‘Why didn’t she leave?’: The wrong question in domestic violence cases

By  Dorcas Muga-Odumbe

Gender & Health Editor

NMG

What you need to know:

• Domestic violence survivors face fear, financial dependence, isolation and risks that make leaving an abusive partner far from simple.
• Telling women experiencing domestic violence to ‘just leave’ ignores the dangers, children, money and isolation they must navigate.

Ask a room full of people what a woman should do if her husband is violent, and almost everyone has a ready answer. “Leave him. Pack a bag. Go to your mother’s.”

It sounds so obvious when it is not your life. Most of the people who give this response have never faced the situation themselves. Their answer assumes something few of us have ever tested: that leaving is a one‑time decision a woman makes on a good day, and then simply leaves.

Anyone who has sat with a survivor long enough knows this is not how it works. Leaving is not a single decision. It is a series of smaller, harder decisions, made under conditions the rest of us rarely have to think about.

Start with the most obvious complication: A man who has already shown he can hurt you has also shown you what happens if you try to leave. This is a big worry. Women who leave violent partners are, by most accounts, at their most vulnerable in the weeks immediately after leaving, not before. So, the advice to “just leave” is, in many cases, advice to move towards the most dangerous point in the relationship, not away from it. We rarely speak about this part.

Then there is money, which does the quiet, unglamorous work of keeping people trapped long after fear alone might have loosened its grip.

A woman who has spent a decade managing a household rather than earning from one does not have savings waiting for her the day she decides enough is enough. She has children who need to eat that evening, not eventually. It is easy to tell someone to choose freedom over safety when you have never had to choose between hunger tonight and uncertainty tomorrow.

Add children into the equation and the maths gets harder—not simpler, as we sometimes assume. Do you take them into instability, or leave without them and live with that? Neither is a correct answer, and both get made, if they get made at all, entirely alone.

And underneath all of it sits something less visible than money or fear: isolation, built slowly, long before the first blow ever lands. Control rarely announces itself as control. It shows up gradually, as concern; questions about where you have been, who you spoke to, why you needed new friends when you already had a husband. Each question sounds reasonable when it is asked alone.

Often a woman does not notice this happening. She only looks back later and sees how few people she still had around her. By then, the violence has usually started too, and there is nobody close enough left to ask for help. That makes leaving much harder than it sounds. Without someone nearby to turn to, leaving stops being a simple choice and becomes a much harder one.

So perhaps the question itself is the problem. Every time we ask why she did not leave, we hand the entire burden of escape to the one person with the least power in that home, while everyone else—family, neighbours, employers, the state—gets to stand outside the frame, uninvolved. It is a tidy arrangement for everyone except her.

A more honest question might be why we left her to manage all of this by herself in the first place. Why relatives who noticed the bruises chose silence over a conversation with her. Why communities treat a woman’s endurance as admirable rather than asking, earlier, what she actually needed. Why do our systems still expect a woman to walk into a police station as though the walk itself were not often the most frightening part?

None of this is an argument for pity. Survivors do not need admiration for staying or praise for eventually leaving. What actually helps them is practical, not emotional: A safe house that people know exists and can reach; financial support that lasts beyond the end of the marriage, rather than ending with it; and neighbours and relatives willing to notice early, so a woman never reaches the point of asking a stranger for land far from home just to stay alive. That kind of attention costs nothing. It simply requires that we stop looking away.

“Why did she not leave?” has never really been a question. It is a way of looking elsewhere. Asking now is harder, because it points back at the rest of us.