The Cost of Leaving

By Jasmin Faulk, WoLF Executive Director

“Why didn’t she leave?”

This is often the question society asks of women who live in abusive homes and circumstances. The questions we ought to ask are: Where would she go? How would she pay for housing, food, transportation, or childcare? What if her partner controls the accounts?

As October begins, Domestic Violence Awareness Month calls us to look more closely at what it takes for a woman to leave, and what stands in her way.

Leaving means more than escaping an abusive situation. It means establishing a path to survival, with somewhere safe to go and the resources to rebuild a life. Walking out the door cannot be the full extent of our expectations for her, or our support.

For a woman living with abuse, money can become another instrument of control. An abusive partner may take her earnings, deny her access to shared accounts, prevent her from working, or sabotage her employment. He may create debt in her name or require her to ask permission for basic purchases. Each restriction makes her more dependent on the person harming her and puts independence further out of reach.

The National Domestic Violence Hotline identifies these behaviors as forms of financial abuse. They can be profoundly degrading and dehumanizing. Having to justify every expense or ask permission to meet ordinary needs strips a woman of authority over her own life.

And those restrictions do not simply disappear when she decides to leave. She may need to find employment, secure housing, pay a security deposit, arrange transportation and childcare, and replace essential belongings—all while meeting everyday expenses. Finding somewhere to live, attending appointments, and addressing the consequences of abuse may also require time away from the very job she needs to keep.

When a woman weighs immediate danger against the possibility of having nowhere safe to sleep with her children, she is facing a choice no woman should have to make. She may remain because she fears that leaving without support will expose her and her children to even greater harm. Her staying does not mean she accepts the abuse. It may reveal how few safe options she has.

This is why economic independence is essential to women’s safety and their ability to make decisions about their lives. Feminists before us fought for women’s access to employment, control over their earnings, and a voice in the places where laws and rules are made. They understood that dependence can leave women vulnerable to exploitation, with little power to change their circumstances.

Those battles secured vital rights. Making those rights meaningful in women’s daily lives remains unfinished work. A woman’s freedom to leave an abusive relationship must be more than a theoretical right. Legal protections need enforcement, and the systems women turn to must provide a practical route to safety.

That requires emergency housing, flexible financial assistance, and support that helps women find and maintain employment. It requires listening without judgment and without demanding that a woman leave on someone else’s timeline. It also requires accountability for abusive men. When consequences are absent or inadequate, women are left to bear the costs of violence inflicted on them.

Women should be able to seek safety without facing destitution. Their ability to escape abuse should not depend on whether they have savings, family support, a community, or an employer willing to accommodate a crisis.

So before we ask, “Why didn’t she leave?” we need to ask: “What would make leaving safely possible, and, what are we doing to make that possible?”