CENTERPIECE : OUT OF HARM’S WAY : Learning to Reject Abusers : More female victims of emotional or physical mistreatment turn to shelters.

“There has to be a better way to live.”

After 40 years of physical and emotional abuse--from being locked in closets by her court-appointed guardians as a toddler to being confined to her boyfriend’s house as a woman--Tania Roberts said this idea finally struck her harder than any man ever had.

Roberts, a 43-year-old Thousand Oaks resident who spoke for this article under a pseudonym, said it was three years ago when she found the strength to leave an abusive boyfriend and enter a shelter for battered women.

Now she is among the counselors who see an increasing number of Ventura County women seeking help and rising up against men who have beaten or emotionally abused them.

The trend is not overwhelming--in fact, the Ventura County Coalition Against Household Violence in Ventura reported a slight decrease in calls and requests for shelter last year--but it shows up in the figures of several local agencies.

Martha Bolton, director of family services at Interface: Children, Family Services of Ventura County, a Camarillo-based agency, compared six-month periods and found a 34% increase in women seeking support services from 1990 to 1991.

In Ventura, police logged a 12% increase in domestic violence calls, from 34 calls a month from January to August, 1990, to 38 a month over the same period in 1991. In Simi Valley, police reported a 24% increase, from 27.5 calls a month in 1990 to 34 a month through November, 1991. Oxnard police said the number of domestic violence calls was stable at about 62 per month from 1990 through 1991.

Domestic violence experts say the cause for the rise in reported cases is unclear. They say the figure could indicate that awareness of the problem has increased, that more women are fighting back or that hard economic times are fueling increased frustration, abuse and violence in more homes. To calm violent behavior in a home, many authorities say, most abusers must overcome denial.

“It takes a willingness to . . . say, ‘Yes, I was violent and I want to change my ways,’ ” said Gina Giglio, a marriage, family and child counselor in Ventura.

“These guys are not bad guys,” said David Friedlander, a counselor who answers calls on an “anger hot line” opened last year by the Coalition Against Household Violence. He also runs an anger-management group for men who have been convicted of spousal abuse.

“They’ve had trouble in dealing with their anger,” Friedlander said. “I think they can learn new ways of doing that. . . . Sometimes, I think these guys are written off (as) unchangeable.”

For women to get help, it often takes the strength to leave a relationship in which they seem emotionally or financially trapped.

“A woman has to agree to take care of herself,” Giglio said. “A woman who is beaten up (often) gives up inside.”

In a few highly publicized cases, battered women have killed their abusers. But far more often, the first recourse is a friend, a family member or a women’s shelter.

At the Coalition Against Household Violence, Executive Director Jamie Leigh and other staff members recounted these cases among the many they have confronted in the past year:

* A 21-year-old Ventura woman, mother of a year-old child, called to say she had just been beaten again by her husband of two weeks. For three years before their marriage, the woman acknowledged, her husband had been abusive and unfaithful. “She was real shook up and real angry that she had married him,” a coalition staff member said.

* A 35-year-old Oxnard woman reported that her husband had taken her and their four children to a vacant lot and put a knife to her throat. The husband left them there, where they were found by a police officer. He called the coalition for help.

* A 21-year-old Ventura woman told shelter workers that she fled after her husband shoved her against the wall and table in their house, bruising her back and arm. She left her 18-month-old twins with her husband, who she said went to court and won custody of the children.

* When a 30-year-old Camarillo woman with four children found her way to the shelter, she was one of the most battered women that staff members had ever seen. She told staff members that her jealous husband had seen a construction worker say hello to her, accused her of flirting in front of their children and later took a machete to the construction worker’s leg. The husband was arrested, the shelter coordinator said, and received a suspended sentence for spousal abuse and a year in jail for the attack on the construction worker.

* After a 32-year-old Santa Paula mother took her two children with her to Oregon with an abusive, stealing, bad-check-writing boyfriend, Ventura County Child Protective Services officials gained custody of the children and had them returned to California. After several more months with the boyfriend, the woman fled and appeared at the coalition shelter in Ventura. She soon found a job, started visiting her children, took parenting courses and attended meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous and Co-dependents Anonymous. Shelter officials say court officials recently allowed the woman to move in with her parents and her children, and are considering restoring her custody of the children.

Authorities agree that domestic violence is a cyclical problem.

Lenore Walker, a Denver-based psychologist and author, asserts that children who see their mothers battered are 700 times more likely to imitate the violent behavior later.

Similarly, experts say, girls who are abused as children often find themselves attracted as adults to men who will treat them in a similar fashion.

The details of Tania Roberts’ story fit that profile.

Among her first memories, she recalled being beaten and locked in a closet. After living in a series of foster homes, she said, she was adopted by an alcoholic woman and her “cold and distant” husband.

When she was 11, Roberts recalled, a male acquaintance of her adopted parents sexually abused her. When she finally told her adopted mother seven years later, Roberts said, “She just got this glazed look in her eye and said, ‘You should have told me earlier,’ and walked away.”

Three failed marriages and a series of relationships followed with men that Roberts said were usually alcoholics or not interested in returning her affection.

In her last relationship before fleeing to the Interface shelter, Roberts recalled, she agreed to have no car, no job, no phone and no social contacts outside the house without her boyfriend. Her boyfriend often struck her and pushed her down the stairs, she said, but she nevertheless stayed.

“It wasn’t until the end that I became somewhat fearful for my life,” she said. The relationship, she acknowledged, “was horrendous. It was the epitome of every bad relationship I’d been in, including mother and father.”

Her decision to leave, Roberts said, came one day as she helped her boyfriend work on his car. She waited until he took a bath and snuck out the door to a telephone booth across the street. After being rebuffed by a girlfriend who had seen her fail to follow through on earlier escape plans, Roberts called a suicide prevention hot line. Staff members there called Interface. Several hours later, Roberts arrived at the closely guarded address of the Interface shelter.

After three days of quiet and counseling, Roberts’ headaches had receded, as had the urge to return to her boyfriend. She took particular encouragement from the shelter’s support group meetings.

“It was just a real comfort to know that I’m not the only one,” she said.

The Interface shelter, slightly smaller than a similar facility run by the Coalition against Household Violence, resembles a one-story, ranch-style house. Its kitchen is newly remodeled, and the house has five bedrooms and three bathrooms. As many as four women, 18 children and a shelter manager have lived there at one time.

But not every woman who seeks help is as fortunate as Tania Roberts. As the number seeking help increases, so will the number turned away.

Over a six-month stretch last year, records show that 147 women sought shelter or other help from Interface. Nearly 100 could be accommodated, but 51--more than one in three--were referred elsewhere. In August, 18 women were turned away because the facility was full, said Bolton, the crisis services director. Bolton attributes the increase in reported abuse cases to the economy, and suggests that the stress of the recession “reaches into the home when businesses aren’t doing well.”

Walker, the Denver-based psychologist, has said the increase in reports of domestic violence might signal two things: rising defiance among abused women, and anger--and sometimes heightened violence--among the abusers when they encounter defiance. “You listen to it and you shudder,” Walker said. “I think they’re angry that women are not taking it anymore.”

To reduce those cases, Walker calls for increased police and court attention to cases of domestic abuse. But in the tangled psychology of domestic violence, authorities say, it’s not enough to stop an abusive man from pursuing his victim; there are still the victim’s unhealthy instincts to reckon with.

For days after she fled her last abusive home, Roberts said, “My biggest fear was that I’d go back.”