The government shutdown is very bad news for victims of domestic violence, as aid organizations and shelters nationwide have lost funding. At one West Virginia shelter, that’s meant massively scaling back the assistance it can provide women fleeing abuse, Huffington Post’s Melissa Jeltsen reports.
At the Eastern Panhandle Empowerment Center, financial assistance to help women move out of the shelter and into their own homes—freeing up a shelter space for another woman—is gone. A woman with a traumatic brain injury has missed doctor appointments because there was no money to get her there and back, and she hasn’t been able to refill her prescriptions.
Money for those things is crucial in helping women who are too often trapped in abusive situations by poverty, without the resources to leave:
“People will call and say ’I would love to come in, but I have no way to get to work on Monday, or no way to get my kids to school,” [Katie Spriggs, executive director of the Eastern Panhandle Empowerment Center,] explained. “We used to tell them not to worry because we could alleviate some of that financial burden. But now we can’t because we don’t have any money.”
Women who have made it out of dangerous homes are being fed peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches rather than hot meals, as the center tries to make its available grocery money last.
And that’s just what’s happening already. Within the next couple weeks, the Eastern Panhandle Empowerment Center could be looking at layoffs—and it’s surely not alone among domestic violence organizations struggling through this shutdown. So victims of domestic violence are squarely on the list of people Donald Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell don’t care enough about to end the shutdown.