Just before Christmas 2019, “Katherine,” who asked her real name not be used for fear of retaliation from her alleged abuser, walked into an informal hearing held by the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) that would decide the fate of her and her five children. She had received a notice from the agency that it planned to terminate her Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher (HCV)—assistance that the 44-year-old had depended on for the past ten years to afford her East Garfield Park apartment.

The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) forbids Section 8 landlords and public housing authorities from evicting domestic violence survivors or terminating their housing subsidies based on the acts of the abuser. But legal experts said that there are still many hurdles facing domestic violence survivors like Katherine as they advocate for their housing rights under VAWA.

It does not help that most domestic violence cases are not as straightforward as the law envisions, Park said. While domestic abuse often involves financial control over survivors, as in Katherine’s situation, it is harder to argue for protections based on financial abuse. Compared to more clear-cut cases where, for example, survivors lose their homes because their abusers broke the law during acts of violence, there is less understanding among landlords and public housing officials when it comes to the implications of financial abuse. The burden falls on survivors to prove that their failure to pay rent is a direct result of domestic violence.

A few months back, Katherine fled her longtime residence in East Garfield Park to escape from the escalating abuse and had been living with friends and families. Just hours before the hearing, however, her children’s father found her at her niece’s apartment and tried to break her finger in another episode of violence.

According to Park, many housing authority officials lack the cultural sensitivity to understand domestic violence and are sometimes downright hostile to survivors. “You just see a lot of situations where the authorities just don’t really sympathize with the victims and instead actually want them out of their system,” she said.

Billhardt continued. “If we don’t have that awareness of what trauma can look like, we can come to conclusions that make us reject that person or provide them with a different kind of diagnosis than what’s really going on with them.”