RAPHAEL, Jody

PERSONAL:

Female. Education: Bryn Mawr University, received degree, 1966; University of Chicago, Law School, J.D., 1969.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Schiller DuCanto & Fleck Family Law Center, DePaul University College of Law, 25 East Jackson Blvd., Chicago, IL 60604.

CAREER:

Center for Impact Research (formerly Taylor Institute), Chicago, IL, executive director, 1994-2003; Schiller DuCanto & Fleck Family Law Center, DePaul University College of Law, Chicago, senior research fellow, 2003—.

WRITINGS:

Saving Bernice: Battered Women, Welfare, and Poverty ("Gender, Crime, and Law" series), Northeastern University Press (Boston, MA), 2000.

Listening to Olivia: Violence, Poverty, and Prostitution ("Gender, Crime, and Law" series), Northeastern University Press (Boston, MA), 2004.

WORK IN PROGRESS:

A third contribution to the "Gender, Crime, and Law" series on drug abuse and incarceration, for Northeastern University Press, expected in 2007.

SIDELIGHTS:

Jody Raphael is an expert on violence against women and was the first researcher to establish the connection between domestic violence and welfare receipt. Since 1994 she has been executive director of the Center for Impact Research in Chicago, which was founded as the Taylor Institute in 1975 to address poverty through grassroots research of illiteracy, prostitution, sweatshops, and teen pregnancy. Raphael also continues this work through the Schiller DuCanto & Fleck Family Law Center at DePaul University's College of Law.

Raphael has contributed books to Northeastern University Press's series on gender, crime, and law. Her first volume, Saving Bernice: Battered Women, Welfare, and Poverty, is a case study of one welfare mother, a survivor of domestic violence. Bernice Hampton, a mother with two children, was on welfare for eight years, during which time she was being abused, harassed, and stalked by her former partner, Billy, a man with whom she had a relationship since age fourteen. She came from a family so dysfunctional that her alcoholic father poured gasoline over her thirteen-year-old brother and threw a match to it, resulting in the boy's death. Overcoming both depression and isolation, Bernice was eventually able to cut off her own harrowing relationship.

Raphael first met Bernice through the welfare-to-work program that Raphael directed. She uses interviews taped from 1995 to 1999, as well as reports of social workers and psychologists, to tell Bernice's story, and expresses her gratitude for the trust Bernice placed in her. Raphael concludes that domestic violence, which is most prevalent among the poor, is a primary cause of women being unable to take advantage of the job training and education required by welfare reform. Since they are not supposed to be living with their men while on welfare, they cannot report the abuse. Booklist critic Vanessa Bush noted that Raphael "asserts that many pathologies attributed to poverty may actually be directly related to domestic violence." Katherine McDade said in NWSA Journal that Raphael "also reports the ways that male partners have sabotaged women's attempts to leave welfare for work. They refuse to provide promised transportation or childcare, hide or destroy clothing and books. More serious sabotage includes refusal to use birth control; verbal and physical harassment on the street, in training programs, and on the job; stalking; and threats and acts of violence."

Ann Withorn wrote in the Women's Review of Books that she does not disagree with Raphael "that the intrusive, paternalistic welfare system, with its inadequate grants and crazy-making double binds, often serves to keep women connected with abusive, controlling men. But I think the picture is more complex because jobs are every bit as untrustworthy and potentially abusive as men are. Of course, good jobs with good pay, good benefits, and flexible hours are probably better than welfare, but most women forced off welfare won't find them. Instead, they will find low-paid, disrespectful work, accompanied by poor child care, where women will be rightly fearful to discuss their abusive family situation." Withorn felt that these sorts of jobs, as well as the welfare system itself, may cause women to return to a setting that is familiar, the one that includes domestic violence. In a review for the Boston Globe, however, Alyssa Haywoode wrote that "although the book reads like a novel, Raphael makes a compelling public policy plea. Before the first chapter ends, readers get a thorough education.… Even readers who disagree with Raphael are likely to concur with her call for more research."

For the same series, Raphael wrote Listening to Olivia: Violence, Poverty, and Prostitution, a second in-depth profile. Olivia left home at the age of sixteen, hoping to become a dancer on Chicago's Rush Street, which was known during the 1970s for its strip clubs. Olivia had been drinking since the age of nine, and she continued abusing alcohol and drugs to numb herself to the degrading life she was leading and which eventually took her into prostitution. Library Journal contributor Suzanne W. Wood wrote that in her narrative Raphael "places Olivia's experiences in worldwide historical and contemporary contexts of prostitution, the tyranny of pimps, and the burgeoning sex trade." Nineteen years later, Olivia received help from Genesis House and eventually became director of addiction services of a program that helps drug-dependent women. Olivia's story is unique in that she was able to turn her life around. A Library Bookwatch reviewer called Listening to Olivia "a compelling, informative, and gripping autobiography."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, June 1, 2000, Vanessa Bush, review of Saving Bernice: Battered Women, Welfare, and Poverty, p. 1816; March 1, 2004, Whitney Scott, review of Listening to Olivia: Violence, Poverty, and Prostitution, p. 1117.

Boston Globe, July 31, 2000, Alyssa Haywoode, review of Saving Bernice, section B, p. 9.

Chicago Sun-Times, July 10, 2000, Francine Knowles, review of Saving Bernice, p. 46.

Library Bookwatch, October, 2004, review of Listening to Olivia.

Library Journal, May 15, 2000, Ellen D. Gilbert, review of Saving Bernice, p. 116; April 15, 2004, Suzanne W. Wood, review of Listening to Olivia, p. 107.

NWSA Journal, fall, 2001, Katherine McDade, review of Saving Bernice, p. 209.

Women's Review of Books, November, 2000, Ann Withorn, review of Saving Bernice, p. 23; June, 2004, Amy Hoffman, review of Listening to Olivia, p. 19.