Consider the following scenario. A bright, attractive, kind young woman goes off to college, where she enters a relationship with a young man. Less than a month after they start dating, he begins to treat her cruelly, with blows or harsh words or both. In stead of dumping him, instead of throwing him permanently out of her life, she stays in the relationship, taking more and more abuse. On the urging of her friends, she at last goes to a counselor and get the obvious advice: get away from the guy, get a re straining order, press charges, etc. Yet still she will not act on it. It takes months, or longer, filled with vicious treatment, before she gets away if she gets away at all.

Hypothetical? I wish it were. Yet the sad truth is that I know several women who have gone through it in one form or another, and I have read of countless others. Each time I hear such a story, my reaction is always the same: shock, disbelief, and incompr ehension. It's not the mere fact that the guy is a jerk; there are plenty of jerks (male and female) in the world. What I often cannot fathom is why the girl stays with him.

Of course, in some cases I can. He may have threatened to kill her if she leaves (this happened to a friend of mine), and with today's revolving-door excuse for justice, she may have reason to fear him. If they are married, especially with children, she m ay be dependent on him for sustenance. More often, she may feel a duty to change him, or feel pity for him, or even think she somehow deserves the abuse.

There are other rationales; I have personally heard some of them given. Yet even though they make sense intellectually, on a deeper level I cannot understand. Unless forced by threats or economic dependence or some other compelling reason, I cannot compre hend how a woman can choose to stay with a man who deliberately hurts her.

For one thing I have figured out is that in such a case, she does choose, and until she makes the decision not to take it anymore, there is nothing anyone can do to stop the abuse (that is, short of using a .45 and a shovel, and believe me, I've been temp ted). It's what Ayn Rand calls "the sanction of the victim."

This was a painful realization for me. The first time a friend told me she was in an abusive relationship, the first thing on my mind was to help her get out. I told her she did not deserve it, that no one deserves abuse. I explained what a vicious thing it is to take pleasure in tearing someone down. I asked her how she'd react if a masked man with a knife came into her room, and why she didn't react that way when her boyfriend showed up. I wanted to buy a gun for her and every woman in America and teach them all how to use one, because it was obscene to me that he should have control over her, that she should have to be afraid of him.

But a gun is useless without the will to defend oneself, and all my advice was useless as well. (She finally did leave the troll, but he'd damaged her badly.) The root of the trouble was that she did not believe, as I do, that physical abuse is unforgivab le and emotional abuse damn well nearly so. Another friend of mine once jokingly said of her fiance that if he hit her once, she'd leave him, and if he hit her again, she'd kill him. She spoke in jest, but if he'd actually struck her, I have no doubt she would have made good her threat.

Without that basic conviction, any woman (for that matter any man) will always be vulnerable to abuse and control. I can see how to teach it to one's children. But how to reach those who grew up without it, who are already being abused and lack the will t o fight, is a terrible problem. It will require patience, empathy, prayer, and long reiteration of the truth: that no one deserves abuse, that you cannot change someone by letting him destroy you, that it is far better to be alone than with a victimizer, etc., etc. God willing, such advice and support will lead the victims at last to say, "No more."

John Keisling recommends the NRA's "Refuse To Be A Victim" seminar to any woman who has made that decision. He is a math Ph.D. candidate whose column appears Wednesdays.

By John Keisling
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