`Why Doesn't She Leave?' -- The Realities Facing The Battered Woman Are Much More Complex Than The One Question That's Most Frequently Asked About Her

------------------------------------------------------------------ When faced with the realities of "domestic violence," any reasonable person has to ask: What can be done to prevent it? Unfortunately, the question most of us ask is: Why doesn't she leave? It's a question that illuminates a profound misunderstanding of the realities facing the battered woman. ------------------------------------------------------------------

When we look again at the facts - millions of women battered every year, a woman battered every few seconds, thousands of women murdered every year by the men they live with - and when we consider what a fundamental right it is to be able to live, just to be, free of harm inside one's own skin, then the next question should be obvious: Why hasn't this violence been stopped? Any reasonable person has to ask: What can we do to prevent it?

But as it turns out, that's not the question reasonable people ask. We ask instead: Why doesn't she leave?

The same old question

Despite the immense achievements of the battered-women's movement in the past 15 years, those who work to stop violence against women - those who staff the hotlines and the shelters and the legal-service centers, those who press to make law enforcement and criminal justice act responsibly, those who lobby for legislative reform - know that the next time a woman is battered in the United States (which is to say within the next 12 seconds), few

people will ask: What's wrong with that man? What makes him think he can get away with that? Is he crazy? Did the cops arrest him? Is he in jail? When will he be prosecuted? Is he likely to get a serious sentence? Is she getting adequate police protection? Are the children provided for? Did the court evict him from her house? Does she need any other help? Medical help maybe, or legal aid? New housing? Temporary financial aid? Child support?

No, the first question, and often the only question, that leaps to mind is: Why doesn't she leave?

This question, which we can't seem to stop asking, is not a real question. It doesn't call for an answer; it makes a judgment. It mystifies. It transforms an immense social problem into a personal transaction, and at the same time pins responsibility squarely on the victim.

It obliterates both the terrible magnitude of violence against women and the great achievements of the movement against it. It simultaneously suggests two ideas, both of them false: that help is readily available to all worthy victims (which is to say, victims who leave), and that this victim is not one of them.

So powerful and dazzling is this question that someone always tries to answer it. And the answer given rarely is the simple truth you find in the stories of formerly battered women: She does leave. She is leaving. She left.

No, so mystifying is the question that someone always tries to explain why she doesn't leave even after she has left. This exchange takes place remarkably often on television talk shows and news programs - heavily influencing the way the public thinks about battered women. Let me give you an example.

The case of Karen Straw

In October 1987 the local New York City affiliate of the CBS television network included in the nightly news a segment on the case of Karen Straw, a 29-year-old woman about to stand trial for murder.

Karen Straw had left her husband, Clifton, in 1984, after a three-year marriage, and moved with her two children to a welfare hotel. She wanted a divorce, but she couldn't afford one. For more than two years, her husband harassed and beat her although she obtained orders of protection from the court and tried at least 10 times to have him arrested and prosecuted.

In December 1986 he broke into her room, beat her, raped her at knifepoint in front of the children, and threatened to kill her. She got hold of a kitchen knife and stabbed him. She was charged with second-degree murder, the heaviest charge the state could bring against her since New York reserves first-degree murder charges for murders of police officers and prison guards.

The WCBS report filed by reporter Bree Walker, a woman, showed footage of Karen Straw, the Queens courthouse where she was to be tried, and short bites of three interviews prerecorded separately with Michael Dowd, a prominent attorney who had volunteered to defend Straw; Madelyn Diaz, a woman previously acquitted of all charges after killing her assaultive husband (a police officer); and me.

Introduced by Jim Jensen, the anchorman, the segment went like this.

Jim Jensen: This is a problem society has never really learned to deal with: women who are physically abused by their husbands. This evening we take a closer look at this problem and the way some women are finally getting some help. Bree Walker has more.

Bree Walker (reporter): Jim, it's a painful closer look at this black eye on society, how the cuts and bruises suffered by women with abusive husbands are usually overlooked, but when women finally stop suffering in silence and turn to desperate measures like murder, no one can overlook that, especially in court where once again the plea of self-defense will be tested.

Tomorrow this woman, Karen Straw, faces the trial of her life. The charge: second-degree murder. The penalty: life in prison. Karen Straw allegedly killed her husband after escaping to a shabby welfare apartment where she lived with her two children. She says she turned a knife on him after he broke in and raped her at knifepoint. After two years of repeated attacks, her attorney says she had no other way out.

Michael Dowd (attorney): She went to the family court. She had him arrested in the criminal court. She called the police numerous times. She moved away from him. And nothing that she did stopped him from coming back, beating her, threatening her, hospitalizing her, raping her.

Ann Jones: She'd done everything a battered woman can do to get out of that situation and to get the criminal justice system to be responsive and responsible for her safety. But it still didn't work. They still didn't protect her.

Walker: . . . Both (Jones) and Straw's attorney agree: the only protection our society provided Karen was a flimsy paper shield.

Dowd: She was given a piece of paper, what we call an order of protection. It's as if we gave her a crucifix to defend herself against a vampire.

Jones: Battered women are denied protection. Battering men are not arrested. They're not locked up for any substantial length of time.

Dowd: There's no question in my mind that Karen Straw was acting justifiably. She defended herself in her own home. Hopefully, 12 honest people will give her something that the professionals couldn't, and that's some fairness and justice and a chance to live her life.

Walker: The one positive note to this tragic song that plays too often is that support (systems) like victim service agencies, hospitals and church outreach groups seem to be making a difference. The numbers show women murdering husbands and boyfriends is the only type of homicide that has in fact decreased in the last 10 years. So perhaps we can say that where the courts have left off, individuals have picked up.

That ended Walker's prerecorded report. Wrapping it up, anchorman Jensen leaned toward reporter Walker, sitting beside him in the studio, and asked the standard question, the one everybody always asks: Why didn't she leave? Jensen phrased it this way: "Why would one murder her husband instead of just walking away?" The question was particularly remarkable, for it didn't match Bree Walker's report or the circumstances of Karen Straw's life at all.

But even more remarkable was reporter Walker's reply. As though the facts lay not in her own report but in the anchorman's irrelevant question, Bree Walker began to explain why Karen Straw, a woman who had walked away, had not. "There are a lot of different reasons psychologists say - helplessness, dependence, a lot of different reasons. A lot of women feel . . ."

Jensen interrupted: "Well, if they're dependent on them, when they kill 'em, they've lost their dependence, haven't they?" He sounded angry, as if he were scolding Walker for her point of view. Walker, looking startled, responded, "Well, certainly. Yes. It's an ugly, ugly, confusing problem." There was a moment's awkward airspace before anchorwoman Carol Martin jumped in. "Well, from that subject we'll move on," she said. "Still ahead, we'll talk about the rain . . ."

His violence overlooked

But Jensen's question still hung in the air: "Why would one murder her husband instead of just walking away?" It enveloped the story in a fog of mystification. Clifton Straw's violence and terrorism disappeared in that puff of rhetoric, utterly overlooked. Vanished, too, was the public issue reporter Walker had presented, magically replaced by the personal problem of another dumb woman. Viewers did not have to question the failure of the police and courts to protect this woman; they could think instead that Karen Straw might simply have walked away. Just when viewers were beginning to feel indignant on her behalf, they could say to themselves instead: "How stupid of her. Why didn't she think of that?"

I told this story about the TV program to a very smart, very successful network television producer, a woman, of my acquaintance. "Don't you think Jim Jensen's comments were outrageous?" I asked.

"You're too hard on men," she said. "You can't expect men who've never been that scared of another person to understand why battered women can't leave. You have to be patient and explain to them that it was fear, not just dependence, that made her stay with him."

"Wait a minute," I said, taken aback. "You didn't hear the story either. The point is that this woman didn't stay. She was outta there. Gone. Goodbye. She left."

My friend looked puzzled. "Then how did she get raped?"

Karen Straw was acquitted of all charges against her by jurors who heard the whole story; and she was released to gather up the tatters of her life. But that familiar, trivializing question - the question that obscures both the extent of violence against women and the immense individual and collective efforts of women to overcome it - doesn't go away. It contains the whole history of woman beating in America. And our response to it shapes the future.

Appealing through `the system'

The indelible paper trail Karen Straw left through the records of hospitals, police, courts and social services proves that she made every possible appeal for help to "the system." For women's advocates, Karen Straw became a textbook case: a woman who followed through on everything the criminal justice system told her to do, only to find the system worse than worthless. Karla DiGirolamo, executive director of the New York State Governor's Commission on Domestic Violence, told the press, "It's a crime of the system that we allow people to live this way, without public intervention, until they feel they have no alternative but to kill." Ronnie Eldridge, former director of the New York State Division for Women, commented, "Obviously, this system doesn't work at all." But in fact, considering that the system was designed by men for men, it worked perfectly - at least until the murder trial when the jury refused to cooperate by convicting Karen Straw. Karen Straw, all by herself, had to stop the man who terrorized her. Why should men, who had no quarrel with her assailant, have done it for her? What right had she to ask?

But men don't like to come right out and say that. Think about it - how would it sound? So they say instead, as anchorman Jim Jensen did: Why didn't she leave? And then someone, someone like reporter Bree Walker, begins to explain - all about dependence and helplessness and low self-esteem and masochism and psychological problems and what the experts say and . . . well, you see how neatly that works.

And you see what battered women, individually and collectively, have been up against all this time.

(From the book "Next Time She'll Be Dead: Battering and How to Stop It," copyright 1994, Ann Jones. Reprinted by arrangement with the publisher, Beacon Press. Distributed by Los Angeles Times Syndicate.)