My Mother Survived the Violence. Federal Policy Failed Her Recovery
By Renee Sahatdjian
As a young girl, I remember finding an old newspaper clipping wedged between dusty books in my mother’s room. It was a 1977 article with a headline that reflected the era’s indifference to violence against women: “Brooklyn Man [Commits] Suicide After Shooting His Wife and Son.” It was a story I knew well – the “wife” was my mother, and the “son” my oldest brother.
After being shot in the head with a .38-caliber revolver, my mother survived a life-saving operation. She then began the daunting work of relearning how to speak, read, and write, largely on her own and with minimal professional support. The damage to her brain, however, was permanent. Once a writer, model, and dancer who toured across North America, she was now labeled “disabled” and left to piece together a life on disability checks alone. Research shows that survivors with head trauma often receive no follow-up care and their injuries frequently go undiagnosed or untreated.
My mother’s story was far from rare. Many survivors live with long-term disabilities from violence, a reality reflected in public health data documenting the severe health consequences of intimate partner violence. In this article, “survivors” refers to women who experience intimate partner violence directly, as well as children and family members who live with its long-term consequences. The analysis focuses on women and traumatic brain injury, where the empirical evidence is most developed, while acknowledging broader harms to children and other family members that are not examined in depth here.
For much of the twentieth century, domestic violence existed in a policy vacuum shaped by fragmented authority and deliberate nonintervention. In the absence of federal standards or funding, police exercised broad discretion not to intervene, hospitals treated injuries without assessing cause, and social welfare systems were not designed to support survivors seeking safety or stability. This environment normalized institutional inaction and rendered violence administratively invisible.
Domestic violence is often assumed to end with the assault, yet for survivors, the consequences don’t fade when the sirens do. Evidence from shelter-based samples indicates that nearly three-quarters of women have sustained at least one traumatic brain injury. The impacts of these injuries are profound: it becomes harder to work, harder to access medical care, and harder to parent in systems that routinely equate disability with neglect. When long-term recovery remains unfunded, disability becomes a pipeline into poverty, family separation, and institutional involvement.
In the 1990s, this began to shift as domestic violence was reframed from a private family matter to a public governance problem. Sustained advocacy by survivor-led movements and growing evidence of systemic failure pressured Congress to treat violence against women as a federal responsibility rather than a matter of local discretion, culminating in the passage of the Violence Against Women Act in 1994. One year later, the Department of Justice established the Office on Violence Against Women to operationalize this shift by directing federal resources toward services long absent or inconsistently provided, including legal assistance, transitional housing, advocacy, and prevention programs. These reforms developed alongside research emphasizing the need to change public attitudes and strengthen community responses, particularly in rural and tribal communities where chronic underfunding has left Native American survivors facing the highest rates of violence and the fewest services. Together, these changes redefined domestic violence as a public health, civil rights, and community safety issue – and codified a governmental responsibility to repair harm once ignored.
Today, that progress is at risk.
The Trump administration has proposed a nearly 30 percent cut to the Office on Violence Against Women, a reduction now under consideration by Congress. Survivors would face emergency rooms alone with undiagnosed brain injuries and enter custody hearings without legal representation, often losing their children because the system will not fund legal support for abused women.
These cuts come alongside a wave of disparaging comments from high-ranking officials that minimize domestic violence altogether. President Donald Trump called it nothing more than a “little fight with the wife,” a “lesser crime.” These remarks are not merely rhetorical; they operate as a signal to public institutions about where responsibility is expected to reside. By framing domestic violence as a private matter rather than a public concern, such language legitimizes institutional withdrawal – narrowing eligibility for services, weakening enforcement priorities, and discouraging sustained public investment. Historically, this framing produced fragmented systems and discretionary responses, leaving survivors reliant on informal support networks that were often unavailable or unsafe.
Growing up prior to the passage of the Violence Against Women Act in 1994, I lived in a policy environment where survivor assistance was substantially limited. My mother’s brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder unfolded against this backdrop, producing long-term consequences shaped by the absence of coordinated, sustained support systems. My sibling and I entered foster care because she was injured and poor and no system existed to help her recover or parent safely. When the judge removed us to state custody, there were no legal advocates to defend her, explain her rights, or help her navigate a system she was cognitively unequipped to face alone.
Cutting funds to the Office on Violence Against Women will not erase costs; it will redistribute them onto the systems already straining to hold survivors up. A government that claims to care about public safety cannot justify balancing its budget on the backs of those already harmed by violence. When legal aid, housing support, and advocacy disappear, emergency rooms, foster care programs, disability services, and families in crisis are left to absorb the fallout. Survivors deserve more from their government than an emergency-only response. They deserve the long-term support required to rebuild safety and stability in their lives.
My mother survived her injury, but our laws failed to support her recovery. Without long-term services, we are sentencing survivors to decades of preventable suffering, and their children to burdens they never chose. Treating long-term recovery as a shared public responsibility, rather than an individual burden, is a core function of government – not a discretionary choice, but one that requires sustained investment.
Author’s Bio
Renee Sahatdjian is a Rackham Merit Fellow and Master of Public Policy student at the University of Michigan whose work is informed by both scientific training and lived experience as a survivor. She conducts research in the Interpersonal Violence Research Laboratory focused on policies that support survivors’ safety, dignity, and long-term recovery.
Editors: Gautham Sharma/ MPP’26, Jiseon Kim/ MPP’27
