Stop the silence: an attorney speaks up
By Natalia Williams, Aug 4, 2006

In 2003, I was hired as an attorney by an agency to represent low-income women who were victims of domestic violence. I spent the next three years in court representing these clients as they sought to divorce their abusers, fight for custody of their children or obtain an order of protection or child support. Working with hundreds of clients, I found that domestic violence encompassed all kinds of behavior, the only common denominator being controlling another person. 

While most of my cases involved physical abuse, I also handled cases that involved not beatings but rather intimidation, threats and controlling behavior. One client described a husband who never hit her but would become enraged daily and walk around the house violently swinging a hammer at her. Another woman described a husband who padlocked the refrigerator so that he could control how much she ate each day. Yet another client never received any physical abuse but was essentially held captive by her husband and in-laws, prevented from learning English and made to work as a slave for the family. 

I also found that domestic violence affects the entire family, and in particular children. There isn't enough space in this article to delve into the profound effect of family violence on children, but I have never heard anything as devastating as the 911 phone call from a nine-year-old boy, hyperventilating and repeating "my daddy is killing my mommy." 

As my caseload increased and I began to work with clients from all different social, economic and religious backgrounds, I began to think more about why this happens and how we can prevent it. Who are these people who are abusing their loved ones, and who are the women staying in these relationships? 

Although men and women can both be perpetrators and victims of domestic violence, the overwhelming majority of abuse victims that I represented were female and their abusers were male, so I will use the according pronouns in this article.

Many people asked me if I was ever afraid of dealing with an abuser in court. Sometimes I was. There were occasional batterers who seemed out of control even when appearing in court in front of the judge. One husband began sending paranoid letters to my office and would call me screaming on the phone. But generally, the anger was directed at my clients, not me. I also began to see that in most of the cases the abuser's behavior fit into explainable patterns. Drug and alcohol abuse, as well as mental illness, played large roles. Poverty and economic pressures also played pivotal roles and were often interlinked with other causes. Many clients told me that the abuse only began when economic and social pressures appeared in the relationship, many times in the form of a newborn baby. There were also many broken individuals who seemed emotionally underdeveloped and immature. Many as children had never experienced positive relationships to model their behavior on, and consequently they expressed powerful emotions, 
such as love and vulnerability, through anger. I saw that social and religious structures could also have an impact. In communities where men enjoyed more social rights or standing than women, abusers were more often able to rationalize or legitimize their treatment of the victims. In some cases husbands would appear in court, outraged at having been pulled in front of a judge for what they considered perfectly acceptable behavior within in their community. Sometimes those husbands would appear in court with a community or religious leader who supported their justifications. 

By the time that my clients came to me for legal help, they had almost always left the batterer for the final time.

However, most of them had spent years going in and out of the abusive relationship. The reasons varied for each person, but I found many common threads. The economic reasons cannot be overstated. Time after time I had cases in which leaving the batterer required the woman to leave a financially comfortable existence for her and her children in exchange for an uncertain and dim future. Frequently, clients would move into a shelter and subsist on welfare and food stamps until they received a child support order. Strong child support laws have helped, and in the best cases the process works quickly and smoothly, but often the amount mandated by the court would be much less than the father had previously been providing for the children. 

There were also other kinds of dependence that made it difficult for my clients to leave and that often had been encouraged in the relationship. In cases in which the woman did not speak English, the abuser almost always used this as a form of control. This frequently would play out when the police would come to the home after being called by a neighbor and the abuser would convince the police to leave, later telling the woman that the police would never be able to help her. Other clients were dependent on the batterer because of their immigration status, which the batterer would usually threaten to report, or because they had no friends or family outside of the batterer and his relatives. One client from a closed religious, immigrant community had been sexually abused by her father for years, and then at age 14 forced by him to marry an older man who physically abused her severely. To have defied her father would have required her at age 14 to break with her community and be without any family or religious o
r financial support. 

Religious and societal pressures also frequently played a role in a client's reasons for remaining in the relationship. People take their commitments seriously and are reluctant to throw away a relationship when doing so goes against their religion or the customs of their community. I had many Orthodox clients who stayed in abusive relationships for over 20 years. For them, divorcing would have hurt their children's chance to make a good marriage match, and as mothers they felt they could only separate once their children had been married. 

Finally, perhaps the simplest reason for staying in abusive relationships is that people have established emotional bonds with their batterers, often during an early period when they had a more positive relationship. They are reluctant to leave something that they are so deeply invested in, or someone with whom they may have children. One client who had been savagely beaten and shot at by her husband and had separated from him still wanted to stay married. She explained that she wanted him covered under her medical insurance so he could receive treatment for mental illness and hopefully become a more positive presence in their children's lives. 

And then there were cases with complex psychologies that I could only guess at. One of my younger clients had twice been brutally raped by her boyfriend and then, when she was nine months pregnant, was beaten so badly that her stomach turned black and blue. Yet when police officers arrived in court to arrest the boyfriend, she began screaming and throwing herself at the officers to try to stop the arrest. 

My time in family court was not all negative. I saw fathers caring for children who were not their own, and I saw many people turn their lives around for the better. Twice I even saw clients make real peace with their abusers. I also learned that there are concrete things that help victims. Without a doubt, strong laws have and do provide protection to victims, particularly laws that affect the availability of orders of protection for victims and the penalties for abusers. Strong child support laws, welfare laws and social programs also make it financially possible for victims to leave their abusers. Educated police officers and judges are also critical. Sometimes a call to the police is the first step a victim takes to try to separate herself from the abuser, and a police officer who has an understanding of domestic violence and takes it seriously can make a difference. Judges ultimately make decisions in domestic violence cases, and judges who understand the range of behavior that family violence can encomp
ass and the special difficulties the victims face appearing in court can ease the court process. Legal services and legal outreach into communities to inform clients of their rights also help. I met with many women at local community centers who did not know that the behavior they had long suffered was in fact illegal and that tools existed for them to protect themselves. Perhaps most essentially, we can all fight domestic violence by educating societies and ourselves that women have equal social rights and freedoms, and that their exercise of these rights strengthens all of us.