The system became her abuser

“Why didn’t she leave?”

I cannot tell you why she did not leave, but I can tell you what she was afraid of, and how right she was to be afraid.

I am not writing this piece to pick at wounds that are still healing. I am writing it because the way our community thinks about women fleeing abuse is costing us lives. I have sat in rooms, in offices, on phone lines, in shelters, and I have watched the same story play out so many times that I can no longer stay quiet about it.

In recent weeks there have been too many headlines ending the same way: a woman, a relationship, a final act of violence that everyone saw coming except the systems designed to stop it. We shake our heads. We ask why she didn’t leave. We move on.

I grew up watching domestic violence normalized around me. I would express concern when I witnessed it and be told, in no uncertain terms, to mind my business, that what happened between a man and a woman was not mine to interrupt. I began to unlearn that when my mother left her abusive marriage. I have been unlearning it ever since: as a sociologist, as a columnist, and as a woman who has lived this story from the inside.

Here is the myth that needs to die: that leaving means someone saves you. Most people genuinely believe that the moment a woman leaves her abuser, the system catches her. Victim Services swoops in. Government agencies come running. NGOs offer a steady hand. The hard part, the thinking goes, is finally over.

That is not what happens. What happens is that the abuse continues. It just changes hands.

She gets abused by the landlord who finds out what she left and decides that makes her easy to exploit. She gets abused by the police who had body camera footage of her begging for charges to be laid and chose their paperwork over her safety. She gets abused by shelters that are supposed to be a bridge, but become another barrier, another intake form, another person asking her to prove her pain. She gets abused by a broken system that still (in 2026) treats the victim like the suspect, requiring her to re-traumatize herself every single time she picks up the phone, just to access the bare minimum.

If she is Black? The weight compounds in ways that should shame every institution claiming to serve her, and if she is also living with disabilities? Multiply everything I just said.

She did not leave because she had already done the math. She knew exactly what was waiting for her on the other side, and she was right.

Here is what I need our community to understand: she has no time to heal. She is in survival mode. She is simultaneously fighting the person who hurt her and the system that keeps treating her like the problem. Healing is not possible in survival mode. You cannot recover while you are still being wounded.

Everybody loves a good recovery story. We celebrate survivors after the fact. We call them brave. We share their posts, but how many of us are willing to become part of the story; not after it ends, but during the hardest chapter, when she still doesn’t know how it turns out?

To the woman reading this who is still in it: do not go back. What I have described is hard and real and survivable. You are not alone, even when every system around you is behaving as if you are. Use every resource available to you. Advocate loudly for yourself and for your children. Do not stop.

To everyone else: believe women. Show up for the ones in your community before the headline. Challenge every institution that continues to fail them.

She left. Now it is our turn.