Why Does She Stay?

The Navhind Times [1] reported that a man named Motiar was sentenced to just eight months in jail for attempting to murder his wife, Tumpa Bibi, ostensibly because she pleaded that he be let off and the court believed that there existed the possibility of their living a happy life together. He had set her on fire and left her with 36% burns just 28 days into their marriage according to the paper.
Personally, I think that every time a woman decides to stay with an abusive man, it’s an example of hope triumphing over experience (though not in the sense Dr. Johnson meant it). In one of the books in the Princess series, Jean Sasson and her anonymous collaborator had said something to the effect of: Once a dog’s let you see its tail crooked, don’t expect it to straighten it out because it won’t. I couldn’t agree more.
In an article by Evan Stark called ‘The Entrapment Enigma‘ [2] in the OUP USA blog, the author said:

“The psychiatric establishment in the 1970s believed women brought abuse on themselves because they were “masculine,” “frigid,” “overemotional” with “weakened ties to reality,” or had “inappropriate sexual expression.” But by the late 1980s, the “myth of masochism” and other transparent accounts that blamed the “wife-beater’s wife” for her abuse had been widely discredited, in no small part because of the work of feminist mental health professionals . Empirical work by psychologists and social workers had demonstrated that battered women had a better sense of reality than their assailants and, compared to nonbattered women, were actually more “social,” more “sympathetic,” less “masculine” though not necessarily more feminine, exhibited greater ego strength, and employed a greater range of strategies to change their situation than nonbattered women in distressed relationships.”

The question which has remained, however, is why battered woman stay in an abusive relationships. In her book ‘Trauma and Recovery’, Judith Lewis Herman wrote, “Prolonged, repeated trauma, by contrast, occurs only in circumstances of captivity. When the victim is free to escape, she will not be abused a second time; repeated trauma occurs only when the victim is a prisoner, unable to flee, and under the control of the perpetrator.”
Being unable to flee, to use the author’s words, I suspect, is a result of four factors:
1. Practical Difficulties
such as being financially dependant on the abuser and having nowhere to live
2. Social Conditioning
such as believing that a woman’s value as an individual is derived from her ability to ‘keep’ a man which is reinforced by living in a societies where women will be looked down on for supposedly failing to do so
3. Personal Beliefs such as those where a woman is unable to believe that she is worthy of being treated with either respect or kindness as a result of having had her self-esteem torn to shreds by being abused
4. Institutional Responses
such as finding it difficult to convince police to file charges against the perpetrator, not having access to shelters, knowing that courts are unlikely to convict the perpetrator.
Knowing that women may have reasons (which seem entirely sensible) for staying in abusive situations though doesn’t stop me from feeling ill every time I hear about a woman who has actually done so.

Links:
[1] http://www.navhindtimes.com/articles.php?Story_ID=031755
[2] http://blog.oup.com/2007/06/violence/