Why Did I Stay?

****Excerpt from the book Never Guilty, Never Free
By Ginny Foat with Laura Foreman

Why did I stay with him? I must have been asked that question a thousand times by now. I must have asked it myself ten thousand times. The trouble is, there's no easy answer. Or rather, there's no one answer. There are a lot of different explanations that apply to different times.

I stayed with him, at first, because he made me feel good about myself. I stayed because I loved him, because leaving would have meant another failure, and I was terrified of failing again. I stayed because I believed him after the first beating, or the second, or the third, when he said it would never happen again, and when he begged my forgiveness. I stayed because I accepted the blame for having provoked him.

I stayed because I had nowhere else to go and I didn't know what else to do. I stayed because I was afraid of being alone and because I was ashamed. I stayed, eventually, because I was afraid of what he would do to me if I left. At the time I had no way of understanding what was happening to me. I thought that I was being beaten because there was something wrong with me, some shameful flaw in me, that brought it on. That had to be true, I thought, because other women, good women, weren't being beaten by their husbands or lovers. Oh, maybe it happened in the slums sometimes to poor, degraded people who couldn't help themselves. But it didn't happen to people I knew, to the women who lived next door, or down the street. It was happening only to me. I was guilty, for some reason, and I was alone.

I couldn't know, then, that there were millions of women just like me, exactly how many no one is certain even today, since spousal abuse remains one of the country's most underreported crimes. One conservative estimate is that forty million American women will suffer a serious beating by an intimate partner at some time during their lives. And two thousand to three thousand women die each year at the hands of a husband, a lover, or an ex-partner.