Domestic and Family Violence – Why doesn’t the victim leave?
[Michael Salter: Associate Professor of Criminology, School of Social Sciences, University of NSW]
There are many reasons why victims of domestic and family violence stay in their relationships. It can take a while to recognise you’re in an abusive relationship because perpetrators are quite effective at manipulating the way that the victim understands their relationship. There’s a real process that victims have to go through to identify this relationship is unhealthy and it needs to come to an end. But even once they’ve made that realisation, they have to disentangle the emotional links, the financial links, peoples economic lives become intertwined and then can be really entrapping especially if the perpetrator is engaged in financial abuse. There are practical challenges for women in leaving an abusive relationship. When they have kids or to leave their relationship, they essentially become a single mum, so how are they going to get kids to and from school, who’s going to provide childcare, how are they going to manage their jobs. These are things that have to be in place before someone can leave so there’s a long planning phase often before somebody leaves an abusive relationship and during that time, she really is just trying to cope day to day.
[Jan Breckenridge: Professor and Head of School of Social Sciences
Co-Convenor of Gendered Violence Research Network
University of NSW, Sydney]
Mostly we’re not aware of people’s circumstances we don’t know how safe it is for them to leave, we don’t know the consequences of what might happen if they leave in terms of responsibility for the children, their financial circumstance, whether they would become homeless. It’s very easy to recommend but actually without being clear about the safety I think it’s a very dangerous thing to say.
[Michael Salter: Associate Professor of Criminology, School of Social Sciences, University of NSW]
Leaving a relationship is the most dangerous time for a victimised woman. If she’s experienced domestic and family violence, he’s often threatened her and told her what he would do to her if she does leave and those are not empty threats, men do follow through on these promises and the majority of intimate partner homicides occur as the woman is leaving the relationship or immediately afterwards and simply leaving the relationship doesn’t bring the violence to an end. She may continue to be stalked, she may continue to be assaulted and harassed physically and sexually assaulted by the partner. It’s a key moment of risk for her and that holds a lot of women back from leaving their relationship is because they’re afraid and they’re justifiably afraid.
[Jan Breckenridge: Professor and Head of School of Social Sciences
Co-Convenor of Gendered Violence Research Network
University of NSW, Sydney]
Often when people don’t leave it’s because they really feel it’s not in their interest to do so, that there would be worse violence. Some people stay in relationships because they have children and they have a grave concern about letting the children go with the perpetrator without them, so staying is a way of being protective and I think for some people they went into the relationship with a lot of hope and they might still have residual feelings and perpetrators are very very good at saying “I’ll change, I’ll do this, I won’t drink anymore” and it’s very common for people to believe that and want to believe that their relationship can be saved. So there are a range of reasons why people might stay and it’s very difficult as an outsider and a non-counsellor to actually unpack that and do anything useful with it.