The Hidden Risk of Abuse
Why abuse victims often face arrest, prosecution, and loss of child custody
by Leah Mitchell
Shauna knew her husband Scott had a drug problem. But that was only one of many things about him that she could not control. Married when she was barely sixteen and now with two small children, Shauna had no idea how to cope with her husband’s increasing abuse of her. Sometimes he was violent and raging, and she worried he would kill her. Sometimes he kept her awake hours into the night with his drug-fueled rants, screaming and pounding on the walls. She was terrified.
Shauna had grown up in a deeply devout household in rural Alabama. Her grandfather built the church she attended. Her first inclination was to take the problem to her pastor and elders. They seemed concerned, but ultimately dismissed it. Scott had not cheated on her, as far as anyone knew. They told her to stay, to be patient, and to pray for him.
“They told me a story,” Shauna relates, “of a woman whose husband tried to stab her to death, but when she cried out to God, the knife became dull and wouldn’t pierce her skin. They said if I had faith like that, I’d be okay.”
Shauna stayed.
And she was there the night her husband was arrested for manufacturing drugs. So were her two small daughters. Police shrugged off Shauna’s protests that she didn’t know the extent of her husband’s drug activities. She was arrested alongside him. Her daughters were taken into state custody and placed in foster care. While Shauna sat in jail, her parental rights were terminated. Her daughters were placed for adoption. She has not seen her children since the day she was arrested.
Although Shauna’s story is extreme, it is not isolated. Abusers are self-centered, power-hungry, with delusions of grandeur and entitlement. They often have active addictions. All of these traits make them far more likely to involve themselves in fraud, illegal drugs, and other crimes. Incarceration of abused women is common, as they are frequently caught up in crimes of their abusers.
Often an abuse victim has no idea the illegal activity was going on. Caroline, a domestic abuse survivor from New York, relates her own story of nearly being caught in her husband’s web of deceit. Like Shauna, Caroline married while still in her teens, and her husband took advantage of her inexperience:
“I wondered why we never seemed to have any money, but my husband kept telling me that the economy was bad, and that I just didn’t understand how hard it is to make a living. He wouldn’t let me see the finances because he said he didn’t want me to worry. He made it sound like he was sacrificing himself for the family—taking on all the agony of financial management in a bad situation to spare me the stress. Then one day, he happened to mention that he was making $1500/week, take-home pay. I was stunned because I was working too, making about $3000/month. That meant we were clearing about $9,000/month, with a mortgage of $1500/month, and we still weren’t doing okay. Where was the money going? When I asked, my husband started crying and claimed he didn’t actually make that much money—that he was just trying to feel better about himself. I comforted him, but I was still a little suspicious. I went to the bank and managed to get copies of our bank statements, and I took them home and reviewed them. That’s when I discovered all his fraud. We weren’t just making $9,000/month. My husband was stealing from everywhere. We were on food stamps that we didn’t qualify for. We were getting a foster care subsidy for a child no longer placed with us. We were getting deposits from the diaconal fund at the church where my husband was a trustee. We were getting social security. Any place you can imagine getting fraudulent funds, we were getting them. He had only reported about $9,000 of income for the entire year on our taxes. I just started shaking. To this day, I don’t know where the money was going. There were numerous large cash withdrawals, and he hadn’t paid the mortgage for nearly a year.”
When Caroline took the matter to a lawyer (over the protests of her church elder, who refused to grant permission for her to even see a lawyer), she was told that she could be arrested at any time for felony fraud. Her husband had forged her signature on numerous documents related to his fraud, and he had convinced her to sign tax returns that she didn’t understand. Like Shauna, Caroline faced hostility at her church for wanting a divorce, but the risks were real. For the next three years, until the statute of limitations ran out on most of the crimes, Caroline panicked every time a police car pulled up nearby.
Even when abuse victims know about criminal activity—or even participate in it—they may have little control over it. Evelyn, a middle-aged housewife from Toronto, was arrested for shoplifting a carton of cigarettes. Evelyn did not even smoke, but of course, her abuser did. “I knew it was wrong to take them,” she confessed. “But I also knew he would beat me terribly when we got home if he didn’t get his cigarettes. And he wouldn’t let me have any money to buy them.”
The long-term consequences of arrest and conviction can be devastating. Some victims, like Caroline, are fortunate enough to avoid criminal prosecution, but worries over the possibility of arrest may make them reluctant to call police for help when they experience violence. Others, like Evelyn, emerge from an abusive relationship with a criminal record. They find it difficult to get work, and they are turned down for apartment rentals, making it much harder to survive without their abuser. In the worse cases, abuse victims like Shauna may even lose custody of their children.
Victims of abuse are frequently blamed for their role in criminal activity of their abuser, but victims feel they had few options. “I had three kids,” Caroline explains, “and my church was my only support aside from my husband. When they refused to allow me to divorce, I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t have anywhere to go. I tried to watch our finances to make sure it didn’t happen again, but how could I know? I found fraud for as far back in the financial records as I could look. It had been going on for more than a decade—more than $250,000 of fraud just from state benefits, and he had done it all behind my back. If he could get away with all that without me knowing, how could I possibly know what else he had going on without me knowing? And where was all the money? Obviously, there was something else going on that I still didn’t know. That amount of money doesn’t just disappear.”
Ultimately, Caroline did divorce her husband, but only after four more years of fear and further abuse.
The risks of abuse are often pictured in terms of physical damage—black eyes and broken noses. A more openminded evaluation may also consider psychological and spiritual effects. But any group of abuse survivors can relate stories of coercion into criminal activity, and many abuse victims have been or are at risk of arrest and prosecution.
What can we do to assist abuse victims facing criminal risk due to their abuser?
Listen. Many victims say their church dismissed or downplayed these risks, refusing to take it seriously. But the threat of criminal arrest and incarceration is often all too real, and women also risk losing custody of their children, especially if the crimes are drug-related.
Get legal advice. Abuse victims are rarely in a position to afford legal counsel. But a lawyer can assist with an evaluation of the risk and also suggest ways to mitigate it. Do not assume that an abuse victim won’t be prosecuted just because she didn’t know or felt coerced. The law often fails to account for abusive coercion in criminal prosecution.
Support separation and/or divorce. Churches that demand that a victim of a criminal abuser stay in the marriage put the victim at potential risk of harm, including criminal prosecution, incarceration, and loss of child custody.
Protecting victims of abuse means considering all ways in which abuse may harm them. While abuse often shows itself in bruises and broken bones, it also filters into other aspects of life with even more devastating consequences. Bruises heal. Broken bones knit back together. But for those who lost children into foster care or cannot pass a criminal background check for housing and employment, the consequences of abuse live on long after the abusive relationship ends.
“I look back on that period of my life with so much anxiety,” Caroline says. “I was lucky. If I had been arrested, I would have lost my teaching job. I wouldn’t be able to work in social work, as I do today. I don’t know how I would have provided for my kids when I left. But even today, I wonder if he is out there still using my name and social security number in some kind of scam. He was my husband. He knows all my information and how my signature looks. And I may never know until the police knock at my door.”
