toward a child before removing her from the home, New York has found a way to slightly balance a system designed to punish parents simply for being unfortunate enough to experience abuse. Although their system is far from perfect — as Miles-Cloud noted, it funnels parents into a less-than-ideal shelter system, and the law still does not address the caseworker bias that concerned Lansner — it provides a template which other states could use to begin the process of clarifying these laws.

Ideally, however, survivors of domestic violence should be met with compassion and provided with services that help their families heal and thrive intact. It seems, instead, that as long as failure to protect charges exist, the child welfare system will continue to promote a culture of secrecy surrounding intimate partner violence, thus validating the very abuse it claims to condemn.

Then, after a while, you get used to them. They get worse; they multiply. But you stop noticing. Eventually, you flick them off your body like nothing. You watch with dull reserve when you uncover yet another nest. They become a part of your life. Once you have roaches, you can never really get rid of them—you can only try to mitigate their effects.

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Women have been dealing with a lot of roaches. The viral MeToo hashtag has brought to light the horrifying impact of sexual and physical assault against women, which is an inarguable advance from the (sometimes not-so-distant) times when violence against women was so widely accepted it was used to sell household products. Like any powerful social movement, however, it has its critics. “Why now?” has become one of the biggest questions detractors are asking. If this is such a major problem, why didn’t survivors come forward earlier? Why do so many still hold back from reporting, or testifying in court?

People still ask me those questions. They ask even though it’s 10 years after the end of my abusive relationship, and even though I still live in a world overrun by my trauma. They ask even though providing the testimony that would incarcerate my abuser meant inviting a lifetime of PTSD, which arises only in the aftermath of trauma, when the long-used survival mechanisms fail to shut off.

The events that took place between the ages of 15 and 20 remain trapped in my body like shrapnel too precarious to be extracted. They are distanced from the rest of me by dissociation and selective amnesia; psychological post-traumatic scar tissue. I can’t always recall the details attached to each trigger, but I know them by their symptoms: anger, shame, debilitating self-doubt, panic attacks, suicidal ideation, substance use, an unshakable sense of not belonging.

I didn’t know exactly how much the aftermath would hurt until I finally walked away, but I had inklings every time I tried. I would spend days cycling between joy and misery; torn between my desire to live free from violence, and the despairing knowledge that healing would require painful, arduous work. When I finally testified, it was in spite of myself. I had already recanted previous reports countless times before I finally gathered the courage to stand my ground.

Domestic violence is so intensely damaging because it is personal, targeted, isolating, and private, but that pressure to recant is nearly universal. In a 2011 study of abuser-victim dynamics, Amy Bonomi and other researchers listened in on recorded conversations between jailed male abusers and their female partners. In 17 of 25 pairings, the abuser was able to convince his partner to recant her testimony (the other conversations were inaudible or included people who were not the primary victim). All of these conversations followed a pattern: The abuser first minimized the assault, then elicited sympathy from his victim by describing the hardship of life in jail, before romanticizing the “good times,” bonding over a shared dislike of a hostile authority figure, and finally requesting that she recant.

Given the likelihood that victims recant, it’s no wonder prosecutors seemed concerned when my abuser’s conviction hinged on my testimony. The county assigned me a victim’s advocate who coached me through the court process and periodically checked in on my welfare and willingness to speak in court. But after the sentencing, it was four years before I heard from their office again—and then only to meet with me briefly about his release. I was not set up with a network of trauma care workers. Nobody followed up to learn whether I had stable housing, or how my job search was going after school. I was left alone to deal with the aftermath, and 10 years later I am still struggling to overcome that oversight.

Studies have found that women who survive intimate partner violence suffer myriad long-term physical and mental consequences. (Although domestic violence happens across the gender spectrum, it is most common between male assailants with female partners; because of this, most research focuses on couples that fit this dynamic). Digestive problems, eating disorders, issues with reproductive organs, headaches, and blackouts are some of the most common physical ailments associated with domestic violence. PTSD develops at a 74:3 ratio in women who have been abused versus those who have not.

I’ve always lived below the poverty line, but before developing PTSD, I never struggled for what I really needed. The aftermath of abuse left me floundering for everything. No one warned me how hard it would be to stay alive after the relationship was over. I was able to complete graduate studies in writing, but not without a good dose of heroin—and that, of course, came with its own set of debilitating consequences. Before building enough contacts and credits to work as an income-earning freelance writer, I was mostly unemployed, occasionally bouncing between telefunding jobs, and constantly struggling to keep my family housed and fed. Even recently, when my husband suffered a costly health complication, we ended up with an impending eviction that we were only able to skirt through an online fundraiser.

The financial devastation I experienced is not unique. Since the 1990s, health officials have known that battered women experience significant interruptions to their jobs that include unemployment, missing work, being late or leaving early, and even being fired. More recent data confirm that financial insecurity continues to be a major issue for abuse survivors—domestic violence is thought to account for a combined total loss of 8 million work days each year. Couple that with the fact that 99 percent of women who are physically abused also experience financial abuse, and the well-recorded difficulties associated with escaping poverty (especially if mental illness is involved), and you begin to see a very grim picture—one that leaves already-vulnerable victims struggling to access enough resources to survive.

Survivors of intimate partner violence should not disappear into a black hole after escaping the abuse, nor should we assume they are okay just because they are “safe.” The evidence says they are not. And so, six months into #MeToo, we need to start dealing with the wreckage.  #MeToo allowed women to realize that they were not alone—that many of us have cockroaches, and the filth does not belong to us. #MeToo allowed women to let out a long-awaited sigh of relief. But it also triggered some survivors, who weren’t ready to face their trauma. It made women feel guilty for not being ready. It made those on the outside think that sending the aggressor to prison was the end of the story. It made people forget that domestic violence survivors still need help, even after the relationship ends.

There is no longer any basis to argue that domestic violence doesn’t have a long-term physical, psychological, and financial toll. The question is now, what are we going to do about it?

The first day I stood in the courtroom, all I had was my story. I prepared to tell the judge that I had been groomed by the man seven years my senior since I was 14; that I had been kidnapped, drugged, beaten, bitten, strangled, and raped. I prepared to tell her that the last time we were alone together, the petitioner strangled me while I was holding my infant son until I had a seizure and dropped my baby. I prepared to tell the judge that my son was now an eight-year-old boy who still wore diapers and could not speak, while I was in recovery from a heroin addiction that had, for many years, been my only means of coping with the PTSD.

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My abuser came to court equipped with an attorney. His lawyer was a tall man with an olive complexion and an easy self-confidence that he showcased by strolling through the courtroom, addressing the clerks by name and punctuating their interactions with a rolling belly laugh. My abuser’s attorney had all the papers in order. I, attorneyless, did not.

When the judge entered she told me I needed a lawyer, and offered me a continuance I didn’t know I could request. I took it, thinking it would give me a little more time before my son would officially belong to the man who had terrorized me when I was little more than a child myself. I knew the continuance would ultimately make no difference; there was no attorney I could afford.

This type of legal divide is not uncommon. According to the American Psychological Association, abusive fathers file for sole custody more often than fathers who have no history of domestic violence. Since 99 percent of domestic violence victims also face some form of financial abuse, abusers tend to have more money and thus more access to legal resources than the women fleeing their abuse. That gives them an advantage in the courts that makes them just as likely, or even more likely, to gain custody.

These prolonged legal battles can turn into an abuse of their own. Court-related abuse—sometimes called litigation abuse—is a widely under-recognized phenomenon in which a perpetrator of intimate partner violence will use family law court as a means of maintaining contact with their victims, even when legal protections would otherwise forbid it. Women and their children who have endured horrific abuses, including sexual molestation and rape, can be forced to interact repeatedly with their assailants in the courtroom upon escaping the relationships.

My abuser discovered his judicial advantage in 2016. I had a five-year protective order against him, a length of time I was told is rarely granted except in cases of extreme violence. But even that did not stop my abuser from dragging me to court.

Unlike many women, I got lucky. I won a lottery for a pro bono attorney through a program offered by my county that mentors licensed lawyers hoping to switch from their previous specialty to family law. These lawyers are only available—in limited quantity—to domestic violence survivors involved in custody cases where a child faces significant danger should the outcome favor the opponent. My attorney’s previous specialty was personal injury law. My abuser’s attorney had been practicing family law for decades. He filed claim after claim trying to dispute my testimonies, forcing me to recount abuses I hadn’t even yet addressed in therapy, and painting me as the negligent junkie who abandoned my son and couldn’t even keep a home clean.

When the case was over, I asked my attorney if she still planned to pursue family law. She said no.

After a year of litigation that included a comprehensive assessment by a child’s advocate, threats of Child Protective Services involvement, numerous courtroom proceedings that placed me side-by-side with my abuser, and an attempt at mediation, my abuser got bored and gave up his parental rights. Or maybe his new girlfriend became angry that he was giving me so much attention. Or maybe he litigated himself out of money, though that’s extremely rare in these types of cases. I don’t know. What I do know is that my son’s biological father now gets to put his name on the birth certificate. I know that I still have a domestic violence protection order, but it no longer covers my now-10 year old son, who is nonverbal and cannot call for help or tell anyone if he is harmed.

During the proceedings, I lost my job as a fundraiser. I began hallucinating the face of my abuser over the faces of men who resembled him, which made me afraid to leave my home. I had to start taking medication for trauma nightmares that made me dizzy if I stood up too quickly in the morning. I also relapsed on heroin, briefly, and take medication now for that too. Before the case began, my PTSD centered on events in the past. Now I have to be scared of the future: of the possibility that my abuser will come after my son and me again.

Litigation gave him freedom to pick at the most private things about me. I had to defend the reasons why my son didn’t live with me. I had to defend how and why I have PTSD. I had to reveal my addiction and treatment history, and then defend that too. On the other hand, I learned very little about my abuser. What I did learn was that he has a new girlfriend. She is not yet fully fluent in English, which fits his pattern of bouncing between underage girls and women who are new to the country and language. I learned that he lives with his girlfriend on a small piece of land outside of the city. I heard they raise chickens, and that on some weekends his girlfriend’s daughter—a young girl who has begun experimenting with hair dye—stays overnight.

Editor’s note: To protect the privacy of certain individuals, identifying details have been changed. 

Two years prior to the shooting, Ranta tried leaving Maffei. When Maffei picked a fight and tried to leave with their then 2-year-old son, she demanded that he hand over her child. Then, he raised his fist and threatened to punch her. That was the moment she started to realize that his mean streak was not harmless—he had never been physically violent before. Ranta called 911, but Maffei was calm when the officers arrived.

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“I’m running up looking like the ‘hysterical wife who loves drama,’ but in reality,  I was highly traumatized,” Ranta recalls.

While the other cops spoke to Maffei, one officer took her back in the house to warn her, saying: “If he didn’t hit you this time, he’ll hit you next time. Go get a restraining order against him tomorrow.”

Ranta took the officer’s advice. But it took two years, multiple visits to the courthouse, and a near-death attack before Ranta was granted a permanent order of protection.

Ranta’s experience is not uncommon. According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, 1 in 3 women in the United States have been abused by an intimate partner. And according to Sarah Gonzalez Bocinski, director of the Economic Security for Survivors Project at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, one of the main reasons survivors don’t leave is because their partners use sinister tactics to trap them into staying.

For 99 percent of domestic violence victims, that includes financial abuse that can leave victims facing economic insecurity and poor credit. Financial abuse is insidious—it gradually takes away a survivor’s agency by controlling their money, hindering their ability to keep a job, and withholding necessities like food and medicine. Despite its prevalence, 78 percent of Americans had not heard about financial abuse as it relates to domestic violence.

Throughout their marriage, Maffei never took out credit cards in his name. He left that to Ranta, telling her she was “doing her part for the family.” He kept all his money separate from hers, so that Ranta built up debt while Maffei accrued savings.

A University of Kentucky study headed by T.K. Logan showed that victims incur an average of $1,114 in property losses six months prior to petitioning for a protective order. That leaves victims extraordinarily cash-strapped, especially since most Americans would not be able to come up with a third of that amount in an emergency. And getting a protective order—much less a new place to live—is not free.

Filing fees for protective orders vary by state, but can cost up to $400. Many courts will waive fees for survivors of domestic violence and stalking—but there are still hidden costs that add up. Survivors must miss work, arrange for child care, and find a way to get to the courthouse. This can require multiple attempts, especially if a judge is unable or unwilling to hear a case at a time that works for a survivor’s schedule. Even if a survivor qualifies for legal aid, it usually doesn’t reduce the costs of child care and transportation. Nor does it make up for the hours they missed from work at a time when they are tucking away savings for divorce and child custody proceedings, which can cost anywhere from $5,000 to $35,000 or more.

“It costs money to be safe,” Logan says. “It takes extraordinary time, effort, and money to get a protective order; there’s taking time off work, the child care costs, travel, legal expenses, and more.”

After Ranta submitted her paperwork, a courthouse employee told her that Broward County’s judge looked at protective orders at the end of the day. She waited about six hours before Judge Michael G. Kaplan granted her a temporary order of protection. Maffei was served later that evening—he was legally mandated to stay away from Ranta. She filed for divorce shortly after.

But again, the costs continued to accumulate. After the judge granted the temporary order, Maffei stopped making payments to the credit cards and the mortgage on their home. He didn’t help with child care costs, which were $1,100 per month. Their house went into foreclosure and her car was repossessed. “Getting the protective order was the first step in financial devastation for me,” Ranta says.

Two weeks later, Ranta had to take time off work to testify in court. In most states, after a victim receives a temporary protective order, they must prove in court that their partner was abusive to be granted a permanent one.

Judge Kaplan refused to grant a permanent order of protection after the hearing, which meant that she’d have to go back to court often to re-file after the temporary ones expired. Before the divorce proceedings even started, Ranta owed $25,000 to her lawyer. Ranta describes herself during that period as “severely depressed and just kind of like a shell of myself.”

Maffei promised that if Ranta came back, he’d use his pension from the Air Force to help with finances. She wanted to believe him. Six weeks later, Ranta said she had to take her son to the hospital; she believes Maffei gave him an Ambien to make him fall asleep.

That’s when Ranta left Maffei for the last time, and filed for another restraining order. Kaplan turned her down three times due to “insufficient evidence.”

In order to stay safe, Ranta had to move with her son several times. One day, while no one was home, Maffei broke into her first apartment, Ranta says. Nothing was stolen, but it was vandalized: There was obscene graffiti in her son’s room, and damage to her car. Even though Ranta felt like she was in danger, the leasing office for the apartment didn’t let her get out of the lease early. She moved, but refused to pay the costs of breaking the lease. To this day, she’s still suffering from a bad mark on her credit. “This guy cost me probably $100,000 from running away from him,” she says.

Ranta wasn’t granted a permanent order of protection and divorce from Maffei until after the shooting. When they went to court that time, Kaplan didn’t even see Ranta, her dad, and her son before he granted all of them permanent protective orders. She believes that Kaplan couldn’t face them because “he knew he had blood on his hands.”

Five years after the shooting, Ranta is finally safe. This April, Maffei was sentenced to 60 years in prison for his attempt to murder Ranta and 60 years in prison for his attempt to murder her father, with no chance of parole.

Jail time will not rectify the economic injustice she’s faced. “He should have to pay for everything—legal fees and all the damages he caused,” she says.

But with the current #MeToo movement drawing attention to harassment, assault, and abuse, Ranta at least feels vindicated that survivors’ testimonies aren’t being dismissed.

“Believe all women when they tell you they aren’t safe,” she says. “You cannot co-parent with an abuser.”

For 22 years, I did what many Americans do: I worked, I attended college, and I worked some more. I paid my taxes, I voted with my heart just as much as with my mind, and I obtained a career. I did everything right.

Then, on June 30, 2016, my fiancé shot me in the back of my head at point blank range.

As I lay dying, I watched the man I loved turn his gun on himself and take his own life. I was left for dead, but I fought for my life through unimaginable darkness, hurt, and pain. I survived. I am broken, but alive.

I think about that night a lot. I think about it because it shapes everything about my life now, and not just because the bullet fragments in the back of my head and neck leave me in pain. I think about it because the disability I have now, that I acquired with a one-second pull of a trigger, turned my life upside down.

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I used to be a senior court clerk within the New York State Unified Court System. My fiancé was a New York State Court Officer-Lieutenant. Together we earned well over $150,000 per year. My career offered great benefits, a pension, and health insurance—and I was privileged enough to take them for granted.

I lost everything because my fiancé decided my life was not worth living. For the past 14 months, I fought to prove that it is: first by surviving, then by working to regain my dignity, self-worth, and independence.

Now, I find myself fighting the same battle with a different opponent. Once again, someone is deciding my life is not worth living. Except this time, it’s my president, and it’s the senators and representatives of my country telling me I have no worth.

Right now, President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans are working to pass a budget that takes desperately needed resources from the people who need them the most. In his 2018 budget, Trump proposed cutting $70 billion from Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), which would take away income from up to 1 million Americans with disabilities like me. The House budget, which lawmakers are trying to pass this fall, isn’t as specific but the effects could be the same.

Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s budget director, justified these cuts by calling SSDI “very wasteful” and suggesting that not everyone on it is “truly disabled” and people need to “go back to work.” The thing is, I’d love to. This is not a life I wanted, this is not the life I worked for. It is the life that was forced upon me. But I’m at the mercy of those who think this was a choice.

There are a lot of things about what happened to me that I won’t ever understand. I don’t understand why my fiancé got his service weapon back after he’d struggled with his mental health, or why he decided to shoot the person he said he loved. And I don’t understand why any intelligent, self-aware individual would think that my life was a choice—a choice to live a life where food is not a guarantee, where I am never quite sure if I’ll be able to visit the doctor for life-saving treatment or if I’ll have to suffer in pain forever, until the pain paralyzes me.

I live in fear every single day that the people I elected to help me, to help America, will take my life and the lives of millions of other Americans. We are failing as a nation if we continue down this path, if we take from the weakest to feed the strong.

Under the Heritage plan, the cuts would be dramatic. They would reduce funding for the Departments of Commerce, Energy, Transportation, Justice, and State, and eliminate funding entirely for the National Endowment for the Arts, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Paris Climate Change Agreement, and the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.

The cuts would negatively impact low-income people, people of color, and many other groups in terrifying ways. But there is one specific group that would be caught in a perfect storm of slashed services: survivors of sexual and domestic violence, who rely on many government services that would be on the chopping block.

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The proposed cuts would eliminate grants from the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), which funds services for survivors like transitional housing, legal assistance, law enforcement training, and support for people who have been sexually abused within the prison system. These grants have been incredibly effective—since the passage of VAWA in 1994, intimate partner violence has decreased by 64%. That success is due, at least in part, to the fact that they work in tandem with other programs, like Community Oriented Policing Services (also slated for elimination under the Heritage Foundation proposal), to make sure police have the staff, technology, and training they need to properly respond to survivors.

These cuts would also eliminate the Legal Services Corporation (LSC), which is the single largest funder of civil legal aid. The most important legal actions that survivors take often happen in civil, not criminal, court—civil court is where they file for divorce from abusive partners, seek custody of their children, and apply for protective orders.

According to Lisalyn Jacobs, Vice President of Government Relations at Legal Momentum, “civil litigation can be a battle of who can wear down who first, and the survivor is far more likely to have less resources to stay in court for a long time.” Survivors are disproportionately likely to be low income, and have almost always been subjected to financial abuse that leaves them with limited access to cash. That makes it harder for them to afford a lawyer or endure a lengthy civil legal case—hence the need for civil legal aid.

The direct elimination of federally-funded support services and legal aid would create an extremely hostile climate for survivors, and the Heritage proposal would hurt this group in other ways as well. It would reduce funding for the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, which in turn could affect funding for housing discrimination cases. Survivors are particularly vulnerable targets of housing discrimination—landlords often evict survivors or deny them housing specifically because they’ve been abused in the past. The DOJ Civil Rights Division currently extends legal protections to survivors to prevent this, and holds landlords accountable for any instances of biases or discrimination. This cut, then, would immensely weaken protections that survivors rely on in order to achieve safe housing and distance from an abuser.

The overarching conservative argument behind the Heritage proposal is that it’s the responsibility of the states, not the federal government, to protect survivors. But states do not have the finances, leverage, or incentive to provide the same level of service. For example, if victims or their abusers regularly cross state lines—like many people in the DC metro area do simply to commute to work—then state-level policing efforts to enforce protective orders would fall tragically short. Survivors’ mobility often relies on the portability of their protective orders, and only the federal government has the wherewithal to ensure interstate cooperation on these orders.

Each one of these proposed cuts individually would place survivors at increased risk, but combined they would leave survivors without police, housing, and legal protections that they desperately need. That paints a very dark picture for survivors—one that legislators should be mindful of when they draft the federal budget in April.

Editor’s Note: This post has been updated for clarity so that no readers are under the impression that the Trump Administration has released a formal budget proposal.

Domestic violence is a classic “women’s issue.” Although both women and men can be victims (and although both men and women can be violent) studies estimate that up to 97% of abusers are men with female partners; between 1994 and 2010, the Bureau of Justice says, 4 in 5 victims of intimate partner violence were women.

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It’s easy to look at these numbers and frame domestic violence purely around sexism: If patriarchy says a man is king in his home, and if women’s lives and needs are deemed less worthy than men’s, then it follows that many heterosexual relationships descend into a nightmare of control and violence as the abuser asserts his supremacy in the most literal way possible.

But if you shift your focus just a little bit to the side, to the realm of money and work, another pattern emerges — and it may prove to be far more useful in terms of crafting policy that saves victims’ lives.

In one study, 60% of domestic violence survivors reported losing their jobs as a direct consequence of the abuse. 98% said that abuse made them worse at their jobs — they couldn’t concentrate because they’d been attacked, or were anticipating an attack when they got home. Generally, abuse victims miss work more often, come in late more often, are hospitalized for injuries more often, suffer more long-term and chronic health conditions (depression, PTSD, substance abuse), and thereby accrue more medical debt. When you add in the economic abuse present in 98% of abusive relationships—anything from sabotaging job interviews to holding a monopoly over family bank accounts to simply making sure that things like cell phone contracts are in the abuser’s name—it’s no surprise that a woman who does try to leave her abuser frequently finds that her entire financial support structure disintegrates when the relationship does. It’s for precisely this reason that the majority of homeless women are domestic violence survivors.

The point of this catalogue of horrors isn’t to tell you domestic violence is bad, which (I hope to God) we can all take as a given. It’s to demonstrate that the division between “economic issues” and “women’s issues” is artificial. Money is our society’s most concrete form of power. And when we look at domestic violence through money, what we see is a power play: women are kept captive to male violence because they can’t afford to live without the men who hurt them.

That’s why it’s essential to treat domestic violence as an economic issue. It allows us to craft responses that go beyond the moral (“don’t be violent”) or even the purely gender-based (“don’t be sexist”—always good advice!) and actually alleviate specific burdens.

In Pennsylvania, for example, there are two measures on the table: One, a move to remove all cancellation fees for abuse victims who have to abruptly leave their cell-phone contracts, and give them a new phone number if requested. Two, a move to allow women who are being abused to terminate their leases without penalty. Those seem like small things, maybe even trivial—but if your abuser still has access to your phone, he may be able to see who you’re calling, or even use your GPS to find you, making stalking more possible. And you can’t “just leave” if breaking your lease will damage your credit and make it impossible for you to rent your next home and begin to rebuild your life.

These specific, practical policies are not only effective, they require policymakers to take a feminist, victim-centered approach: Talk to victims, listen for common stories, and figure out what common tactics abusers are using and precisely where debt-relief or financial aid should be applied to benefit victims best. The cell phone bill, for example, stems in part from a specific situation in which a woman’s abuser smashed her cell phone because he knew she couldn’t afford a new one, thus draining her bank account (she couldn’t stop paying the bill) and limiting her ability to reach out for help.

Annamarya Scaccia, who has reported on the Pennsylvania bills, says these smaller interventions can precede and prevent the necessity for larger ones.

“The most direct connections aren’t always the most obvious or violent,” Scaccia told me. “When an abuser wipes out your account to embarrass you at the store or when they smash your cell phone knowing you can’t afford another one, these can easily be framed by the abuser as accidents or lies, and the victim ends up looking ‘crazy’ or ‘overreacting’ (which of course has a gendered element). These smaller (so-to-speak) moments of abuse often proceed [more severe abuse].”

To be clear, cultural work is also deeply necessary. As long as women are fundamentally seen as less worthy than men, the violence they experience directly in abusive relationships will simply be repeated in other, subtler ways throughout their lives, as they move from the men who attack them to the bosses who pay them less or the male co-workers who denigrate their contributions. Needless to say, if more employers benefited from real education about how domestic violence works, and more workplaces had plans for dealing with it, fewer victims would lose their jobs.

But when we allow ourselves to move toward an understanding of domestic violence and sexism as economic issues—with all the seriousness and “real” political heft that implies—then we have both more urgency and more acuity in dealing with them. And when we include gender in our economic understanding, our policy stops being a sort of generalized “uplift” and starts providing specific and targeted aid. We can stop sifting our thinking into “real” issues and “women’s” issues, and start thinking about the ways both feminism and economic justice cohere to make real, immediate changes—which we have to do, in the end, if we want to impact sexism at all.

Disclosure: Alyssa Peterson previously served as a volunteer domestic violence advocate with the organization.

Alyssa Peterson: How does economic security matter in domestic violence cases?

DC SAFE: If the abuser and the victim are living together, she has limited options. Most people of an average income wouldn’t be able to just go and put themselves up in a hotel on zero notice. If you don’t have family or friends in the city, it’s two-hundred dollars a night for a hotel. If it’s thirty degrees out, you can’t just go sleep on a park bench—if that’s even an option for anybody. If you have children, it’s even more complicated. So, having access to housing, or money for housing, is one of the biggest barriers to getting away from the abuser.

Domestic violence is said to affect people equally across sections of society regardless of income, but [that’s] not what we experience. And that’s mostly because those with income can handle domestic violence on more of a self-help basis, whereas those without income are forced to resort to [public] services and place their violence that they’re experiencing out into the open. Somebody with means can put themselves up into a hotel [or] can hire an attorney to divorce somebody and seek assets. Those without means are going to have to come to the D.C. Superior Courthouse and seek emergency housing through the city.

Alyssa: Can you all explain a little bit about your work?

DC SAFE: One of our programs is called the Court Advocacy Program (CAP). We accompany clients to court, provide them emotional support, [and] we can also work on different things that happen in court like warrants.

We can also refer survivors to different social services, including Crime Victims Compensation, which is an organization run by the government and the court systems that assists and gives some financial support to victims of crime in D.C. We [also] have several partner agencies that provide free legal services to survivors of domestic violence. We can also refer and place individuals in our shelter program, and provide them with referrals for counseling [or] forensic nurse examinations.

We assist with running our 24-hour help line, OCAP. We do things like book emergency housing, get lock changes, safety plan, [and] talk victims through both the civil and legal remedies that are available to them, often referring them to come to the intake center if they want to talk to an advocate or file for a protective order. Transportation is also something, especially [to get] to a safe place or a courthouse.

Alyssa: We’ve seen a massive shortage in affordable housing.  Has that put a lot of pressure on your services?

DC SAFE: Absolutely. One of [our] top concerns when we meet with survivors is where is [the survivor] supposed to go?

If you have a client that can transfer to a different county in Maryland—that looks very different from a client who’s really stuck in the housing system in D.C. Some people were on [a] waiting list for a long time which could be as long as 10 years or more in many cases—[they] are afraid to leave their situation because they don’t want to lose that spot.  They don’t want to be with the abuser, but they don’t want to lose this place that they finally got to after all these years.

Then, if you look at the homeless systems, the challenges there are that we work on a crisis basis and [the homeless system] may not be working on a crisis basis. [The homeless systems] may take months for them to take a client. Or there may be sobriety rules that a client can’t adhere to. If you have a program that requires that a client have documented clean time for sixty days, and we’re a crisis shelter [with maximum stay period of less than sixty days], then there’s no way that those numbers are going to match up. Even if my client is saying: “I want to be clean, I’ve been clean since the moment I got here,” that’s still over a month left before the client can even begin to think about getting into these programs.

Alyssa: Is the shelter system even a real option for survivors?

DC SAFE: It’s not ideal. Usually, the conversation is [that] if you have kids and you need an emergency shelter, and you aren’t getting in a transitional program [(another housing option for survivors)], you’re going to be leaving the district. There just aren’t options really here currently. For people who face multiple levels of trauma, going into a shelter [means] there’s little observation of what’s happening, or sharing rooms with multiple people. That may cause [survivors] to face other levels of trauma. [Survivors] may be victimized in those shelters. And then there’s the fact that [you usually] have to take your stuff with you every single day when you leave, it’s so much easier for someone to find you when you’re out on the street every day.

And ultimately, we believe that a survivor knows her situation better than anybody else in the whole world. She or he is the only one that knows what’s best, so we have some situations where they may choose option B as opposed to going to a shelter. That’s an empowered decision and we support that. It can be very difficult when you have a limited number of options. As a society, we have created a system where people really have a lack of choices.

Alyssa: Do you see a lot of survivors in a situation where an abuser has harmed their credit or economic wellbeing?

DC SAFE: Credit is a continuing issue and it’s something that we’re trying to find more resources [to address]. Even a client who has the option to transfer [to alternative low-income housing], we may see that because of back rent, they may not be able to transfer until they pay that off. The reason that they may not have paid it off is because of financial manipulation that happened with the abuser.

Which is why there’s a real need for second chance housing in the District for people who have credit issues and need to be able to prove income.

In addition, [survivors] may have wages in cash. They have wages that may be much easier to steal and manipulate. And of course, sometimes the abuser is borrowing money. He keeps borrowing. He borrows a hundred here, two hundred there, and never pays it back. And suddenly, the victim is out two-thousand dollars that she’s just been fronting to him out of her paycheck, and she can’t pay rent.

Alyssa: Are there other things that D.C. is doing specifically that help the economic security of survivors?

DC SAFE: D.C. is starting to recognize domestic violence as an extremely serious issue, as opposed to something that should stay inside the home. Every agency is continuing to take this very seriously. [D.C. has] some of the most progressive policies surrounding domestic violence.

D.C. has sick and safe leave.  You can take sick time and you can also take safe time. So, you can take time off of work, utilizing your sick days to get safe if you are experiencing domestic violence.

[But] there remains a ton of work to be done. It’s great that that law is in place, but it isn’t going to do very much for a tipped worker or a low-income [worker] who has no idea what sick and safe leave is; or an employer who is going to look at a sick and safe leave request and just not [allow it]. So, there’s a lot of work to do in outreach and enforcement.

Survivors in D.C. also have the right to break their lease early with no penalties, which is fantastic. So, if a survivor just signed a lease in January, [it] may be actually one of the reasons that they may not report [domestic violence]. They may say I just signed this in January. They may say I’ll just stay here and keep the doors locked and then in a year when I feel like I can move, I can.

And then when you tell people—and this is something people don’t really know—and I was meeting with someone today and I said, “Let’s write up this template together.” It’s a letter from the survivor. It’s something from her that she gives to the landlord that explains what her rights are. She signs it and then she’s theoretically supposed to be able to move two weeks later. I think that’s very helpful.

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Alyssa: Are there other programs to support low-income survivors?

DC SAFE: The D.C. Department of Human Services does have a domestic violence work exemption for TANF [(Temporary Assistance to Needy Families)]. If [a TANF recipient] is a domestic violence survivor, not only can they be exempted from the work requirement for three months, with the option of re-opting after three months, but they can also be referred to counseling and case management.

Alyssa: I’ve read studies that the TANF exemption is underutilized. Is that the case in D.C.?

DC SAFE: Last year, they had a grand total of three exceptions granted because people just didn’t ask for it. People don’t know. Because of the vast bureaucracy of the D.C. Department of Human Services, it makes it almost impossible for a client to know how to navigate [the system]. [A survivor has] to get a referral letter from an advocate that would be faxed to a certain person [in the Department of Human Services], and then a follow up call would have to be made to that person, who would then have the client verify, and then work through the process of initiating a work exemption.

That’s the entire reason that SAFE exists because clients can’t navigate the system on their own. It’s bureaucratic, it’s byzantine… you need an MSW to know how to access all the services that you’re entitled to. And [survivors are] dealing with their court case, and finding housing and child care, and a new job, or whatever. They need to focus on doing that, and then we can focus on advocacy piece.

And when you’ve spent years being beaten down by somebody who’s trying to make you not advocate for yourself… Your abuser’s been telling you for however long that everything is your fault; that you’re a terrible person. So why do you feel comfortable advocating for yourself? You need somebody to tell you that you have a right to these services—somebody who can help you connect with the agencies and tell you that you deserve them.

However, the devil is in the details.

A sizeable number of Americans (and politicians) claim to support survivors while limiting their ability to access the supports needed to leave an abusive relationship. In essence, people are trying to reap the benefits of appearing “anti-violence” while supporting policy choices that in fact aid and abet abusers.

Almost half of all survivors report experiencing financial difficulties.  Those who support survivors should not force them to choose between abuse and homelessness. Nor should they ask survivors to risk losing their health insurance or custody of their children.

Yet that’s exactly what some of our current policies choices do. The status quo strengthens abusers and harms survivors by:

Weakening direct services. We often have many positive things to say about the advocates who dedicate their professional lives to assisting survivors of domestic violence. Yet at the same time our lawmakers haven’t given them the funding they need to do their jobs. Three vital programs – the Legal Assistance for Victims program, the Rural program, and the Transitional Housing program – had their funding cut in the 2014 appropriations bill. In fact, some lawmakers, such as Congressman Paul Ryan, have supported further cuts to funding for domestic violence service providers. These funding pressures occur at a time when the number of survivors coming forward will likely increase, in part due to referrals from the invaluable domestic violence screening and counseling benefits included in the Affordable Care Act.

As demand for services rises, let’s remember that on one day last year, almost 10,000 requests for services were denied due to a lack of sufficient resources for service providers.  Further, more than 1,500 service provider staff positions were eliminated last year. The fact is when survivors cannot receive services, sixty percent return to their abusers.

Undermining access to attorneys and court advocates. For many survivors, access to civil legal services is essential to ending abuse. Through the court system, survivors can receive civil protection orders (also known as restraining orders), obtain a U-visa, or divorce an abusive partner.  Attorneys can also help survivors gain custody of their children, eliminating a common threat abusers use to force survivors to stay. But despite the demonstrated benefits of legal services, inadequate funding last year resulted in only 12% of domestic violence programs assisting survivors with legal representation, and slightly more than half were able to have an advocate accompany a survivor to court.

Civil legal aid providers—who also handle many domestic violence cases—remain badly under-resourced. In the past few years, more than 1,200 individuals who worked for legal services providers have lost their jobs due to funding cuts as the number of individuals who qualify for legal aid has risen.

This gap in services is alarming. The immense power differential between an abuser and a survivor, along with the effects of trauma, make it exceedingly difficult for survivors to file petitions without support.  Survivors are placed at even more of a disadvantage when their abusers have access to legal resources.

Refusing to pass paid safe days legislation. Many survivors do not even make it to the courtroom because they cannot take off work. Only California, Connecticut, the District of the Columbia, and four cities provide survivors with paid “safe” leave. In the vast majority of states, survivors who work in low-wage jobs with little job security cannot take off multiple days of work to attend courtroom proceedings. They are forced to choose between providing for themselves and their families and their safety; some may stay with an abuser as a result. For a country that claims nearly unanimous support for survivors of domestic violence seeking help, we make it very hard for them to actually access it.

Failing to invest in affordable housing. Instead of choosing to preserve existing affordable units and build new ones, we have lost almost 13% of our nation’s supply of low-cost housing since 2001. While direct service providers strive to provide domestic violence survivors with emergency shelter, it is impossible for them to meet the demand for long-term housing. When we fail to invest in the affordable, permanent housing, survivors are forced to choose between terrible options. They may ask, “When my stay in emergency housing ends, do I return to my abuser, or do I become homeless?” or “Do I stay in this lease with my abuser or do I move out, knowing I have nowhere to go?”

Support for survivors cannot be separated from support for a robust social safety net, affordable medical care and housing, paid safe days, and well-funded domestic violence service providers and legal aid providers. It’s time to evaluate our policy choices. It’s time for all of us to make a real commitment to ending domestic violence—not just in word, but in deed.