Strategies for Addressing the Needs of Domestic Violence Victims within the TANF

Martha R. Burt, Janine M. Zweig, Kathryn A. Schlichter

The nonpartisan Urban Institute publishes studies, reports, and books on timely topics worthy of public consideration. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Urban Institute, its trustees, or its funders, or to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

This report was prepared for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, under contract number HHS-100-95-0021, Delivery Orders 19 and 30. The authors thank our ASPE project officer, Jerry Silverman, other federal advisors, Jody Raphael of the Center for Impact Research, Ann Menard, consultant to DHHS on domestic violence issues, and the many representatives of state and local TANF and domestic violence programs for their help in making this report possible.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Introduction (Chapter 1)

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (P.L. 104-193; PRWORA) changed the fundamental structure of welfare. It created the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, eliminating the entitlement nature of cash assistance. It imposed lifetime limits on receipt of assistance, and demanded that far more recipients engage in much greater levels of work activity. The Act imposed performance standards on states, and specified potential sanctions for failing to meet the standards.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) has responsibility to provide guidance and technical assistance to states about how they might address the issues surrounding domestic violence in the caseloads of the TANF and child support enforcement programs. In September 1997 its Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation funded this project to increase the Department's ability to provide timely and relevant information to states. The project was also designed to give DHHS feedback on how welfare reform is progressing in relation to this highly focused issue, contributing to the Secretary's priority on tracking domestic violence and welfare-to-work interactions. The Urban Institute and the Center for Impact Research (formerly Taylor Institute) jointly conducted the activities for this project.

In the TANF program, the permissible level of exemptions from work requirements is stringent enough to raise fears that more women would have legitimate reasons for non-participation than could be exempted. One such legitimate reason would be a well-founded risk of battering if the women participated in work activities. As PRWORA was being debated, concerns were raised that its participation requirements might result in states' pressuring women to go to work, even if such behavior could put them in danger of abuse from partners who, for whatever reason, did not support these moves toward self-sufficiency on the women's part. Therefore the Family Violence Amendment (42 USC 602(a)(7)) allows states to adopt a Family Violence Option (FVO) to screen for domestic violence, refer or provide services, and exempt those clients who need it from program requirements. Other provisions allow states to waive requirements to establish paternity and identify absent parents for purposes of child support collection if doing so would expose the custodial parent and/or children to potential abuse.

This Project

This project used several techniques to summarize existing information about domestic violence issues within TANF and child support enforcement caseloads, learn what states were doing about the FVO, and examine the day-to-day operations of TANF and child support programs surrounding the issue of domestic violence. The project first developed an annotated bibliography of critical writings to serve as a primer for people interested in learning about domestic violence issues in the welfare setting. The Center for Impact Research conducted all-state surveys in early 1998 and early 1999 and wrote reports summarizing state TANF and child support agency responses to and actions regarding the FVO. The Urban Institute and Center for Impact Research held a conference in November 1998 to bring together states, counties, and experts to describe initial efforts to identify, assess, and address domestic violence issues in their TANF and child support caseloads. Finally, Urban Institute staff conducted site visits to seven counties in five states to learn how the FVO was being used in actual practice.

Both all-state surveys and site visits sought answers to the following questions: Did states and localities adopt the Family Violence Option? What are they doing about domestic violence in TANF caseloads? How, for instance, are they identifying clients for whom this is an issue? What are they using as screening tools? How are they getting clients to disclose their situation, especially when many clients have good reasons to keep their abuse secret? What are they doing with and for clients who are identified as at risk—do they simply exempt them from participation requirements, or do they offer some assistance that helps the clients move toward both freedom from violence and self-sufficiency? If the latter, what types of resources are being devoted to the task? Are states and localities, in following the route of exemption, further isolating the client rather than offering assistance that could be available to move toward more work involvement? Are TANF and child support enforcement offices pursuing the same strategies or different ones? Are they coordinating or not? Has the domestic violence advocacy and service community been involved in discussions with state or county officials responsible for these policies? With what result? If not, why not? What differences, if any, can be discerned in policies developed with and without advocate involvement, and what are the implications of the differences? What special mechanisms are being used to take children's well-being into account as decisions are made about how to work with their mothers? And finally, how does the incentive structure for frontline workers affect what actually happens in TANF offices?

The Sites (Chapters 2 through 7)

This report focuses on findings from site visits (previous reports have summarized the all-state surveys — Raphael and Haennicke, 1998, 1999). We visited seven counties in five states. Sites were chosen to represent a variety of approaches to identifying, assessing, and addressing domestic violence issues within TANF and child support caseloads. Some sites visited have incorporated domestic violence as one issue in a broader approach to addressing barriers to work in TANF environments that have undergone major efforts to change the culture of the welfare office. Other sites were chosen because their approach to TANF is more typical of the country as a whole, and we wanted to see how the FVO was being implemented in these locations. The sites are presented in the order visited.

Anne Arundel County (Annapolis), Maryland

Maryland is a state-administered state in the mid-Atlantic region. Counties have flexibility to develop their own approach to TANF and domestic violence if they want to do so, within broad state guidelines. Anne Arundel County, a mostly suburban county containing the state capital of Annapolis, undertook its own "culture change" agenda as early as 1995. The goal was to alter the nature of the agency from eligibility determination and an attitude of "guarding the purse strings" to one of support and encouragement to assist applicants and customers in obtaining good jobs and achieving self-sufficiency. Staff were heavily involved in defining and implementing the original culture change, and also received specialized training on domestic violence when Maryland's FVO was put in place. Coupled with the county's early work to create overall culture change, the training helped to incorporate domestic violence-related procedures and attitudes with relative ease. Anne Arundel County will incorporate a woman's activities related to resolving domestic violence issues as part of her self-sufficiency plan, and uses TANF and other funds extensively to provide facilitative and supportive services toward the goal of self-sufficiency, both before opening a cash assistance case and while the case is open.

Douglas (Roseburg) and Multnomah (Portland) Counties, Oregon

Oregon is a state-administered state in the western region, with a strongly state-directed TANF program and approach to domestic violence. The two counties we visited, Douglas and Multnomah, were recommended by the staff of the statewide domestic violence coalition as excellent examples of how the FVO functions in Oregon. Douglas is a rural county in the southwest corner of the state, while Multnomah County is home to the state's biggest city, Portland. In Portland we visited the Southeast District office, one of 10 serving the county. Oregon had also been in the process of making major changes in the culture of the welfare office when AFDC changed to TANF. Its implementation of a concern about domestic violence within TANF fit well within the overall emphasis on identifying and removing barriers to work and eventual self-sufficiency. Discovery and assessment procedures for domestic violence were incorporated into general intake and assessment procedures, and all districts were required to have a domestic violence point person on staff. One office we visited had a domestic violence advocate on site, while both offices used specialized caseloads and offered their case managers training and technical assistance to assist with clients who had domestic violence issues. Counties in Oregon may incorporate a woman's activities related to resolving domestic violence issues as part of her self-sufficiency plan. They use TANF and other funds extensively to provide facilitative and supportive services toward the goal of self-sufficiency, both during the assessment period before opening a cash assistance case and while the case is open. In addition, Oregon has used TANF money to create a special fund to purchase supportive goods and services for survivors of domestic violence. Counties can use this resource to help women deal with domestic violence, even if the women will not ultimately qualify for TANF.

Shawnee County (Topeka), Kansas

The Topeka Area Office of the Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services is one of 11 regional offices administering TANF in Kansas, a small, state-administered mid-western state. It is also the site of a domestic violence pilot project called the OARS program (Orientation-Assessment-Referral-Safety), implemented beginning in February 1999. OARS was developed jointly by the Kansas Coalition Against Sexual and Domestic Violence and the Central Social and Rehabilitation Services office. The office has not undergone a major change in how it administers TANF as a result of the pilot. Instead, the office has integrated the activities of the OARS program into its existing structure. A domestic violence advocate is located on site in the TANF office. Participation in OARS is considered an allowable work activity as part of a self-sufficiency plan. TANF funds can be used in Kansas to purchase goods and services needed by clients to achieve or maintain job readiness or employment. These funds are also available to help women address issues that arise in relation to domestic violence.

Orange County (Orlando), Florida

Florida, a large southern state, is officially state-administered but in reality affords considerable autonomy to the 24 boards that oversee WAGES, Florida's TANF program. We visited Orlando, in Orange County, a fast-growing urban center in the middle of the state. Orange County's WAGES program has a multi-tiered approach Eligibility is determined by the Department of Children and Families, who then refer clients to One-Stop Career Centers run by a private for-profit contractor. One-Stop Career Center staff work with clients to develop self-sufficiency plans. Florida's TANF plan does not include any activities as "allowable" that are not also "countable" as equivalent to federal definitions of work activity. Clients who are not quickly able to get jobs and identify barriers are referred to the Work First Plus program, which is designed to assess and address barriers to work including, if appropriate, domestic violence. This structure has the potential to let eligibility workers do their jobs with little change from pre-TANF days, and to put assessment and assistance with domestic violence and other barriers into the hands of social workers and others trained to help and interested in helping clients overcome their barriers.

City and County of Denver, Colorado

Colorado is a mid-sized, county-administered state in the mountain region of the country. The state only adopted the FVO in 1999. Counties have considerable autonomy to design their own TANF program within the broad structure set by the state. The City and County of Denver Department of Human Services administers the local TANF program, called Colorado Works. Colorado has identified domestic violence as one of the areas of focus for county TANF offices. Denver DHS has initiated efforts to address domestic violence through screening and assessment efforts, as well as funding on-site domestic violence advocates for follow-up services. Denver DHS has been more proactive in addressing domestic violence than many other counties in Colorado, but is still engaged in an effort to shift its TANF focus from eligibility to assisting clients with necessary services to reduce barriers to work. It is trying to make domestic violence services effective in this environment, which to date has not seen major changes in its welfare perspective and culture.

El Paso County (Colorado Springs), Colorado

El Paso County is Colorado's second most populous county, and includes its second-largest city, Colorado Springs. El Paso County's Department of Human Services (DHS) has structured its cash and other assistance programs in a manner designed to provide the most active help possible to families and other clients who may need them, in an office culture changed significantly from the old eligibility determination model. It has gone quite far in the degree to which it integrates its approach to families however they connect to the department (through TANF, child welfare, or other cash and non-cash assistance). Its approach to domestic violence is likewise integrated across programs, including the police response. As with the other two "culture change" sites we visited, the atmosphere and approach of El Paso County's TANF program make it relatively easy for clients to disclose domestic violence and get help to deal with it.

Findings and Implications (Chapter 8)

Overall Program Philosophy

A state's or county's basic approach to TANF played a critical role in determining the nature and success of its approach to domestic violence issues in the sites we visited. Sites may be characterized by the relative emphasis their approach placed on "carrots" and "sticks" to prompt TANF applicants and clients toward employment and eventual departure from the TANF rolls. In the TANF case, "carrots" are positive incentives and supports to move toward self-sufficiency, including a relatively liberal list of activities that "count" in the state's or county's program, and the use of TANF funds to help remove barriers that would prevent self-sufficiency. "Sticks" available to TANF are the rules of engagement (shorter or longer time frame before work is required, stringency of the work requirement, and speed and severity of sanctioning for noncompliance).

The programs that did the best at identifying domestic violence issues were those set up to identify all major barriers to self-sufficiency — that is, those with a strong orientation to use "carrots." Programs focused more on immediate employment rather than on longer-term self-sufficiency were not well set up to identify any type of barrier, and the same was true for domestic violence issues.

Tools for Identifying and Assessing Domestic Violence

Programs used many different "tools" to identify clients with domestic violence issues and address their needs. The first of these was the overall ambiance of the TANF office. Anti-violence posters in the waiting rooms, along with brochures and other information about domestic violence services side by side with brochures for every other variety of self-help, training, or service program or activity in which clients might be interested, conveyed the message that this was a safe place to talk.

Other tools were a clearly phrased screening question or two as part of the initial application for aid, plus a more extensive domestic violence screener used once a worker had some indication that the client might have domestic violence issues. Questions asking for disclosure should be preceded with information about the TANF office's interest in identifying barriers to work and helping clients address these obstacles. Further, a TANF program, and TANF workers, should never pose these questions to clients without commitments to (1) inform clients about how the information will be used, and (2) use the information in confidence to assure the client's safety. A final set of tools was embedded in the TANF procedures of some of the programs we visited. This was the ability to include domestic violence-related activities as "allowable" work activities.

Even with all these tools in place, worker training was essential to assure that they would be used, and used appropriately. Using them at all requires that workers feel comfortable asking the questions, getting the answers, and discussing the issues. Achieving this level of comfort takes a major and ongoing effort. Further, comfort is only one of the issues to which training can contribute. Training gives workers the understanding to interpret clues and indicators, to probe carefully and understand correctly, and to remain non-judgmental but supportive.

Resources for Supporting Women with Domestic Violence Issues

Many of the TANF programs we visited had created a wide variety of resources to support their clients with domestic violence issues. These included arranging for the on-site availability of domestic violence expertise, using TANF funds for supportive services, developing smooth relationships with community partners for the provision of specialized services, providing related supportive services such as mental health and substance abuse treatment, options for "what counts" as participation and cooperation, the credentials and experiences of staff, and arrangements that concentrate specialized resources on clients with particular problems (such as organization into specialized caseloads).

Making the Change to Focus on Domestic Violence as a Barrier

Even in the programs that had undertaken major culture change for TANF in general, some workers were still reluctant to address domestic violence issues. Reasons included not understanding domestic violence, having unresolved domestic violence issues in their own lives, and not feeling comfortable discussing the issue with clients due to lack of domestic violence-specific training. Programs that did less, taking a few steps — such as doing minimal training and bringing in an on-site domestic violence advocate — but not making the necessary investment to change the orientation of most workers, had very inconsistent practice.

Several practices helped make the transition smoother, more consistent, and more accepted. One of these was attention to the incentive structures faced by caseworkers. If workers are penalized every time one of their clients is not engaged in either job search or work activity, their motivation to discover and address domestic violence issues is not likely to be high. Jurisdictions that accept activities addressing the reduction of domestic violence as a barrier to work help these caseworkers to accept a focus on domestic violence.

On-site domestic violence advocates have helped greatly in many but not all sites. Conditions under which they work best appear to be when:

• They are operating in an environment focused on barrier reduction;
• They have the full support of agency leadership;
• If TANF staff, they have received adequate training and technical assistance related to domestic violence;
• Training for TANF staff is provided by the on-site domestic violence advocates, at least in part, to let TANF staff get to know and trust the advocate(s) and establish a habit of interacting with them;
• The domestic violence advocates spend significant portions of their day and week at the TANF agency (preferably full time at a big agency);
• The roles and responsibilities of the on-site domestic violence advocates with respect to TANF staff have been carefully specified and discussed with all parties;
• The on-site domestic violence advocates are integrated into the activities of TANF staff, attending staff meetings, retreats, trainings, etc., and have the full support of TANF administrators; and
• Care is taken that the on-site domestic violence advocates maintain good working relationships with the domestic violence service agency and its staff, so they do not end up feeling isolated from their own colleagues.

Some programs have gone farther than others toward integrating child support into the TANF application process. In the programs focused on maximizing the resources of applicants and clients to shorten or eliminate the need for TANF, child support is perceived as an important source of both immediate and ongoing cash. Maintaining confidentiality of information shared by clients about domestic violence, and the need to protect clients from inadvertent disclosure of her whereabouts as part of child support proceedings are difficult issues to resolve to everyone's satisfaction. But they are essential to address if the central premise of the FVO, not to contribute to a woman's further endangerment, is to be honored.

Implications

One of this project's central purposes was to identify promising approaches being used by state and county TANF and child support enforcement programs to assure that program requirements do not create or increase danger to people in domestic violence situations. We found the most promising approaches to be those integrated into a general culture change aimed at moving welfare offices toward promoting long-term self-sufficiency among their clients. However, since most TANF programs have not made this type of culture change, we also examined approaches that have some promise in more average TANF environments. These included on-site domestic violence advocates, designating activities addressing domestic violence as "allowable" work activities, and creating a screening and assessment structure that largely bypasses the eligibility determination process. As with other aspects of promising approaches, the function of formal FVO waivers varied considerably by the type of program operating in a jurisdiction.

The FVO in the TANF Programs We Visited

The remedies offered by federal statute and regulations — the FVO waiver and the good cause child support exemption — were not used much in the counties we visited. Most had developed an approach they felt to be more productive, and one less consuming of agency resources. The general approach, with variations in each site, combined (1) an expanded array of activities allowable within a client's self-sufficiency plan, and (2) caseworker flexibility to make these decisions rather than requiring a formal waiver application to cover the things a woman can accomplish within the time frame of a two- to four-week waiver.

The FVO in Other TANF Programs

Some states have set up complex and formal procedures through which clients may request a waiver of various program requirements under a state's FVO. These procedures may exist side by side with more flexible approaches to handling domestic violence situations, as they do in Colorado. Or, they may be the major route through which TANF clients may seek relief if they feel that program requirements place them in danger. Massachusetts, for instance, which had one of the federal demonstration grants to implement the FVO, is one of these. We understand from presentations at conferences that TANF programs set up with very formal waiver processes, such as the one in Massachusetts, process relatively few waivers, virtually all of which are for quite short periods of time. Nevertheless, the option of applying for and granting a waiver may be critically important for the relatively few TANF clients whose domestic violence-related issues cannot be settled quickly. If a domestic violence survivor or her children needed to participate in counseling or therapy for an extended period of time, or needed time to recover from injuries over a period of months, a formal waiver might protect her from running out of cash assistance benefits at the end of the federal or state-imposed time limit on benefit receipt.

Other Functions of the FVO

The Family Violence Amendment has caused each state to examine its current practice with respect to the treatment of domestic violence survivors who apply for or are recipients of TANF. Further, each state has had to make a conscious legislative decision about whether or not to adopt the FVO. The need to do so has raised the issue of domestic violence and remedies for it to a level of political debate and consideration that it might not have achieved in many communities in this country without the stimulus of federal legislation.

An additional benefit of the FVO is the leverage it gives legal advocates when a person with significant barriers to work due to domestic violence is being pressured by a TANF program to fulfill stringent work requirements or face a sanction. Cases exist in which legal advocates have been able to secure waivers for their clients when the state allowed them but a local TANF office was not operating in the spirit of the state's FVO legislation.

Finally, as noted earlier in this chapter, formal state adoption of the FVO gives states a certain amount of flexibility with regard to federal TANF regulations. With a formal FVO in place, a state may be able to obtain relief from potential federal penalties for failure to meet work participation rates, or be allowed to carry more than 20 percent of its caseload past the 60-month federal lifetime limit without penalty.

Good Cause Exemptions for Child Support

With respect to good cause exemption from cooperating with child support enforcement, there is even stronger evidence that additional or expanded remedies would be desirable. The results of several studies (Pearson, Thoennes, and Griswold, 1999; Pearson and Griswold, 1997) indicate that the vast majority of women want the income from child support and further, they want the man to pay. What they fear is that he will find them, and that they or their children will suffer harm as a result. An appropriate remedy would assure that the woman's whereabouts would be protected, but that the state would pursue child support. This seems hard to accomplish, as discussed in chapter 7, because of court procedures and the public nature of the information in court orders.

This report is available in its entirety in the Portable Document Format (PDF), which many find convenient when printing.

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