‘Why didn’t she leave?’: The wrong question in domestic violence cases

Ask a room full of people what a woman should do if her husband is violent, and almost everyone has a ready answer. “Leave him. Pack a bag. Go to your mother’s.”

It sounds so obvious when it is not your life. Most of the people who give this response have never faced the situation themselves. Their answer assumes something few of us have ever tested: that leaving is a one‑time decision a woman makes on a good day, and then simply leaves.

Anyone who has sat with a survivor long enough knows this is not how it works. Leaving is not a single decision. It is a series of smaller, harder decisions, made under conditions the rest of us rarely have to think about.

Read: What not to tell a woman in an abusive relationship

Start with the most obvious complication: A man who has already shown he can hurt you has also shown you what happens if you try to leave. This is a big worry. Women who leave violent partners are, by most accounts, at their most vulnerable in the weeks immediately after leaving, not before. So, the advice to “just leave” is, in many cases, advice to move towards the most dangerous point in the relationship, not away from it. We rarely speak about this part.

Then there is money, which does the quiet, unglamorous work of keeping people trapped long after fear alone might have loosened its grip.

A woman who has spent a decade managing a household rather than earning from one does not have savings waiting for her the day she decides enough is enough. She has children who need to eat that evening, not eventually. It is easy to tell someone to choose freedom over safety when you have never had to choose between hunger tonight and uncertainty tomorrow.

Add children into the equation and the maths gets harder—not simpler, as we sometimes assume. Do you take them into instability, or leave without them and live with that? Neither is a correct answer, and both get made, if they get made at all, entirely alone.