Section of Individual Rights &
Responsibilities
The Impact of Welfare Reform on Women |
| Charlotte Snow is a writer in
Chicago. |
Every Thursday afternoon, Brenda Richardson sits down in a classroom at Malcolm X Elementary School in Southeast Washington with as many as 25 welfare recipients. They are all women. They are all black. They are all single mothers. The youngest is 18, the oldest 42. And they call their weekly support group "Parents Like Us." Richardson, a 40-year-old social worker who runs a consulting firm specializing in women's and environmental justice issues, says the new federal welfare law has left the women confused and frustrated. "Their perception of what the city is doing is that they are a herd of cattle and the city has to get them through this gate so it can keep its money," she says. "I view this as going through women's suffrage all over again. This is a population of disempowered women who don't have the wherewithal to get themselves out of this cycle of poverty." She predicts a third of her group's members will make it. These are the women, she says, who are motivated and just need a push in the right direction. The second third, she says, are scared and lacking the self-confidence to move forward. She calls the bottom third the "untouchables"—those who are clinically depressed and who are substance abusers. "The women feel no sense of empowerment or enthusiasm," she says. "Welfare reform suggests nothing but bad things to women in poverty." Believing the new law to be devoid of an appreciation for what the changes mean for welfare recipients on a personal level, Richardson formed the group a year ago to provide a nonthreatening source of emotional support. Although she says the group's initial flyers never described the meetings as for women only, "women were the ones who came." It's not surprising that women fill the seats at Malcolm X. Nationally, of the 3.7 million families on welfare, 93 percent are headed by single women, while only 7 percent have both a female and male parent in the home. Of the 10 million individuals supported by welfare, two-thirds are children and the vast majority of the rest—some 90 percent—are women. Although no national, conclusive studies have yet been completed on the impact of the new law on these women, initial findings and observations indicate that the federal and state governments have a lot of ironing out to do. The new law has opened a Pandora's box of social ills, exposing the interconnections among the complex, deep-seated issues of society's attitudes toward women, child care, domestic violence, child support, and poverty. While the numbers show more welfare recipients moving off the public dole, family and child advocates in the trenches say the bigger picture is being overlooked—and they're taking their concerns to legislators and the courts.
Historically, the federal welfare laws have reflected the greater society's attitudes toward women, says Karin Martinson, a senior policy analyst with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington-based advocacy group for low-income families. When social mores favored women who stayed at home, the federal welfare program did too, she says. Congress established the federal welfare system in 1935 with the creation of the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, which they intended to support widows and their children, Martinson explains. Through the 1940s and 1950s, the primary objective of the program remained that of helping mothers without a father in the household stay home with their children. But as more women in the general population entered the work force, the expectation that women on public assistance should also work grew, says Martinson. In 1968, most recipients, other than those with children under six years old, were required to participate in specified welfare-to-work programs. Then with the passage of the Family Support Act of 1988, the Congress created a more comprehensive jobs program and changed the exemption to only women with children under three years old. "As society saw more and more women working, a fairness issue arose," says Martinson. "Groups began to call for women in the welfare program to get jobs too." Enacted in August 1996, the new federal welfare reform law, called the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, completely overhauls the former system in an effort to reduce the amount of public funds being spent on AFDC, which paid benefits of more than $20 billion in combined state and federal funds to about 4.6 million families with 8.6 million children in fiscal year 1996. The new law replaces AFDC and its individual entitlement to federally supported cash assistance with block grants to the states under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, conferring much authority on the states for how to pay for and administer welfare benefits. The few parameters set by the new law aim to encourage states to develop programs that will decrease their welfare caseloads or risk losing federal dollars. The new law requires at least 25 percent of a state's adult welfare caseload to be working or participating in work-related activities in fiscal year 1997, increasing to 50 percent by fiscal year 2002. For the first time, the new law allows states to terminate benefits to recipients who fail to comply with program rules. Specifically, states are permitted under federal law to terminate benefits if a recipient is not working a minimum of 20 hours a week after two years of receiving benefits. States may also terminate benefits to recipients who do not establish the paternity of their children and enforce child-support orders and who use up a five-year lifetime time limit on benefits.
Supporters of the changes point to statistics that show significant drops in enrollment in the federal welfare program since the passage of the new law. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 10.3 million individuals and 3.7 million families were enrolled in the federal welfare program as of July 1997, compared with 13.9 million individuals and 4.9 million families in January 1995. Compared with January 1993's enrollment, the department says, there are now 3.9 million fewer individuals and 1.2 million fewer families in the program. Backers of the new law hail the numbers as proof that the incentives are moving people from welfare to work. But advocates for women and children argue that the numbers reflect many recipients who have left the system not for jobs but because they could not meet the work requirements and, as a result, chose to look for support elsewhere or had their benefits terminated. The critics blame lawmakers for not going far enough to resolve the law's Catch-22s: How can a population of women who represent a disproportionate share of the nation's victims of domestic violence establish paternity and enforce a support order? How can women go to work when they can't find or afford adequate child care or transportation? How can a group of primarily uneducated women stay in school if they have to go to work? The new law's impact on victims of domestic violence particularly concerns the Washington-based National Organization for Women, says Karen Johnson, the group's vice president of membership. The group wants Congress to pass legislation exempting these women from the two-year work requirement. "Women talk about how when they try to get a job their jealous partner beats up on them," she says. "We have to have some aid to help them recover."
A report prepared by the Project for Research on Welfare, Work, and Domestic Violence, a collaborative effort of the Taylor Institute in Chicago and the University of Michigan Research Development Center on Poverty, Risk, and Mental Health, coordinates national research on the relationship of domestic violence to poverty and welfare use. The report, titled "Trapped in Poverty/Trapped by Abuse: New Evidence Documenting the Relationship Between Domestic Violence and Welfare," found in its survey of recent studies that 30 percent of abused women reported ongoing arguments over child support, 23 percent over visitation, 14.7 percent over child custody, 36 percent over police visits to their homes, and 15 to 49 percent over education, training, and work. The report further found that women on welfare who have been abused suffer from depression, other mental health problems, post-traumatic stress disorder, drug and alcohol abuse, and physical health problems at higher rates than their nonabused counterparts and the general female population. According to one study by the University of Massachusetts-Boston cited in the report, 19.5 percent of a random sample of 734 women in the Massachusetts welfare caseload between January and June 1996 reported current physical violence at the hands of an intimate partner, with 64 percent experiencing violence from an intimate partner at some point in their adult life. Abused women in the sample, the first to reflect a state's entire AFDC caseload, were 10 times more likely than their never abused counterparts to have a current partner who would not like them to go to school or work. Another study by the Passaic County Board of Social Services surveyed a sample of 846 women on AFDC in Passaic County in northern New Jersey from December 1995 to January 1997 and found that 14.6 percent reported current physical abuse by a partner, 25 percent reported verbal or emotional abuse, and 57.3 percent reported physical abuse at some time during their adult lives. In addition, 12.9 percent of the entire sample and 39.7 percent of those currently experiencing physical abuse reported that their partner actively prevents their participation in education and training.
In September 1997, the New York-based NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund joined with the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey and the Newark, NJ, law firm of Crummy, Del Deo, Dolan, Griffinger & Vecchione to file a lawsuit on behalf of some 20,000 poor mothers and their children in New Jersey State Court. The lawsuit, Sojourner A. v. The New Jersey Department of Human Services, challenges the Child Exclusion provision of New Jersey's welfare law, which denies all cash benefits to children born into families already receiving welfare assistance. The complaint charges that the provision violates children's rights and a woman's constitutional right to privacy by interfering with her decision as to when and under what circumstances to have a child. "Any attempt to use subsistence benefits to coerce women's reproductive decisions is fundamentally contrary to a woman's right to choose, which includes the choice to carry a pregnancy to term," argues Sherry Leiwant, a staff attorney for NOW. The Washington-based Children's Defense Fund supports similar changes in the law. Increased federal support for child care tops their lobbying list, says Deborah Weinstein, the director of the CDF's family income division. Although the new law entitles states to receive funds for child-care assistance equal to the amount they received in 1994, the CDF backs a proposal in President Clinton's 1998 budget that calls for an increase in these funds. According to a May 1997 report on the impact of welfare reform on child care, prepared by the U.S. General Accounting Office, the supply of child care in many areas will likely be inadequate to meet the needs of welfare mothers. The report says, for example, that the supply of child care in Chicago will meet just 14 percent of the demand by the end of fiscal year 1997. Without any increase, the report continues, the supply will meet only 12 percent of the estimated demand—even less in the poorest areas of the city—by 2002. "The new welfare law puts mothers in a position, depending on the state, where they may be forced to leave children in an unsafe situation or lose all support," says Weinstein. Women's groups are also alarmed at the number of welfare recipients who appear to be leaving school to meet the work requirements. The Washington Post reported in December 1997 that the number of students on welfare at Milwaukee Area Technical College has fallen from 1,600 to 250. Similarly, the Post said Baltimore City Community College lost one-third of its 900 welfare students last year and the City University of New York saw a drop in students on welfare from 27,000 to 14,000. Weinstein says the CDF is about six months along in a three-year project to monitor the impact of welfare reform and plans to address many of these issues in its initial findings, expected to be released this summer.
The lack of hard evidence makes it difficult to back up the assertions of either defenders or detractors of the new law. Most states have just begun to implement reform and few have a handle yet on why people leave the system and what happens afterward-whether they "churn" back into the welfare system at a later date, stick with steady employment, or find other means of support. However, another May 1997 report by the GAO hints at what might be occurring in situations where benefits have been terminated. The GAO, at the request of Sen. Daniel P. Moynihan (D-N.Y.), the ranking minority member of the Senate Finance Committee, reviewed benefits termination from January 1987 to the passage of the new law in 46 states that had received approval to experiment with their AFDC and welfare-to-work programs. The GAO found that of the 18,000 families whose benefits were terminated nationwide through December 1996, more than 90 percent failed to comply with program requirements. Most of the terminations—some 13,000—took place in Iowa, Massachusetts, and Wisconsin, which the GAO studied in-depth. Although these states had relatively high numbers of terminations, they terminated on average about 1 percent or less of their monthly caseloads. Most of the families who lost benefits in these states reflected the national profile of welfare families: They had been receiving assistance for less than three years and comprised a female head of household aged 20 to 39, with one or two children. Explanations for their noncompliance included having unreported employment, extended family support, or other sources of income; not feeling well; having to care for a sick household member; wanting to stay home with their children; wanting to follow their own career path, including higher education; and an unwillingness to do community service or work for low wages. States also acknowledged making administrative mistakes in tracking recipients' work participation. In Wisconsin's Milwaukee County, for example, 44 percent of benefit termination notices through August 1996 were subsequently reversed because county officials determined that program requirements had been met or the sanctions had been based on inaccurate data. The GAO predicted that other states will have a relatively higher proportion of terminations due to noncompliance with enrollment and other nonwork requirements when first converting their programs and that over time terminations due to noncompliance with work requirements and time limits will increase. It also predicted that a significant percentage of families whose benefits are terminated for failure to comply will return to welfare. Most alarming to proponents of a strong government safety net, the GAO said states will likely see significant reductions in the number of families receiving Food Stamps and Medicaid benefits after they lose their TANF benefits because they will tend not to ensure that these other benefits continue. "This was not supposed to happen," says Weinstein of CDF. "This was supposed to be the safety net. People were accustomed to getting their assistance as a package and they don't understand that it's now provided separately. We have to look at just how threaded our safety net is."
Wisconsin was one of the first states to pass welfare reform legislation. The state started implementation of its new system in September 1997 and by the end of March all benefits recipients will have made the transition out of AFDC into the Wisconsin Works program. Caseloads have already dropped by more than half since 1993. As of July 1997, there were 100,387 TANF recipients in Wisconsin compared with 241,098 in January 1993. "We really don't know why because no one has gone out and said what's happening," says Anne Arensen, the director of the Wisconsin Council on Children and Families. "We don't know if people are just making it in the underground economy or have moved or gotten jobs." Arensen blames wrongful benefits terminations on a decentralized system in which a combination of for-profit and nonprofit agencies and for-profit/nonprofit partnerships oversee individual financial planners in charge of administering the program across different counties. "There's a great deal of potential for people being treated unfairly," she says. "There's a great deal of power and discretion with the financial planners. In the name of flexibility, the state created a program that's not as specific as AFDC." Arensen says she fears most for the women who have mental health, substance abuse, and physical problems. "The chaos of the lives of women who are very poor is not well understood," she says. "Some of the women in the program can't work full-time until they get their lives together. It's like a backlash against the women's movement and they're saying, `you said you wanted to work, so we'll make sure you work.'" In New York, officials and recipients are in the middle of their transition to a new system. The welfare caseload has dropped 15 percent to 1 million in July 1997 from 1.2 million in January 1993. The Legal Aid Society, a not-for-profit law firm in New York, has moved about six attorneys from other areas to welfare issues over the last two years in preparation for benefits termination suits and other related grievances. Adriene Holder, a staff attorney for the society, says the society's welfare-related cases include those dealing with the enforcement of a requirement that calls for all benefits recipients to receive an individual assessment and a personalized employability plan; the computation of benefits; the placement of disabled recipients in properly accommodated workplace settings; and the provision of child care. Holder says part of the society's strategy is to represent advocacy groups, like the Welfare Reform Network, a coalition of community organizers and social workers. By working with such groups, she says, "we can more effectively find plaintiffs and bring attention to the issues." Washington, D.C., is an example of an area that is in the early phases of transitioning to a new program. By contrast to Wisconsin and New York, its welfare caseload has fallen by only 2 percent to 64,326 in July 1997 from 65,860 in January 1993. Randal Jeffrey, the Georgetown Women's Law and Public Policy fellow at the Legal Aid Society in Washington, says local officials are just beginning to sanction recipients who have failed to participate in the city's work program. Based on other states' experiences and the confusion among recipients as to what the rules are, Jeffrey says, the society expects to see a number of wrongful benefits terminations. The society is currently developing several brochures that explain to recipients their right to appeal a benefits termination. "States are all over the map in terms of how far along they are in implementing the federal statute and in what kinds of programs they are implementing," Jeffrey says. "There is a lot of uncertainty among recipients about what will be required."
With its increased focus on long-term employment without equal attention to child care and other practical issues, the new law seems to reflect the nation's present-day ambivalence toward its women. The conservative groups that led the charge for tough work requirements are the same ones that tend to culturally favor women who stay at home with their children. It's vice versa for liberal groups that have championed women's entrance into the work world only to lament the new law's stricter requirements. And the decision of upper-class, successful women to leave their high-powered jobs to spend more time with their children further confuses the issue, which is, essentially, a question of what America expects from its women, particularly its poor women. As implementation of the new law continues, it remains unclear if it will be left to other women, like Richardson, to ensure that poor women are counted not just as statistics in a budget plan but as people, like us. |