Surviving Austerity: Rape Crisis Centers and the Illinois State Budget Impasse

Rape crisis centers (RCCs) represent one of the most tangible advances of the modern women’s movement. Their proliferation within all 50 states is largely due to the decision by early movement activists to accept and seek out more government funding (Freinkel & Smith, 1988; Johnston, 1981). There has been little scholarly research on RCCs that takes into account both the radical history of RCCs and their current precarious position as social service providers in times of unprecedented neo-liberal reforms. This study used a mixed-methods design of analyzing existing quantitative administrative data from 34 RCCs in Illinois and 22 qualitative interviews with agency directors to better understand how a de facto austerity policy such as the Illinois budget crisis (a two year period with no state funding) affected RCCs in their ability to provide comprehensive services to survivors of sexual violence throughout the state. Quantitative results, using Interrupted Time Series (ITS) regression analysis, showed significant decreases for criminal justice advocacy, individual counseling, and telephone counseling in the overall, aggregate dataset. Rural centers showed significant decreases in medical advocacy in addition to criminal justice advocacy and large, significant increases for telephone counseling. Qualitative results revealed the ways in which agencies tried to survive the crisis through extreme cost-cutting on basic necessities such as electricity and toilet paper, reducing staff hours, and laying off a few staff members or shifting them to ‘volunteers’. These measures severely depressed staff morale, increased staff distress, and led to client perceptions of agencies as declining. The professionalization and subsequent de-politicization of RCCs over time has led to their use of ‘unobtrusive mobilization’ (Katzenstein, 1990) and empowerment frameworks (Batliwala, 2007). These orientations curtailed more confrontational or radical political activity. Instead, RCCs turned to fiscal strategies for survival such as using lines of credit, relying on reserves, and engaging in extreme agency-wide budget cuts. These strategies allowed the agencies to survive but leave many questions as to how RCCs would survive another sudden, severe loss of funding. Implications for practice and future research are discussed