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Domestic Violence Essay

Domestic Violence Why do abused women tend to stay with their abusers? What are the realities for those abused women -- and how do the realities impact the treatment of battered women? This paper delves into those questions and issues.

Choice and Empowerment for Battered Women who Stay

An article in the peer-reviewed journal Social Work points out that while there have been plenty of articles and a great deal of information in recent years -- so that the public is more aware of the problem of battered women than in the past -- that additional knowledge has "proved useful" in dramatizing the problem but in addition it has "created new myths and injustices" (Peled, et al., 2000). One of the realities that result from the additional publicity about battered women is that women who stay in relationships with their batterers are seen as a "deviant group" -- which is unfortunate and does not help the problem (Peled, 9).

Another reality that is well-known by the public -- and contributes to the belief that the battered woman who stays is deviant -- is that some battered...

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In fact up to 60% of women who are abused go back to their abusers "…after discharge from a shelter" (Peled, 9). A woman who finds safety and comfort in a woman's shelter, and is given educational opportunities to better understand what has happened to her while she is in the shelter, and yet returns to the hellish beatings she ran away from, is seen as "…incompetent, weak, and lacking coping skills…contributing to their powerlessness," Peled explains (9).
And so the logical question -- notwithstanding the public's perceptions, which are not always based on facts -- why do women stay. What are her realities that lead her to continue accepting this abuse? For one thing, leaving the abuser may be "…more dangerous than staying for both the woman and her children"; to wit, it may "expose them to severe injury and even murder" (Peled, 11). Secondly, the battered woman may be suffering from "traumatic attachment," Peled writes (11). That is, the woman may suffer…

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Works Cited

McCormick, T. (1999). Convicting Domestic Violence Abusers when the Victim Remains

Silent. BYU Journal of Public Law, 13(2), 427-450.

Peled, E., Eisikovits, Z., Enosh, G., and Winstok, Z. (2000). Choice and Empowerment for Battered Women Who Stay: Toward a Constructivist Model. Social Work, 45(1), 9-15.
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