Public Awareness

OPDV Bulletin:
"Why Doesn't She Leave?"


By Ann Jones


Despite the immense achievements of the battered-women's movement in the past twenty-five years, those who work to stop violence against women - those who staff the hotlines and the shelters and the legal-service centers, those who press to make law enforcement and criminal justice act responsibly, those who lobby for legislative reform - know that the next time a woman is battered in the United States (which is to say within the next twelve seconds) few people will ask: What's wrong with that man? What makes him think he can get away with that? Is he crazy? Did the cops arrest him? Is he in jail? When will he be prosecuted? Is he likely to get a serious sentence? Is she getting adequate police protection? Are the children provided for? Did the court evict him from her house? Does she need any other help? Medical help maybe, or legal aid? New housing? Temporary financial aid? Child support?


No, the first question, and often the only question, that leaps to mind is: "Why doesn't she leave?"


This question, which we can't seem to stop asking, is not a real question. It doesn't call for an answer; it makes a judgment. It mystifies. It transforms an immense social problem into a personal transaction, and at the same time pins responsibility squarely on the victim. It obliterates both the terrible magnitude of violence against women and the great achievements of the movement against it. It simultaneously suggests two ideas, both of them false: that help is readily available to all worthy victims (which is to say, victims who leave), and that this victim is not one of them.


And if she does leave? And he comes after her? The pattern is so commonplace that law professor Martha R. Mahoney has coined the useful term "separation assault" to describe the "varied violent and coercive moves" a batterer makes when a woman tries to leave him. Perhaps she'll defend herself and then be tried for murder, like Karen Straw. Perhaps she'll be convicted and sent to prison for a long term - fifteen years, maybe, or life - as are so many battered women who kill. Perhaps she'll be maimed and crippled. Or perhaps she'll be murdered - as four women every day are murdered by their "partners." The mother of one murdered woman told a television reporter: "People ask 'Why don't battered women leave?' They get killed. That's why."


Historian Elizabeth Pleck notes that the inevitable question, or its variant "Why does she stay?" was first asked in the 1920s, coincidentally with the rise of modern psychology, and experts have been "answering" it ever since. "The answer given then," Pleck says, "was that battered women were of low intelligence or mentally retarded; two decades later, it was assumed these women did not leave because they were masochistic. By the 1970s an abused woman stayed married, the experts claimed, because she was isolated from friends and neighbors, had few economic or educational resources and had been terrorized into a state of 'learned helplessness' by repeated beatings." As Pleck observes, even this "modern answer" is "far less revealing than the persistent need to pose the question." What that need reveals is our refusal to do anything to stop violence against women.


Excerpted and modified from Chapter 5 of "Next Time She'll Be Dead: Battering & How to Stop It," revised and updated edition (Beacon Press, 2000) by Ann Jones. Printed with permission of the author. Ms. Jones is also the author of "Women Who Kill" and coauthor with Susan Schechter of "When Love Goes Wrong: What to Do When You Can't Do Anything Right."