Battered Women Discover Leaving Is No Simple Task : Abuse: Lack of money or shelter stops many. Fear of more violence holds back others. And some stay for love.

The woman leafs through cards and letters, mementos of a life that very nearly killed her. She picks one up and reads from it, and her face glows bright with remembered love and comfort. It is 1978 again; she is a newlywed, and beloved.

The letter was written by her husband eight weeks after they took their vows--but before the rape, the death threats, the bruises that would follow, the head smashed on the bathroom tiles, the suicide attempts, the therapy bills. Before the despair.

“I am really free, free to be happy,” he wrote. “You are the most wonderful thing in my life and you are there forever. I love you, Monkey Girl.” The notes were on the pillow in the morning, in Kat’s luggage when she traveled. They reeled her in. They kept her close. When they no longer worked, her husband beat her until she could not leave.

Six years later, after trying several times to leave, Kat was finally gone for good. Why did she stay so long? “I loved him with all my heart,” she says. “Part of the coming back was that he’d woo me back. Part of it was that he’d threaten me.”

In the complex calculus that is domestic violence, there is no single answer to the abiding question, tinged with blame and threaded through with doubt: Why does a woman stay? For some, the answer is as simple as love; for others, as fundamental as money. It is as old as religion and as paralyzing as fear. It is hope and optimism, shame, guilt and the children. It is all of these things put together.

For some, it is the lack of opportunity: “The reason I didn’t leave him before was that I didn’t know there were shelters,” says Dianne, who is currently in hiding at a San Fernando Valley safe house. “I had nowhere to go.”

Simply knowing about shelters is not enough to push a woman from peril to protection. There are but 290 shelter beds in all of Los Angeles County--an area where law enforcement agencies received more than 67,000 domestic violence calls in 1993. Another 250 beds cover the rest of the region from Bakersfield to the Mexican border--an area that recorded nearly 50,000 such calls in the same year.

Most shelters do not take women in on weekends or in the evening. Most do not allow male children over the age of 12. Most cannot accommodate women with disabilities. Most offer little bilingual assistance. Most require women to quit their jobs, pull their children out of school, make sure that the men who hurt them do not follow them back. Shelter life is harsh, but these rare beds are rarely empty.

“The question ‘Why do women stay?’ assumes that these women have not left, when many of them have,” says Patricia Occhiuzzo Giggans, executive director of the Los Angeles Commission on Assaults Against Women. “The other question often asked is, ‘Why do they go back for more?’ They don’t go back for more of the battering. They go back for (more of) the good stuff.”

They go back for the stuff that drew them to their partners in the first place. For what is largely forgotten by a public that often comes to know domestic violence through headlines and tabloid TV--as with O.J. Simpson and Nicole Brown Simpson--is that the violence is but one part of a complex human equation.

Love is another. “God how I loved you,” Kat wrote in her hospital journal in the aftermath of a suicide attempt, four months after she filed for divorce. “I used to be unable to do anything but think about you when you were away. I loved lying in bed with you, eating oranges or cookies and talking and laughing.”

The physical violence began in earnest two years into a marriage filled with verbal abuse, sexual terror, being pushed from the car and left in the middle of nowhere. The first assault was “stunning,” she said, complete with smashed furniture, facial bruises, rape.

She left several times. He wooed her back, wrote her notes, bought her gifts. He terrorized her back, said he couldn’t live without her, said she wouldn’t live at all. Fear and shame kept her quiet; she never called police, visited the hospital, filed charges.

The last time was the worst time. She had already decided to leave him, rented a house in Toluca Lake, gone back to their apartment at the Marina City Club to gather her things, to see her cat. Her husband was gone. She fell asleep. He came home drunk.

From her journal: “Making me stand there for hours while he raved at me. Dragging me by my hair when he had to go to the bathroom and tying me up while he did. And then he raped me. Booze on his breath, his weight. The music very loud. The terror. . . .”

A writer, artist and former battered woman, Kat keeps a photo album of her many lives. She takes it with her when she speaks to volunteers on hot lines, teaching them the ins and outs of life amid abuse. The album shows between times, aftermaths, affection, despair. There is no violence in its pages, just a life that spirals out of control, just the love, just the pain. Her husband starts out handsome, becomes bloated and angry. Kat starts out a beauty, becomes a mannequin. “Look at that face,” she says. “I look like I’m dead.”

For this is what exists between the pull of love and the push of violence--an unsteady diet of degradation and daily life, tension and tedium, what Betty Fisher, executive director of Haven Hills shelter in the San Fernando Valley, refers to as “random reinforcement.”

Sometimes the batterer is awful, sometimes wonderful, sometimes barely there at all. He is controlling in ways that are hard to pinpoint, blaming, instructing, demanding, attentive. Kat’s husband knew where she was at every moment, popped up when he was least expected, omnipotent. Shawn Barton’s boyfriend cracked the code to her answering service, checked her messages daily. Dianne’s husband was far less subtle, keeping her home without car, phone or money.

“People hear about domestic violence when the situation is extreme,” says Jody Brown, a social psychologist with the Family Violence Research Program at the University of Rhode Island. “They haven’t seen the build-up, the slow insinuation of power and control. The first time the violence happens, the woman thinks, ‘Surely this can’t be happening.’ The second time she thinks, ‘Surely this can’t be happening again.’ ”

And this is the paradox: The early violence is generally the mildest, the easiest to explain away. It leaves the greatest room for hope that the abuse will not recur, the greatest room for belief when the battering partner says that he will never do it again, the greatest chance to keep a family together.

But “at an unconscious level, the fact that she stays with him despite the violence, symbolizes for him a certain license to repeat the violence,” says Lee Ann Hoff in “Battered Women as Survivors.”

The first time that Dianne’s husband beat her, he used a club of solid oak. He knocked her out and split her head open, spent five days in jail and was ordered to counseling. She believed him when he said he was sorry.

Alcoholics Anonymous and anger counseling helped for a while. But he discovered he could fake attendance at AA, realized that Dianne was going to stay. His drinking increased along with his sadism. “We had cockroaches in the apartment,” she recalls. “He’d burn them, maim them, watch them wiggle, pour hot oil on them and watch them suffer.”

He began to stay away at night, and beat her again when he reappeared. Eight months after the first beating, she left for good. “I simply could not and would not live in fear anymore,” she said. But the leaving was a process. Her daughter helped by not helping anymore. “She just got tired of listening, tired of the fact that I kept going back,” Dianne said.

She started attending Al-Anon meetings, because “I didn’t have anything of myself left. I’d given him parts of myself that I couldn’t afford to lose,” she said. “Al-Anon gave me some of that back.” She talked him into buying a car. And when she finally could not envision staying with him and staying alive she left. She had the car and the clothes on her back.

“You get to the point where you’re afraid to smile, to say I love you,” she said. It got to the point where I was living with a stranger. It was as if the man I had married had died. . . . I was afraid for my life.”

This is what it’s like to be a battered woman, a badly armed soldier in the most private of wars: You go in whole. You come out in pieces. You go in with perhaps a tenuous hold on self-respect. You come out after doing many, many things that you are not proud of. Or you do not come out at all.

“If someone was around, he was Mr. Charm, the perfect prince,” says Dianne, 45. “I was the ‘Psycho.’ That was what he called his second wife, too. And his mother. . . . By the time I got (to the shelter) I was pretty much drained of all the courage I had.”

The statistics: More than a third of all battered women frequently feel sad or depressed, say Richard J. Gelles and Murray A. Straus, in “Intimate Violence: The Definitive Study of the Causes and Consequences of Abuse in the American Family.” Forty-six abused women in 1,000 contemplate suicide frequently.

“The women who walk in these doors have so much courage,” says Betty Fisher of Haven Hills. “It’s courage brought about by desperation. Knowing what they know, to be able to come in here is just incredible.”

Or at very least incredibly lucky.

First they have to reach a point where change is possible--a process being studied now by Jody Brown at the University of Rhode Island. The key to change, says Brown, is for the woman to discover “that there is a possibility for something different and to know that it can happen for them.”

They will probably relapse, returning to their violent homes. Brown describes this not as failure but as a natural a part of any change, be it quitting smoking or losing weight. “Change is dynamic, slow and incremental,” Brown says. “It happens in stages. . . . Change does not happen all at once.”

Once a battered woman has reached the point where she is ready to leave she has to find a shelter spot that’s open--a small miracle in itself. At Haven House in Pasadena, bilingual outreach counselor Ana Espinoza figures that 55 families are turned away each month, largely for lack of space.

If the battered woman does not find a place to stay she probably will end up on the street, says Linda Bodin, Los Angeles County deputy district attorney in charge of the domestic violence unit. “She’s got the kids and she’s going to live out of the car. . . . After three days, the money runs out. All she’s got is what she has in her pocket, because he controls the money. And so, she goes home. And finally, she gets killed.”

Sometimes she gets killed even if she does not go back. Law enforcement officials estimate that 29% of female homicide victims are killed by a husband or lover--most often when they are trying to leave the relationship.

For Mary Hollis, 53, leaving became more dangerous than staying. Hollis still bears three small scars, reminders of a relationship that came to an end in Boston 27 years ago. One scar is where the bullet went in when her boyfriend--whom she had left more than a month earlier--shot her in front of her family and friends. The second is where surgeons poked around looking for it. The third, where it came out.

“I think about it sometimes,” says the woman, who was driven by abuse to hiding knives beneath her mattress and practicing how to kill her boyfriend. “I think about it because I’m still alive. I think about it when I hear the statistics about how many battered women die in the course of a week, in the course of a year. I think about it because I could have been one of those statistics.”

Her boyfriend got a three-year suspended sentence for battering and attempted murder. He spent six months in a Massachusetts jail for possession of a firearm. Mary Hollis vowed never to be beaten again. She has kept that promise to herself.

If you think that Mary Hollis’ story is an artifact of an earlier generation--the justice system in the bad old days--all you need to do is listen to Shawn Barton, who was not yet born when Hollis was shot.

Shawn Barton, 25, learned the ways of battered women and abusive men on the campus of a pricey Southern California university. The first time her boyfriend raised a hand against her, they were sleeping in her dorm room underneath her fan. Barton got cold and turned it off. He turned it on. She turned it off again.

“He beat the crap out of me just for that, rolled over and went to sleep,” says Barton, who was 22 at the time and far too frightened to leave. “I lay there stunned.”

He appeared on campus unbidden, like a wraith, checking up on her, scaring her home. Fear kept her quiet. Anxiety kept her close at hand. Break up with him while still at school? No way. “I would be too vulnerable. And if I told my mother,” Barton says, “he would have killed me.”

She loved him at first and hated him later, thought she could save him but came up short. The school year ended, she moved back home and slowly, carefully tried to ease her way to safety.

It did not work. First came the stalking. Then the death threats. Then the end.

“I wouldn’t talk to him and said the relationship was over,” she recounted. “It angered him. He took out his anger one night by setting my car on fire and almost burning down my house. That’s how it ended.”

She went to court. He went to jail for six months. She is safe. So far.