the book seems like a very well thought out, balanced attempt to discuss this issue, sure. but what irritates me to no end is the way we ask over and over again: why do women stay with abusive husbands or lovers? instead of: why do men sometimes abuse their wives or lovers?

Wow. Anyone growing up in my small southern town could have told the experts that 30 years ago.

Guns don't kill people. Crazy ex-husbands hopped up on speed kill people, usually with guns, but also with cars and broken glass and whatever comes in handy.

My father was a horribly mentally damaged WWII vet. My mother worked really hard to get us all free from him. We lived the car for weeks. When we finally found a place and started having a life, he found out where we lived.

The Chinese people next door had an illegal immigration problem and my father figured that out and coerced them into spying on my mom. He found out exactly the right time to come and steal my brother.

Once he had my brother, we all had to go back. There didn't seem to be any choice. My mother wouldn't leave my brother alone with that freak.

That was back before feminism. There weren't any places where you could hide from a deranged combat veteran using every brain cell he has left to hunt you down.

I get so mad when people ask, "Why don't they leave?"

But then I suppose it's hard for people haven't ever seen anything like that to understand.

I was reading a comment the other day about the young woman who was kidnapped and murdered in Kansas last week. A man (I presume) made a comment that she shoudln't have been wearing shorts and a tank top, because it brougth unwanted attention to herself. A lot of people attacked him for the comment, but, surprisingly, a woman backed him up, saying that her 3 daughters weren't allowed to dress that way because they would draw undesired attention.

I think we do this so that we can feel safe. If the victim did something to bring on their attack, then we can simply not do that something and we will not be attacked. It doesn't work, of course, because life is not that simple. People get mugged even when they aren't flashing expensive watches. Women get raped even if they aren't young and beautiful and wearing skimpy clothing, or drunk, or in a bad neighborhood. And spouses get battered even if they are totally innocent of any wrongdoing. But if we pretend that they must be doing something to deserve it, then we know that we must be safe - because we'd never do anything to deserve being beaten.

When someone with whom you're in love attacks you, there really isn't any right answer. Getting out of the relationship is often the *best* answer, but it's not the *right* answer. We love to think it's cut and dried, but it's not. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

This study is not the paradigm-shift that Lloyd reports. For a real eye-opener about the problematics of even asking the question "why women stay" see Loseke and Cahill (1984). The question does not "[confound] even domestic experts," since those like Loseke and Cahill criticized reducing the complexity that is domestic violence into such a loaded question over twenty years ago.

I mean, if Stark is purporting a new theory ("cohesive control"), then he isn't as much breaking out of the "why women stay" paradigm, but is just looking at the abuser side of it more closely (which heavily populate both psych and soc lit).

By even engaging the question "why women stay" is akin to the "pro-life" rhetorical frame, the assumptions about women in both are dangerous.

I find it genuinely hard to believe that this tremendous "revelation" has just been stumbled upon. Surely anyone with even a passing knowledge of patterns of domestic abuse knows that leaving entails at least as much risk as staying, and sometimes (sadly) more.

If this book sobers up some administrations and law-enforcement agencies (to say nothing of ordinary individuals) about the reality of the kind of support and protection women require when they leave abusive situations, then I'm all for it. I must say, however, that I am skeptical that this will be the case. When even the experts themselves treat this information as news, my hopes cannot be high.