9.5 Family Access to Safety and Stability
Alexandra Olsen
Why do some families have more access to what they need to be safe and stable? And what can be done to address these resource gaps between families? This final section of the chapter explores why some families don’t have access to what they need.
Systemic perspectives on inequality highlight how classism, racism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, and other forms of discrimination are built into our social structure. These systemic inequalities make it so that marginalized groups don’t have equal access to safety and stability. These macro-factors directly impact micro-level factors, such as the ability to have quality family relationships.
There are also significant barriers to addressing violence and abuse at the micro-level that are integral to ensuring that families are safe and stable. Finally, we’ll look at a few examples of how policies, organizations, and individuals have tried to address these issues.
Limiting Factors for Safety and Stability
In the previous section, we looked at how interconnected factors promote safety. When families lack an essential resource—food, shelter, or health care—they experience increased vulnerability. But why do some families have a deeper sense of safety and stability than others? Much of the reason that some families are more able to access safety and stability than others directly relates to systemic inequalities in society, including classism, racism, sexism, heterosexism, and ableism.
Quality family relationships and access to resources are intertwined. For example, if a parent has to work 60 to 70 hours a week to support their family, they have less time for self and family, and may have strained relationships with their partner and children.
Systemic inequalities also directly impact the quality of family relationships. For instance, more Black children grow up without a father in the home today than during slavery, primarily due to mass incarceration and the racially motivated War on Drugs (Alexander, 2010). Another example can be seen in the 2014 murder of Eric Garner, which left five children fatherless. A combination of racist institutional policies allowing chokeholds and racial biases led to Garner’s children losing their father to police violence. These are examples of macro-level policies and systemic inequality impacting families on the most intimate, personal levels.
At the micro-level, families’ lack of safety and stability also stems from IPV and child abuse. Despite increased services to address IPV, many places in the country don’t have access to services to help victims leave an abusive relationship. This is particularly an issue in rural areas. This lack of resources connects back to the macro-level factors we discussed above, where some groups have significantly greater access to resources than other communities.
Additionally, funding for social services is generally tenuous. Many organizations that address IPV do not have enough resources to meet service demands. Numerous factors contribute to these shortages, including cuts in grant funding, unstable fundraising, or overworked staff.
Even when victims have access to services, it can be tough to leave an abusive relationship because of the power and control an abuser has over their victim. Social structures may reinforce this power dynamic. For example, many religious doctrines contain patriarchal values that dictate a husband’s power or control over a wife. While it can be hard for the victim to psychologically and emotionally break away from their abuser, they also face physical risk when leaving a relationship where there is IPV. Remember, the risk of homicide by an abusive partner is highest when someone is leaving the relationship.
Just as there are barriers to addressing IPV, there are also barriers to addressing child abuse. More child abuse occurs than is reported to official agencies responsible for addressing this issue. Scholars commonly refer to this gap as the “dark figure” of child abuse. Even if child protective services identify children experiencing abuse, these experiences can also be traumatic and expose them to more trauma. This is especially true if they’re placed into foster care.
Addressing Barriers to Safety and Stability
So, how can we address barriers to promoting and creating safety and stability? Families need robust social support. Families directly benefit and become safer when we increase access to financial resources, food, shelter, and other basic needs. These improvements can also not be completely effective unless we work to address the legacies and current manifestations of racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, ableism, and other forms of oppression within our society and institutions. Otherwise, we will only see a reimagining of old systems of oppression in new forms.
For example, we can see how Black families have been continually impacted by institutional racism across U.S. history despite reforms: slavery, sharecropping, Jim Crow laws, redlining, and mass incarceration. If we truly want all groups to experience safety, we need to dismantle the systems that lead to some groups having significantly better outcomes and experiences with institutions.
Education, as pictured in figure 9.7, is integral to preventing, identifying, and effectively addressing issues such as violence and abuse. Efforts to educate childcare providers, teachers, and medical providers about the signs of child abuse can help the people who are most likely to interact with children notice the signs of abuse and intervene.
At the same time, broader education about IPV can help people identify early warning signs of abuse. Education can also help people know how to appropriately respond if they or one of their loved ones is in an abusive relationship. Education is also crucial for helping families create healthy relationships within and outside of their families. This is especially vital for groups who have experienced historical traumas that may be passed down across generations.
In Focus: Why Domestic Violence Victims Stay
Watch the TED Talk “Why Domestic Violence Victims Don’t Leave” by Leslie Morgan Steiner to learn more about barriers to exiting abusive relationships (figure 9.8).
While watching, consider the following questions: How can education about IPV help prevent it? What obstacles exist when a victim wants to leave an abusive relationship? What did you learn from listening to Leslie Morgan Steiner’s experience with abuse?
Accountability and Law Enforcement
One of the big critiques of our response to IPV and sexual violence is the lack of accountability and consequences for those who commit these acts. The mechanisms within the criminal justice system to hold perpetrators accountable are relatively weak and incomplete.
Police may lack the training to respond appropriately to IPV and sexual assault calls. Even when police have training on these issues, they often fail to properly handle calls that are suspected of IPV or sexual assault. The 2021 Gaby Petito and Brian Laundrie case was a well-known example of this. In this case, officers came under fire for not adhering to department protocols for domestic violence situations. At the same time, many police do not see addressing social issues as a central part of their job. They see themselves as enforcers of the law rather than a professional who intervenes in the relationships of others.
In addition, while the courts may grant you a restraining order against someone who has abused or assaulted you, they cannot effectively enforce these orders. Many abuse survivors tell stories of continuing to be harassed or stalked by their abuser even after they got this protection order. In other cases, the restraining orders are only temporary because there is not enough evidence of misconduct for permanent restraining orders. If the situation escalates to the point of pressing criminal charges against the perpetrator, there is no guarantee that prosecutors will pursue the case or hold the perpetrator accountable in a way that a survivor finds meaningful.
If a case gets in front of a judge, the trial process is not easy. Many survivors of sexual violence feel uncomfortable testifying and facing their attacker. Survivors of IPV may not want to be involved or have conflicting feelings about being involved in the court process, especially if they still love or want to be with their abusive partner. Even if convicted, punishment is punitive and frequently not focused on repairing damage or helping survivors heal. This is not to say that all survivors are unhappy with how domestic abuse or sexual assault trials resolve. It is the case, though, that many survivors feel that the criminal justice system does not sufficiently repair harm or bring justice to their experiences.
Comprehension Self Check
Licenses and Attributions for Family Access to Safety and Stability
Open Content, Original
“Family Access to Safety and Stability” by Alexandra Olsen. License: CC BY 4.0.
All Rights Reserved
Figure 9.7. “ACS-FAP Helps Fort Campbell Prevent Child Abuse” by Defense Visual Information Distribution Service. Public domain.
Figure 9.8. “Why Domestic Violence Victims Don’t Leave” by TED. License: Standard YouTube License.
References
Alexander, M. (2010). The New Jim Crow. The New Press.
the unequal treatment of an individual or group on the basis of their statuses (e.g., age, beliefs, ethnicity, sex).
the organization of institutions within society; this affects the ways individuals and families interact together.
the state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.
being confined within a prison or jail.
the intentional emotional, negligent, physical, or sexual mistreatment of a child by an adult.
the discriminatory practice of refusing loans to creditworthy applicants in neighborhoods that banks deem undesirable or racially occupied.
usually used to refer to non-parental care of a young child, often in a paid provider’s home or in a childcare center.
making degrading comments, touching in unpleasant means of harm, or addressing a partner in a degrading way during sexual intercourse, which includes marital rape.
concerned with equity, equality, fairness and sometimes punishment.