Why She Could Not 'Just Leave'
Why She Could Not 'Just Leave' - Domestic Abuse - Part I By Robyn H. Jimenez, Contributing Writer February 4, 2008 DALLAS (Special to the NNPA from the Dallas Examiner)- A woman is abused every 15 seconds. It affects more than 4 million women every year. It has no racial, economic, cultural or geographical boundaries. It affects men and women of every age group, of various religions and beliefs. It happens to people all around the world. According to "Portrait of Abuse, An American Epidemic," a 2007 locally produced film on domestic abuse: One out of ever four women will be abused during her lifetime. Domestic violence includes: physical abuse, verbal abuse, psychological abuse, emotional abuse and sexual abuse. More women are affected by domestic abuse than those affected by breast cancer. The film featured several women whose lives had been devastated by domestic abuse. "I was 25 and we met while we were in the military. We dated for one year and got married. We were married for two years. Well, when we got married I got pregnant on my honeymoon night. We were both very excited. Well, I ended up losing my baby. I had a tubal pregnancy. I came home to recover after my surgery and my husband picked me up and he threw me. I don't even know what set him off or why we were arguing, but he picked me up and he threw me across the room. And the only thing I was thinking was, 'Oh my God, my stitches are going to rip. What am I going to do?' Its like his soul was just empty," said Glenda, a domestic violence survivor featured on the film as she vividly recalls her husband choking her. One out of every five women will be or have been raped by her boyfriend or husband. "For the first 18 years of my life, I was told, or had the sense of, 'I was zero, I was nothing, I meant nothing, I was not loved.' So the first guy that walks by and says 'I love you,' that was it. 'Somebody loves me.' And that I was all I needed. And I was so blinded by that, that I couldn't see all the other little signs that were there. "And then, as we got into marriage and I had a child, all of a sudden it happens," said Shirley. She described how breastfeeding her son made her husband feel threatened and jealous, which was exacerbated by her lack of sexual drive due to the exhaustion that she felt from working, performing everyday household tasks and taking care of her newborn. And when they were intimate, he would insist that she perform tasks she was not comfortable doing. "A lot of times, and even now, the mindset is that when you say 'I do' well, you're suppose to perform sexual acts in bed...but that's with consent. And that's where the difference really lies, is that I wasn't consenting. I would say no and I would say no and I would say no. And it didn't matter," Shirley said. Eventually, she agreed that she would lie on the bed like a "dead fish," rather than having him take her by force. "Can you imagine being married to somebody and in your bedroom, you're telling him 'okay, I'm going to lay here like a dead smelly fish and you can just help yourself?' And that's what I did, probably every other night, for years. And that was what my marriage was. "I loved this guy and I promised to be his wife and to honor him and respect him, cherish him, and this is what he did to me. But you can't go talk to someone about this because they'll turn around and say, 'Well, you married him," and "You chose him." So where do you go? What do you do? And so I kept my mouth shut because that's what I learned to do, growing up." Homicide is the second leading cause of death for pregnant women in America. "A young lady, less than 20 years of age, married, came into the office, pregnant and I followed her through her pregnancy. And I noticed towards the end, the last trimester of her pregnancy, she frequently would come in with bruises. And there'd be bruises on her abdomen. She came in one day with a black eye. And her husband was always right there. I'd ask her if she wanted to talk about anything. 'What's going on?' And she always had a reason why she had these bruises. I guess I believed her and I didn't press her. "About three to four weeks prior to her delivery date, she came into the emergency room. Now she was in shock from blood loss. The baby was dead and she had huge injury to her abdomen, probably from boots. I think probably he had been kicking her. The baby died and she died. And that taught me a very significant lesson," said Dr. Robert Cluck, an obstetrician. Cluck now regrets not taking the opportunity to speak with her privately. But he says that now he asks every woman that comes in how everything is going at home and he's learned how to screen for it. Thirty percent of Americans say that they know a woman who has been physically abused by their partner in the past year. In the film, Glenda recalled a moment when she was abused by her husband in front of their guests. "No one came to my aide. They just left. Everyone just left. They just left. They just let him beat me and left me," she said with tears streaming down her face. Glenda said she knew she had to get out of that relationship because if she had waited even another year, he would have killed her or she would have been in prison. Lisa Muftic, Ph.D. at the University of North Texas, says the general view of American society is, "What occurs behind closed doors, remains behind closed doors," so what happens between a husband and a wife, a boyfriend and a girlfriend, really isn't anyone else's business. She said that movies and television, to some extent, reflect what generally goes on in society, which comes from a patriotical idea of 'man as ruler.' And then, in order to take control of his possessions-his possessions being: house, property, cattle, children and woman-he does so with a 'spare the rod, spoil the child' mentality. "So, essentially, what happens with the woman is, she goes from being under the rule of her father -that is then transferred to her husband. I think this is why people find this sometimes humorous. But it's really not humorous. Women that talked back, women that gossiped, women that were just not under good control-it was deemed necessary to use force - beating, kicking. Those types of things play into the idea that women that are being abused, somehow are deserving of that abuse. They have brought it on, they're hen-pecking their husbands, there's a possibility of adultery, they don't know when to shut up, she pushed them too far. And so essentially, they're asking for it. And this plays into how, in the criminal justice system, we treat women who are abused, which traditionally has not been very well. And so there's a general conception that in the hierarchy of power, females are still under males and that the man knows best. And if the man is resorting to violence, somehow its either because its necessary and/or she brought it on herself," said Muftic. The video shows scenes from older movies, The Philadelphia Story (1940), It Happened One Night (1934), Citizen Kane (1941) and Mr. & Mrs. Jones (1941), which has at least one scene where a man dominates the woman, taking his role as the authority figure by physical and/or emotional force: spanking, slapping, yelling, threatening, throwing over a table. But movies as recent as Titanic (1997) and Far From Heaven (2002), also suggests that the role of the over-powering man and the submissive woman are the norm, even today. But even comedies, such as I Love Lucy, show the role of the husband being so dominating, that he spanks the wife on occasion and at times threatens bodily harm. It even shows - with audience laughter in the background - moments where the wife is not only afraid of physical harm, but she winces and sometimes runs from him. Muftic suggests that if this is considered normal to a child watching it, which is suppose to be the ideal life on television, then as the child becomes an adult, its going to seem "normal"-especially if its happening in the child's own home. Fifty percent of men that abuse their wives also abuse their children. "If mom did not leave her battering husband, your father, the chances of you getting away are less. The battered wife who doesn't leave, is expressing one of the sad symptoms of being battered, is that you become numbed and you really have a sense of hopelessness, except to try to not trigger the rage of the batterer, who has often, out of his insecurity, made real threats that are quite believable," Muftic continues. In the film, Who's Boss - Marriage for Moderns, what was considered an educational film for newlyweds in 1950, the husband appears upset about his wife's behavior, saying, "Its about time she learns what comes first, our marriage or her job. I'm fed up with warmed up leftovers and dishes in the sink. She can't even find time to sew a button for me. What does a man work for? Beating his brains out to make something of himself, if his wife doesn't look up to him? Instead, she competes with me and makes a half man out of me. And I, like a fool, thought I was getting a wife. I'll show her who's boss." These are the images that were common for past generations, the generation who raised the now heavily divorced generation, the grandparents of the generation of unwed parents - of babymamas and babydaddies-temporary and disposable relationships which are still not immuned to abuse. "My father was a physically violent man. My mother was verbally abusive and sometimes physically, as well. You just toughen up and take it," said Angel. "There were signs before we got married that he would be violent. But I ignored them. He was the father of my baby and I was determined to marry him. Almost immediately he became abusive in some way, on a daily basis. I wanted to get out but I didn't have a job and I didn't know about battered women's shelters or any other resources. I was too ashamed to tell my parents 'You're right, I was wrong and my husband is a dog.' I thought I was so pathetic, not even my husband loved me. And my close friends were in abusive relationships, too. It was over a year later that one of my friends reached out to me after she was able to help herself out of her abusive relationship." Cynthia Dyer from the U.S. Department of Justice's Violence Against Women Office states that leaving does not always end the violence. She says that, because abuse is about power and control, many times leaving will cause in increase in violence. And the abuser usually perceives the victim leaving as a slap in the face to his power and control. "I remember the night that I made the decision to leave. From that moment, I was in a war zone. First he beat me until I was unconscious, held me down on the floor, put his knees on my shoulders, burned my neck with a cigarette, burned my arm with a cigarette, kicked me in the left ear until I was unconscious, and stripped me of my clothes and threw me in the back yard. And it was 27 degrees below zero with the wind chill that night," recalls Beth, a domestic violence survivor. "So I ran to the garage and uh... I knew I had to hide. So I found a tarp and I wrapped myself in it and hid in a corner behind some things. I heard him come in and he had a stick and I heard him poking around in the garage. And I just prayed, if he didn't find me, if I could just live through the night, that I would get my kids out of here because I knew what was going to happen next, that he was going to kill me because he told me so many times in that night. He promised me that he was going to kill me and that those kids would never see their mother ." Angel said that it makes her angry to hear people say that an abused woman should just leave her husband, it can't be that bad if she hasn't left, or that she wants to be abused if she stays. "It's not that easy and anyone that has been in that situation knows that it's not just a matter of packing her bags and leaving. And anyone that doesn't understand is blessed to have never been in that situation." http://www.louisianaweekly.com/weekly/news/articlegate.pl?20080204y