There is a new study that publishes a model for women to leave abusive relationships.

For many women, leaving an abusive relationship is very difficult and may take them years and might involve many attempts to leave before finally doing it for good. It is also frustrating for the women’s support group who may not understand the stages a woman needs to go through before she can leave.

This is according to Jennifer Hardesty, who has just published her model for women leaving.

Briefly, the model, which has five steps, is as follows:

* precontemplation, when women are often in denial about the abuse.

* contemplation, when mothers begin to realize they are in an abusive relationship.

* preparation, often marked by a pileup of abusive episodes and noticeable effects of the violence on the children.

* action, for which three trajectories
o either regaining control of their lives or letting go of their desire to make the marriage work
o holding back (regressing to the preparation or contemplation stages), and
o leaping directly from contemplation to action—were identified

* maintenance, a process in which women reclaim their identity and often continue to deal with an ex-partner’s attempts to control them through their children.

The study group consisted of 19 women that were in the process of leaving their husbands. All had been subjected to more than one episode of seven kinds of prescribed kinds of violent behaviour.

The point of this study is that it identifies multiple turning points in a womans decision to leave the abusive relationship, not just one tipping point.

I don’t know much about this kind of study myself and it is not the kind of research that I do, so I cannot comment on the method or the strengths or weaknesses of the study, however I do feel that if we understand human behaviour better, then we can take action before problems arise and prevention is better than cure. If we have greater precision and understanding of people’s problems then we might be better at helping them. It is not a nice area of humanity, neither is cancer and I feel that people that carry out this kind of study really do make a contribution to humanity.

Comments welcome.

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