The High Cost of Divorce
Sara met her future husband when she was 18. He struggled with drug and alcohol addiction, but Sara thought marriage would change him for the better. It didn’t. Sara gave birth to two kids before the age of 25, and she says her husband grew controlling and abusive. A few weeks ago, he got drunk and punched her in the face repeatedly, she says, and she realized they had to divorce.
Sara’s divorce is one of the most difficult kinds—a contested divorce in which she and her husband don’t agree on child-custody and financial matters. She initially had trouble getting a lawyer to represent her. “I have reached out to every lawyer that I can to see if they’ll represent me, but because I have no money, nobody will,” she told me recently. (The Atlantic is withholding Sara’s last name for her protection.)
I found Sara through a Facebook group for people looking for pro bono lawyers to take on their divorce cases. Women post photos of their bruises. They upload mugshots of their spouses. They ask for help divorcing someone they wish they had never met.
The Supreme Court has ruled that the Constitution guarantees Americans theto . People can seek help at legal-aid organizations, but there aren’t to help everyone. (A found that 86 percent of the civil legal problems experienced by low-income Americans received no or inadequate legal help.) Out of necessity, divorce gets the least attention. All the other scenarios—someone is about to lose their house or kids—seem much more urgent. “Poor people who can’t afford lawyers do not have the same America as everyone else,” says Rohan Pavuluri, the CEO of , which helps people file for bankruptcy without a lawyer.
