If you’ve poured a glass of milk or pumped a gallon of gas recently, welcome to the new “material reality” of our economy’s current “negative growth.” In non-economists speak, trips to the grocery store and gas station are costing more while giving you less. Tune in anytime for a daily dose of headlines trumpeting the economic “crisis, squeeze, crunch, and pain” that’s “sharp, wide, deep, and dramatic.”

 

The current economic cocktail of rhetoric and reality is enough to make anyone feel like battening down the hatches and waiting for the rainy day to end. But, not everyone is playing the waiting game.

 

The proposed federal budget now under debate includes the decrease and elimination of vital funding streams for domestic violence programs and services. On the surface these “cuts” can be easily attributed to an admirable, “tightening our belts” message of fiscal responsibility. The reality is that they represent a reckless political red herring whose impact will devastate the most vulnerable among us.

 

The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) includes initiatives to help children exposed to violence, train healthcare providers to support victims of abuse, and provide crisis services for victims of rape and sexual assault. It continues efforts to help law enforcement respond to victims and provides support services to women and children forced to leave their homes because of violence.

 

VAWA has a proud history of helping, despite a constant shadow of underfunding. Historically, money authorized for VAWA has not materialized and initiatives have gone unfunded. The proposed 2009 federal budget includes a devastating 30 percent cut ($120 million) to VAWA, taking the financial viability of VAWA from bad to worse.

 

The Victims of Crime Act (VOCA) is a funding source for services that help victims of crime. VOCA funds counseling, legal and medical advocacy, emergency shelter, transitional housing, community education, and school programs that help victims and their children and communities in the wake of domestic abuse and violence, stalking, rape, sexual abuse, elder abuse, terrorism, drunk driving, and murder.

 

Under the proposed budget, VOCA funding will dramatically decrease starting next year. It will be eliminated by 2010.  

 

What’s your bottom line?

 

These cuts will not save you money, and will actually cost you in the future. In its first six years, VAWA saved taxpayers $14.8 billion in net averted social costs. VOCA is non-tax payer funded, and is supported by fines and penalties paid by federal criminals. Both VAWA and VOCA have saved money while saving lives. Underfunding and eliminating these programs creates extra strain on state and local law enforcement, criminal justice, healthcare, and social service systems. In effect, it eliminates ounces of prevention worth pounds of cure, replacing progress with penalties everyone will eventually bear.

 

VAWA and VOCA funding cuts will restrict and threaten programs and services that so many among us need to survive. Cries for help will go unanswered. Safety will lose its possibility. Hope will be forgotten.

 

Now is not the time to wait for the end of the rainy day.

 

Contact your representatives and urge them to protect VAWA and VOCA.

 

Better yet, show them how to spend money that saves lives. Show them that helping others also helps you. Show them that funding the protection of the most vulnerable among us isn’t a handout, but a hand-up.

 

Luckily, the federal government is prepared to fully fund your demonstration of civic and community pride.

 

In a few weeks, many of us will start receiving checks, averaging about $600 per qualified individual, from the IRS as part of President Bush’s economic stimulus package. Here’s what $600 buys you at A Woman’s Place (AWP), the only domestic violence agency in Bucks County,: six days of safe shelter for a victim of domestic violence and her children; 12 hours of answered hotline calls; 40 hours of counseling for families affected by violence; or 24 hours of education in area schools that can stop the violence before it starts. Make it count at www.awomansplace.org.

 

Like a lot of nonprofits, AWP is darn good at dollar stretching. But we know, every day, it is not enough. Need continually outpaces available resources. Eliminating resources will create a shockwave of devastation that will touch us all.