Spouse Abuse: Profile Of A Victim

Editor's Note: This is the second in a six-part series of articles on domestic violence. Tomorrow, a look at the Beaman Home, Kosciusko County's only women's shelter.

She's in her late twenties, divorced, has two kids and a good job. Her ex-husband never hit her while they were married, but after her divorce she lived for a year with a man who battered her repeatedly - physically and mentally.

She left him recently, and it's a decision she still has a hard time sticking to.

"I cry a lot and I miss him and I think about him being with someone else: Would he be mean to her, too? If he's going to change, I want him to change with me," she said.

The abuse didn't start until they had been seeing each other for a few months. "He was a good con," she said. "He didn't do it until I absolutely loved him."

He was violent on a regular basis, she said: "Always at least once a month." He threw her around, choked her, blackened her eye. He swore he never punched or slapped her, and she doesn't remember him actually hitting her.

He never hurt her when her kids were around, so she was even more surprised when her older child one night told her how much she hated him and that she knew what was going on.

"I can handle taking it myself, even though I don't want to. But once I saw the hate that she had for him, once I saw how it was my kids taking it, I thought, 'Enough's enough.'"

Not wanting to expose her children to that kind of a home life, she made him leave the home they shared. "Women, when they have children, have to put their children first," she said.

He left, but he still calls and flies into a jealous rage if he sees her out in public with someone else.

Now that she has some distance from the relationship, she can see that the abuse was not always physical.

"The physical abuse is not half as bad as the verbal abuse. The first time they get you to be weak. Then you almost feel like you deserve it. He has you believing that you're the sick one. When you love somebody, you take what they say to your heart. They break you down and you're not sure if you're the one who's OK or if they're OK and you're the one who's messed up.

"You always feel like you're on the edge when they're around because they'll always find something. It's easy going into (the relationship) but it's not as easy getting out of it."

Her family and friends saw the bruises, she said, and couldn't understand why she stayed with him. "I told them, 'I love him.' "

"If you were to see him, you would think he's just the sweetest young man, and he's cute," she said. "He's great with kids, and that's one reason I fell in love with him."

Most of the abuse was his way of showing he loved her, of keeping her from leaving him, she said. After a violent episode, he would go to sleep, but never until he knew she was asleep first. She wouldn't leave while she was asleep, he reasoned.

She had him arrested once, but felt bad about putting him in jail and denying his daughter her child support money, so she asked the prosecutor's office to let him go.

"If I throw him in jail and he wouldn't see his kid, do I do that to her?" she said.

If she has anything to say to other abused women, it would be to assure them that the situation is not their fault. "I would tell them, 'You're not the sick one, they're the sick one,' " she said. "They are very sick and they make a woman feel so bad. It's easy to give in to a person like that because you're scared. I feel strong some days and I feel weak others. I just know I've got to go on.

"If you're miserable with them you might as well be miserable without them because that misery is going to go away. Life's got to get better some way."

So why don't they just leave?

• Battered women return to their partners an average of 6 to 10 times before they leave them for good.

• Women who leave their batterers are at a 75% greater risk of being killed than those who stay.

• 70% of all battered women who die are killed while trying to leave.

• Up to 1/3 of America's homeless population is women and children fleeing abuse.

• In their first year after divorce, a woman's standard of living drops by 73% while a man's improves by an average of 42%.

(Statistics provided by the Beaman Home, the Elkhart County Women's Shelter and the Fort Wayne YWCA Shelter for Women.)