Why Victims Stay
Many people are baffled by the battered woman who leaves and then returns to an abusive relationship. After all, if this vicious cycle of violence is so detrimental to the women and the children, then why don’t these women just leave?!
It’s not as simple as it may seem for those of us on the outside of this reign of terror. In reality, the reasons victims stay in violent relationships are numerous and complex. The battered woman is not stupid, she does not like to be beaten, nor is she uneducated or mentally ill.
Let’s think about all that a woman would need to do to escape a violent relationship: She would have to find a place to live, she would have to find a job to support herself and her children, she may need to find child care or transfer the children to a different school, she may be required to file legal documents (custody, separation/divorce, restraining orders), she may lose all health and life insurance benefits, etc. etc.
The following list contains numerous motives that bind victims to violent relationships. All of these factors are not found in each case, but a combination of some of them are usually enough to keep the victim with the batterer.
- Economic dependency
- Parenting (kids need a father)
- Religious or extended family pressures
- Fear of being alone
- Loyalty (he’s sick and he needs my help to change)
- Pity for batterer
- Wanting to help the batterer
- Fears he will kill himself
- Denial (abuse is not that bad, “He only slapped me”)
- LOVE (he is loving and lovable when he’s not being abusive)
- Duty (It’s my responsibility to hold the family together)
- Guilt (batterer blames her for problems and she accepts that the problems are her fault)
- Responsibility (to save relationship)
- Shame and humiliation
- Security
- Identity
- Survival/Fear (He’ll find/follow me and kill me.)
- Childhood (woman grew up in home where abuse took place, she accepts this behavior as natural)
- Frequency and severity (plays into the denial if abusive incidents are not frequent or severe)
- Isolation (often batterer isolates victim and she has no one to turn to and may not know that services are available)
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