Abuse Survivors Face Systemic Struggles as Resources for Help Dwindle

Tanya McLeod's marriage was hurting, but her husband thought he could make it up to her when he brought her a cute dog as a "peace offering." The family stayed together and the dog grew up alongside her children -- until the day her husband decided to destroy the animal with his bare hands.

At that point, McLeod says, "I knew that he was capable of killing me."

McLeod recalls in an interview how the storm of violence began building soon after they were married. Her life was comfortable on the surface: a decent apartment, a solid job with a media company that supported the household as he bounced from job to job. But her husband's grip kept tightening -- from isolating her in their home to controlling her bank account -- to slapping, kicking, choking, pushing his knees into her pregnant belly.

But when McLeod finally decided to leave, she says, she plunged into another barrage of trauma that would last for over two years: unresponsive counselors who turned her away when she sought emergency shelter; working through the police and court systems to prosecute her abuser; dealing with child-welfare agents investigating whether her three young sons were safe with her; and the loss of her job amid the overwhelming stress.

"My whole world was turned upside down," she says. "It was like I was being punished for his actions." She has since joined the New York-based activist group Voices of Women Organizing Project, advocating for policy changes in a social-service system that often leaves survivors to fend for themselves.

More than a decade after Congress passed the landmark Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), abuse survivors face devastating silence in Washington. While the needs for legal protection, shelter and other social supports swell in communities across the country, public resources for responding to the crisis lag far behind.

Last year, Congress slashed millions of dollars from key programs dealing with domestic violence, including civil legal assistance and preventative community-education programs. The White House is now pushing even deeper cuts in its budget proposal for fiscal year 2009.

As grants trickle down to organizations in the coming months, service providers are bracing for deep funding shortfalls. Allison Randall, policy director for the National Network to End Domestic Violence (NNEDV), a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy organization, says, "We're going to look at a serious crisis, for everything from basic services -- making sure that, at two in the morning if you're in danger, you have a place to go -- to the services that are really getting out there trying to take the next steps to end domestic and sexual violence."

Growing Gaps

Despite fiscal tightening, VAWA's passage in the mid-1990s seems to have marked a turning point. According to federal data, the rate of non-fatal intimate-partner violence against women fell by about 60 percent from 1993 to 2005, with parallel declines in related homicides. Yet Washington has consistently under-funded the law's programs, and also restrained related funding streams under the Victims of Crime Act Fund and the Family Violence Prevention and Services Act. VAWA's funding pool remains hundreds of millions of dollars short of what Congress authorized when it renewed the law in 2005.

Though some new domestic-violence initiatives, such as services for youth, got funding boosts last year, core programs for law enforcement and legal assistance lost several million dollars. Congress also cut $35 million from the spending allowance for the Victims of Crime Act fund -- money drawn from prosecution-related fees and fines to support the work of thousands of victim-service agencies nationwide. The White House now wants to further shrink VAWA's main funding pool, tied to the Justice Department appropriations, from roughly $400 million in fiscal 2008 to $280 million.