Why Doesn't She Just Leave Him?
Fair question
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There’s a scene in the Netflix show Maid where the manager of a domestic violence shelter informs the main character that it takes an average of seven attempts for a woman to leave their abuser.
Seven attempts. That sounded wildly high to me, so I turned to my good friend Mr. Google to confirm. But the show was correct—it does take women1 multiple times to escape from an abusive situation.
At the time, this was hard for me to swallow or understand. But the more I’ve immersed myself in domestic violence research, the more I’ve learned about the complexity of ending toxic, abusive relationships. And last week, when OJ Simpson died, I saw a flurry of posts about the spouse he killed. A handful of commemorative posts, and one or two Why did she stay with him for so long?’s.
I want to live in a society where people can ask genuine question and receive thoughtful answers, not a snort and an eyeroll. So if you’ve ever tentatively wondered but…why wouldn’t a woman just LEAVE her abuser? but been too afraid to ask, here’s a cuppa tea. Scootch over.
Here are some reasons I’ve learned about.
Where will she go?
Abusers often isolate victims from their friends + family. Victims may have cut off ties with formerly close relationships (for valid or invalid reasons) and may simply have nowhere to go. Getting a new apartment isn’t something you can do in a day, or even a weekend. Shelters are often full, with long waiting lists—and also, they’re temporary. A victim needs to be able to imagine a steady life for themselves outside of their relationship, which they may have gotten incredibly comfortable in/used to.
Also, an abuser might have done the opposite of isolation. He might have manipulated her family/friends to be on his side. Abusers can be very charismatic, and if you feel like you aren’t just losing your spouse but also your entire family, the choice becomes that much more difficult.
How will she afford it?
Financial abuse is a real thing. When victims have no access to money, and no way to make money due to the above-mentioned isolation, how are they going to afford that new apartment they miraculously get? How are they going to afford dinner? How are they going to afford gas for their car? Do they even have a car? Do they have insurance on that car? Do they have health insurance? Do they have a way to and from work? What about the very, very expensive lawyer she’s almost certainly going to need? You can say you’d rather be poor and abuse-free, but that’s all well and good until you literally can’t eat breakfast.
What about her kids?
Nearly every study ever published on the importance of fatherhood demonstrates that overall, having a father in the home is best for kids. It leads to healthier, smarter, more-civically-engaged citizens who are more likely to go to college and less likely to shoot heroin next to a dumpster outside of a gas station. But our understanding and respect of the father figure has occasionally led us to believe that any father in the home is better than no father in the home, when that is not true. We elevate the beauty of fatherhood without acknowledging that there are traits that make someone a safe father or an unsafe father. If the father is abusing or terrorizing the children or the mother, it is better for the father to not be in the home. However—who defines “abuse”? Who defines “terrorizing”? These are statements that fluctuate, both in culture and on a day-to-day basis. A father may be incredibly loving to his children but abusively controlling their mother. What, then? Who makes that call?
Furthermore, what wouldn’t you do for your kids? Would you get punched in the face so that they have a father around? What about screamed at? What about screamed at, but only a few times a week? What about called names? You might roll your eyes. You might say of course not. You may spout off childhood trauma case studies to me.
Fine. Fine, but let me tell you this: until you are in the situation, the situation of taking your children from their cozy, warm home to a domestic violence shelter, of telling kids they can’t see a father they potentially adore, of letting them know they might have to change schools or move away from their best friend or no longer see grandparents or any number of really, really, really hard things—your opinion is half-baked at best.
My point: it’s NEVER in the best interest of the kids to live with an abuser, but abuse is incredibly hard to narrow down, especially when *you’re* the victim.
What if he’s getting help for it?
You have no idea what’s going on in someone else’s marriage. You may think you do, but you’re seeing a sliver, a tiny perspective that isn’t nearly intimate enough to understand the full picture. What if the abusive person has committed to therapy and extensive treatment and you just don’t know about it?2 What if they’re actively working on their issues? What if she’s given him three months, six months, a year to fix the problem and you have no idea about it or what protections she has in place? (Or also, what if this is all crap but he’s sold her on it through emotional manipulation?)
What does it mean for her faith life?
When you’ve been raised in a culture that tells you over and over (…and over) how evil divorce is, but never emphasizes the importance of safety, repentance, or justice, it’s an incredibly powerful drug that may entice you to make marriage an idol.
What if she loves him?
The hardest point to swallow, but there’s this, too:
Abusers are not just abusers.
They may also be really good dads. They may also be a lot of fun to be around. They may also have really intense childhood trauma they’ve shared with you. They may also be really sweet. They may also be someone you’ve known for thirty years. They may also be the most intelligent person you’ve ever known.
Abusers are (sometimes) really, really good at leaning into those positive traits in order to make their victim love them, and when you love someone, you want to see the best in them. You want to believe that they can change, and that this is the person you’re truly meant to be with. It is so, so hard, especially when your own attachment traumas get mixed up in the mess of who’s abusive and who’s a victim and who deserves to stay and who deserves to go. When gaslighting (real gaslighting, not TikTok #gaslighting) abounds, things get even cloudier.
I love people who have done really, really awful things to me. I wonder, if you pause and think about it for a moment, if you do too. And if there are people who love you, even if you’ve at times exhibited awful (or even abusive) behavior.
It’s hard to find statistics on domestic violence, because domestic violence is both underreported and hard to define.
But here’s why I write any of this at all: God hates abuse. Abuse is not in his plan or his perfect will.
It’s one thing to watch a Netflix miniseries (by the way, Maid is totally worth a binge if you haven’t already). It’s another thing if someone close to you is stuck in a toxic, abusive cycle that breaks your heart and smashes your spirit.
So I say this to you gently, my friend: you don’t know. You don’t know the ins and outs, or the ups and downs. All you know is that you love this person, right? You love this person stuck in a horrible cycle and you hate having to trust in God’s providence. You hate that this is the ugliness of the world we live in. You hate how many of us feel stuck in shitty situations and how unhelpful the world can be when you don’t know where to look.
I can’t tell you what to say, or what to do, or what to think. But I can tell you two things:
The question why doesn’t she just leave? is never helpful.
And God is there, in her darkest moments, in her longest crying spells, in her roughest days. When he feels like the furthest thing; some made-up invention of her childhood who only trots out for miracles and mission trips. He is intimately involved with despair and he will not abandon her. I can promise you so little, but that, I can swear to.
The further I dig into the dirt of a faith life the more I learn that so much of our hopes + wishes are just…is God even here? Is God even listening? Does God even care about the really, really hard cycles women are unsuccessfully trying to wrest themselves from? And the flecks of mud keep reminding me: Yes. Yes. Yes.
On My Nightstand
Pelican Girls by Julia Malye: Wow, wow, wow. Stunning read based on a true story about women in a Parisian asylum being sent to inhabit a French colony in now-Louisiana in the early 1700s. Just beautiful, if a little hard to keep all the characters straight.
Why Antifeminism Isn’t Enough: My spiritual director sent me this terrific takedown of the antifeminism movement. “By poisoning the very idea of feminism without suggesting a more usable term, Gress threatens to erase from memory, and from present view, the real injustices suffered by women. However, if one endorses the gains of first-wave feminism, as Gress seems to do, then why the vicious attack on first-wave feminism itself? And why avoid addressing the real challenges downstream from those gains? If women are included in higher education, business, the professions, and political life, how will they work alongside men (and men alongside them)? How will these opportunities affect their decisions to marry and have children? How will it affect their actual marriages and children? What kind of cultural forms should guide them in this new arrangement?”
How Tolkien's Concept of 'Eucatastrophe' Connects Easter With All Other Fairy-Stories: Loved this piece on “eucatastrophe”, one of my favorite Tolkien phrases. I’ve become really interested the past few years in fairy tales and how they can reflect our faith life so well.
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This letter is specifically addressing man-on-woman abuse, because while woman-on-man abuse is real, the vast majority of abusers are men and the vast majority of victims are women.
You may believe very strongly that abuse is not something that can be helped by therapy but I’ve had enough therapists tell me otherwise that I can’t confidently say one way or another. That’s my point: it’s not black and white. You can feel free to disagree.
You raise really great points. This is related to some of the research I do, so I'll add a few things:
1. The financial control that abusers exercise over those they abuse is a major barrier to women leaving. Depending on where you live, it is easier to receive government assistance if you are leaving on abusive situation, but that comes with a whole host of hoops to jump through.
2. Women's shelters are often over capacity, many of them have limits on how long a woman can stay, and there are often restrictions on whether a woman can bring her children. And this might sound trivial to some, but very few shelters allow survivors to bring their pets, and that matters to a lot of people.
3. It's also worth noting that these troubling, abusive behaviors often begin while dating. I've seen it quite a few times in the relationships my students describe.
I am really flummoxed that discussions about not abusing your partner aren’t a bigger part of Catholic community dialogues. I hear priests preach about the evils of transgender issues all the time (which is a really small percentage of our population), but have never heard a sermon discussing domestic violence, which effects a much larger number of our communities. Youth group relationship/purity education should also say, unequivocally, that controlling or using verbal, physical, and sexual threats is not pro-life or Christ- like.