Battering and the Poverty Trap

Structured interviews with women on welfare (n = 40) reveal the costs of taking a beating. Thirty-five percent of respondents reported having been physically abused by their current or most recent intimate partner. Compared with their peers, physically abused women earned less, worked fewer weeks, and more frequently worked part-time involuntarily. Women whose partners sabotaged their work effort experienced more hardships associated with poverty than did other respondents. The causal connections between the dual traps of poverty and abuse are complex. Irrespective of the direction of causality, battering and poverty diminish the lives of a significant proportion of women on welfare.