Fordham GSS Professor and Associate Dean Elaine Congress, D.S.W., recently published a New York Times Letter to the Editor asserting an unintended benefit of a child tax credit: escape from abusers.
Congress wrote that a child tax credit could give women in abusive relationships the financial means to leave their dangerous situation — providing a better life for themselves and their children:
It has been reported that most women in abusive relationships remain with their partners in large part because they lack the financial means to leave. Some of those relationships prove deadly: Over one-third of murders of women are committed by intimate partners.
Government benefits such as the child tax credit that enable women to leave abusive partners may help reduce family violence. This will have immediate, as well as long-lasting, positive effects on the well-being of women and their children!
Congress’s Letter to the Editor was in response to the August 18th article “The Federal Child Tax Credit Allowed Some Parents to Go It Alone.”
