Hard Times for Women Living on the Edge: Economic Anxieties Send Domestic-Abuse Rates Soaring

By Nick Turse, Tomdispatch.com. Posted May 11, 2009.

'I'm Not No Prima Donna'

The story Tyrie tells is emblematic of the special problems facing domestic-violence survivors in tough financial times. With an already-abusive partner, she emigrated to New York City from Trinidad years ago. After he pulled a gun on her, he was arrested, sent to prison, and then deported. Tyrie stayed on in New York, working and raising her three children.

For the last seven years, she has been married to an American citizen, and was again a victim of domestic violence. "It was an abuse situation," she tells me in her lilting, island-inflected voice. Although she fled to a shelter for victims of domestic violence several times, she says, "I wasn't too comfy there." And so she always returned home.

Nor could she make much use of the group-counseling sessions the shelter offered on a weekday evening. After all, in addition to raising her children, Tyrie held down a child care job from 9 a.m.  to 1 p.m., and then worked as a security guard from 4 p.m. until midnight.

Her husband worked irregularly. "The alcohol controlled him more than he controlled the alcohol" is how she puts it. Last year, the violence at home reached intolerable levels.

After he raped her, Tyrie finally took action and he, too, was sent to prison. While that made domestic abuse a thing of the past, the economic abuse by systemic forces outside the home had barely begun. Tyrie's situation actually worsened as the economy nosedived.

Last spring, with her work permit about to expire, she filed forms to renew it. Then the waiting started. Without a rapid renewal, she lost her security-guard job and eventually retained a personal lawyer to look into the delay. The lawyer, she says, misfiled her paperwork, and without her American husband at her side, Tyrie was left vulnerable. "Then I got this letter saying I'm facing deportation."

With deportation hearings looming and left only with her part-time child care job for minimal support, the financial pressure began to mount.

"It became really hard, paying $1,350 rent, taking care of three kids, [subway] rides, food and everything else," she says. "I spend only $25 every week in the grocery. That's all I can afford. Twenty-five dollars! You tell me what I can ... pick up for $25 and make that work for the week."

Friends offer assistance, but they, too, are facing financial hardship. One, whose job in home construction dried up two years ago, travels from food pantry to food pantry picking up groceries, including a bag for Tyrie's family.

Tyrie then takes the chicken, potatoes and onions he brings back and combines it with the peas and rice she buys on sale to cook up dishes that provide the family three meals a day. "I make it go a long way," she says, with more than a hint of weariness in her voice.

It has to go even further these days. In October, her sister-in-law lost her job on Wall Street. Given the dismal employment situation in New York City, she hasn't been able to find work since. So Tyrie took her and her two children in. Together, the seven of them live in a small apartment, barely making ends meet.

Still, at a friend's urging Tyrie made time to canvass for presidential candidate Barack Obama in Pennsylvania during the waning days of the campaign in order to "make a difference." And at night, for the last year, she has been enrolled in a home-study program in the hopes of one day becoming a social worker.

"Nothing is gonna hold me back," she insists in a way that leaves a listener feeling she's trying to convince herself. As we talk, she vacillates between hope and despair, wondering aloud how she will push on, but resigned to the fact that she has little choice other than to find a way.

In January, Tyrie had to go to her landlord and level with him about her finances. For the moment, he's working with her. "At least I try to give him a thousand dollars every month. But the $300 is backing up," she says of the unpaid remainder of her rent.

Now, a budget cut threatens pre-kindergarten programs funded by New York's Administration for Children's Services, imperiling her remaining part-time job. So on days off, she has gone to Albany to lobby politicians, but it hasn't left her hopeful. "Come September, I might not have a job," she tells me.

More immediately, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is facing its own fiscal crisis and was then threatening to increase subway fares in the city by 25 percent, to $2.50 a ride. That, too, was on her mind. After all, taking mass transit at whatever price is an everyday necessity for Tyrie and her children, and that price leap seemed unaffordable to her.

See more stories tagged with: class, gender, violence, hunger, abuse, poverty, domestic violence, poor women

Nick Turse is the associate editor and research director of Tom Dispatch. His first book, The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, an exploration of the new military-corporate complex in America, was recently published by Metropolitan Books. Visit his Web site at nickturse.com.

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