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01-08-2007

The Dynamics of Staying and Leaving: Implications for Battered Women’s Emotional Well-Being and Experiences of Violence at the End of a Year

Authors: Margret E. Bell, Lisa A. Goodman, Mary Ann Dutton

Published in: Journal of Family Violence | Issue 6/2007

Abstract

Much of the discourse on intimate partner violence assumes that women must end their relationship with their abusive partner to increase their safety and emotional well-being. Few studies, however, exist to support this assumption. Equally problematic, those studies that do exist have failed to distinguish women who leave and stay out from those who leave only to later return. Comparing emotional well-being and experiences of violence for 206 low-income, primarily Black battered women following different relationship trajectories, this longitudinal study found that women both separated from and together with their partner for the entire year of the study fared best at the end of that year compared to women “in” and “out” of the relationship over time. Beyond challenging common assumptions, these findings highlight the importance of considering the larger context within which an individual instance of leaving occurs.

Although we recognize that many of our participants continued to experience abuse during the course of the study such that their symptoms were not “post” traumatic, we nevertheless utilized a measure of PTSD because many women experience PTSD symptoms (along with many others) even in the context of ongoing violence.

With regard to these latter two points, however, we should note that the causal direction could also be the opposite, that levels or changes in levels of violence over time may have been what led to the different relationship courses, rather than vice versa.

This conclusion makes sense only if women in the completely apart group were equivalent to women in other groups on variables such as the length of the relationship, duration of the violence, time since the most recent incident of violence, whether the most recent event was the first violent incident, or whether the most recent event was the worst violent incident, since otherwise some of these completely apart women might actually have been together then apart women (in that we do not know what their relationship status was prior to Time 1). This equivalence did exist in our sample, however, as none of these variables were significantly different across groups.

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Title: The Dynamics of Staying and Leaving: Implications for Battered Women’s Emotional Well-Being and Experiences of Violence at the End of a Year
Authors: Margret E. Bell
Lisa A. Goodman
Mary Ann Dutton
Publication date: 01-08-2007
Publisher: Kluwer Academic Publishers-Plenum Publishers
Published in: Journal of Family Violence / Issue 6/2007
Print ISSN: 0885-7482
Electronic ISSN: 1573-2851
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10896-007-9096-9

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The Dynamics of Staying and Leaving: Implications for Battered Women’s Emotional Well-Being and Experiences of Violence at the End of a Year

Abstract

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