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The Importance of Financial Self-Sufficiency Training For Survivors of Domestic Violence

Domestic violence affects all socio-economic, ethnic, racial, age, national origin, sexual orientation and religious groups.

Conservative estimates are that three to four million women are battered every year in the United States.

Approximately 85% of the women who leave these relationships return.

All too often people assume that women stay or return to these relationships because they have low self-esteem. However, the reasons women stay or return are far more complicated than the strength of a woman’s character.

A significant proportion of the women who do return to the violent relationship attribute their inability to deal with their finances as a major contributing factor. This is because the abuser often holds all of the economic and social standing.

This is why The Business of Me plays such a vital role.

It is clear that survivors lack options and resources to empower, protect and support their choice to leave the violence behind them for good.

These women’s options are further limited by the fact that women who leave a relationship often face one or more additional barriers that includes having at least one dependent child, not being employed outside of the home, not possessing property that is solely theirs, and lacking access to cash or bank accounts.

Lacking the skills to manage their personal finances many survivors of domestic violence who summon the courage to leave eventually returns, most frequently for financial reasons.

Acclaimed Yale University anthropologist David Levinson, in a study he conducted of family violence that focused on battered women, found that in the 90 societies that he studied, incidents of battering were practically non-existent when women have economic independence and support from other women.

In most cases women arrive at shelters with few more resources other than the clothes they are wearing.

Some are bowed down with debt—either their partners or their own. Still others tumble into debt after they have left the relationship because they spend unwisely. And very few have yet to address the emotional and psychological issues that have dictated their poor financial choices.

Rarely is a battered woman accustomed to managing her own money nor does she have the personal financial management skills she needs to lead an independent life free of her abuser.

The Business Of Me teaches these woman how to overcome their fear of managing their own money and real-world personal financial self-sufficiency skills and then provides support in the months and years ahead.