I could be your sister, your daughter, your mother. I could be you.
I am a victim of domestic violence.

Battered women are the products of the crime of domestic violence -
not the cause. Until the only man I ever loved enough to marry beat me,
I was a person, a woman. As a result of his crimes against me,
I am now a battered woman. My behavior is simply reacting to what he did to me.
My being a battered woman is about him, not me.

I fell in love with a man who charmed and impressed and romanced me.
I loved him more than any man I had ever dated, and I married him.
However, I did not know who he was. Batterers know that if they
present their true selves no one would ever talk to them, so they don't.
They act, they con, they deceive - we fall in love. Then, when we start
seeing who they really are, we don't believe it. We want to believe
anything but the truth. And the truth is that these men trick and woo us
and then commit crimes of violence upon us.

We are confused and shocked by what we have seen and experienced.
They tell us that they don't know what happened, they lost control,
they were drunk, we made them do it. We want to believe anything
other than that they meant to do this terrible thing to us. It is not
in our capacity to understand that their acts of violence are deliberate,
but they are. As long as we believe that we have the power to get the man
with whom we fell in love back, as long as we believe that this is caused
by something we can fix, as long as we believe anything but the truth,
we will stay.

We know he does not have to be this way; he acted entirely differently
when we met and fell in love. We know we can get him back. I remember
pleading with my new husband: "You are not the man I married; you are
his evil twin. What have you done with him?" And later in anger:
"How dare you show me how wonderful you can be and then not be that way."

When we start to give up hope, the man we fell in love with comes back.
We are constantly off balance because he keeps changing from the man we
fell in love with to monster boy. When do we leave? When things are
wonderful and the man we fell in love with is loving us? No, life is too
wonderful, and everything is fixed and right with the world. When we are
battered? No, we don't have the strength or desire to live, much less fight.
So we give up. We give in. We disappear. Our only existence is keeping him
happy so he won't hurt us. He begs us to cheer up, he makes promises,
he woos us back.

Eventually many of us reach a point where we no longer have hope for the
relationship or our fear of being injured or killed becomes too great,
or we see our children being damaged. In some cases our children, sometimes
very small children, save our lives by calling 911. Whatever it is that
happens, something in us changes. We decide we can't or won't take the abuse,
and we decide to leave. It can take seconds, or it can take years.
And the most dangerous time for a battered woman is while she is leaving
or after she has left, according to countless studies.
This is when most of us are killed.

He begs us to stay; when it doesn't work he threatens to kill us
and our children. My batterer threatened to kill my parents in front
of me, then torture me until I prayed for death. He told me he could
have someone else kill me and he could be 100 miles away having dinner
with witnesses who would back him up. We are hostages; still, we are safer
on the streets than in our own homes.

The first time that I called a crisis hotline, I found out that domestic
violence happens to millions of women every year in this country.
This means that millions of husbands and boyfriends beat up their wives
and girlfriends every year. There isn't an entity called domestic violence
that is doing the battering. It is men. Men who say that they love us and
can't live without us. I learned that four to six women a day are killed
in this country by their husbands and boyfriends. I learned that we have
thousands of shelters for women and children to hide from their husbands,
boyfriends and fathers. I was outraged. Not in this country,
Not in America.

But yes, we live in this country, America, which tolerates domestic violence
and blames the victims for it. Unlike any other crime of abuse,
even child abuse, the perpetrator picks and woos his victims and cultivates
romance in order to commit the crime. What could be more cruel and evil?
Who could believe it could happen to them? Not me. I took pictures of my first
black eye because I couldn't believe that my husband of six weeks had done this to me, his new bride.

Where is society's outrage at these men and what we have tolerated for so long?

Then there is the legal system. Every woman I have worked with has a
hard time deciding what was more abusive, her batterer's violence,
or the legal system she is involved with in trying to leave him.
After I had left my batterer, I told members of a support group an
awful truth: I honestly felt that I wished that I had never left -
because when I was with him, half the time things were good and half the
time things were bad, but now that I had left, things are just bad.
Every woman there said that they felt this way now or had before.

I was married for nine months. I knew my ex-husband for nine months before
that. He was convicted of eight felonies, two with great bodily injury
enhancements. Two of these felonies are for threatening to kill me and
worse if I ever told or if he ever spent a day in jail. He was sentenced
to 12 years in prison. He will serve six years and eight months. He gets
out in six months. I am terrified and have spent the past six years
preparing for this.

Why does she stay? Because if she leaves, the chances increase that
he may kill her. And if she wins in court, all she does is buy some time.
I left. I won. Do you envy me?

Pam Butler is a domestic violence victim's advocate for Domestic Violence Project of Silicon Valley . Check out her site at:
 http://www.growing.com/nonviolent/