Dr Gabrielle Jamela Hosein
In past generations, women were not encouraged to leave violent relationships.
While feminists transformed this message over the last decades and mobilised to demand improved police and social services response, there are still many reasons why women stay, or leave and return.
Women return to male abusers for many reasons – economic insecurity, fear for their life or lack of support and intervention. These are external factors with which we have grown familiar, and for which there are state and NGO responses.
There are also internal factors.
Women victims may have challenges managing their emotional connection with their batterer and miss him when they are separated. While they may want violence to stop, they may not want the relationship to end.
They may believe their batterer’s remorse or apology. The batterer may have convinced them that he is suffering as a result of their abandonment or that he is the victim who has been punished enough or is the one who is hurting most. He may have threatened to kill himself.
Abusers are extremely emotionally manipulative and can make victims feel responsible for the violence, responsible for batterers’ emotions and actions, and responsible for the relationship ending or lasting.
How many women ended bad relationships and were blamed for being the ones who walked away?
Victims also underestimate their vulnerability to returning to violent relationships or the emotional turmoil they may experience when leaving. They may want to leave, but experience sudden decisions to return, perhaps feeling power in rescuing or reassuring an abuser who has promised to love them and care for their needs. Abuse can destroy victims’ self-esteem and belief that others will love them.
Abusers often follow violence with a phase of being loving or making convincing promises that minimise the future likelihood of violence.
We need to talk more about the confusing and contradictory feelings that accompany leaving abusive partners and ending relationships, including guilt and loss.
Feelings of attachment to abusive relationships are not hard to understand. We continue to love abusive parents and feel sorry for hurtful family members. It takes long to leave relationships where we feel unloved, put down or unhappy.
It’s important not to treat victims who return to violence as if they are different from others also struggling with toxic relationships. Our society normalises unhealthy emotional behaviour and notions of love.
Beyond all this, it’s important to recognise that beliefs that condone violence in some circumstances or blame women victims continue to exist among adolescents and young people across the region.
In other words, we have failed to sufficiently teach another generation of girls and boys what violence is, that violence is intolerable and is not an expression of love, why it occurs and how victims should respond.
As documented in numerous studies, we simply don’t give young people the tools they need to understand emotional neg
