In late April, the Police Exec­u­tive Research Forum released a new sur­vey find­ing that police offi­cers are encoun­ter­ing more cas­es of domes­tic vio­lence as the econ­o­my con­tin­ues to strug­gle. In 2010, 40 per­cent of the agen­cies in the sur­vey report­ed an increase in domes­tic vio­lence calls; this year, that num­ber has risen to 56 per­cent. Num­bers from women’s shel­ters, released by the Mary Kay Foun­da­tion, are even more alarm­ing. 78 per­cent of shel­ters have seen a rise in the num­bers of women seek­ing help, and 58 per­cent report that the abuse they are see­ing has become more violent.

The equation looks simple: Economic stress causes domestic abuse. But it's not that easy.

These num­bers seem shock­ing, but in fact, we’ve known about the con­nec­tion between abuse, eco­nom­ic stress and pover­ty for a very long time. But it’s rarely cov­ered by media. I’d argue that this is in part because doing so requires us to stop adher­ing to pre­scribed bound­aries – ​“eco­nom­ic issues” ver­sus ​“women’s issues,” psy­chol­o­gy ver­sus pol­i­tics – and to start mak­ing connections.

As far back as 2008, work­ers at women’s shel­ters were pre­dict­ing an increase in vio­lence. Shirl Regan, direc­tor of the Women’s Cen­ter and Shel­ter of Greater Pitts­burgh, spoke to the Pitts­burgh Post-Gazette about the rise in domes­tic vio­lence she’d seen around the time of steel mill clos­ings, and had a grim out­look on the cur­rent recession.

“We think we’re start­ing to see some of the same things in terms of stress fac­tors,” Regan said. ​“Our clients aren’t say­ing there’s more vio­lence at this point, but in the past eight weeks they’ve been talk­ing a lot more about eco­nom­ic stress than they were before. That’s a warn­ing sign.”

Now that warn­ing has been ful­filled. The equa­tion looks sim­ple: Eco­nom­ic stress caus­es domes­tic abuse. But it’s not that easy. To say that pover­ty ​“caus­es” abuse is clas­sism: Plen­ty of folks with six-fig­ure salaries hurt their part­ners, and plen­ty of peo­ple with­stand eco­nom­ic strain or pover­ty with­out hurt­ing any­one. In fact, eco­nom­ic stress both incites and results from abuse; to talk about how finances and abuse relate to each oth­er requires one to trace not a lin­ear nar­ra­tive, but a down­ward spiral.

For exam­ple: We know that abuse itself caus­es severe finan­cial harm. One in four women will expe­ri­ence domes­tic vio­lence in her life­time, but more than half of women on wel­fare are abuse sur­vivors. Abused women often miss work or per­form poor­ly due to part­ner sab­o­tage. Eco­nom­ic abuse – pre­vent­ing a part­ner from get­ting or keep­ing work – often co-exists with oth­er forms of domes­tic vio­lence. This leads to a vicious cycle: Abuse harms its vic­tims finan­cial­ly, but vic­tims don’t leave their abusers because they don’t believe they can sup­port them­selves. Thanks to the post-reces­sion scarci­ty of jobs, this is hap­pen­ing more often.

The idea that eco­nom­ic stress may con­tribute to the deci­sion to abuse one’s part­ner is hard­er to map. There are sev­er­al the­o­ries about why abuse hap­pens. A psy­cho­log­i­cal the­o­ry might tell you that abu­sive behav­ior stems from a need for con­trol. A fem­i­nist the­o­ry would tell you that male abuse of women also fre­quent­ly stems from ideas of mas­culin­i­ty as dom­i­nant, in-con­trol and aggres­sive; a male abuser might exert vio­lent con­trol over his part­ner or chil­dren in order to main­tain an image of him­self as the patri­ar­chal ​“head of his house­hold.” The bot­tom-line analy­sis is that abuse is caused by abusers; no mat­ter what’s going through anyone’s head or heart, the per­son inflict­ing pain makes the choice to do harm.

But it is true that eco­nom­ic stress can cut to the core of mas­culin­i­ty. Los­ing a job, or even fear­ing that you might lose it, is guar­an­teed to make you feel exact­ly the oppo­site of in con­trol, pow­er­ful, suc­cess­ful and invul­ner­a­ble. You’re not in con­trol, you have no pow­er, you’ve ​“failed.” Some­one who already believes that vio­lence is pow­er, and that men have to be pow­er­ful, could very eas­i­ly become more vio­lent in response.

He would harm both him­self and his part­ner by so doing, because abuse caus­es finan­cial harm. And the down­ward spi­ral would con­tin­ue. With all of these forces inter­sect­ing, solu­tions aren’t sim­ple. Encour­ag­ing women to pri­or­i­tize work and edu­ca­tion could have a direct affect on domes­tic vio­lence by mak­ing them more like­ly to resist eco­nom­ic abuse. Dis­man­tling tra­di­tion­al ideas of mas­culin­i­ty as tied to dom­i­nance and ​“suc­cess” could help, too. Pro­vid­ing jobs and a reli­able safe­ty net for the poor and the out-of-work gives vic­tims more pow­er to leave and could cut down on the stress that push­es volatile rela­tion­ships to the break­ing point.

But, most impor­tant, per­haps, is that mem­bers of strug­gling fam­i­lies under­stand the con­nec­tion between pover­ty and abuse. Cross­ing the line and hurt­ing a part­ner will not take away the fear of los­ing every­thing; it will make the fears come true.