@Freida @LuckiLee
For the sake of the children (leaving) assumes the abusive parent won’t seek out, or be awarded custody. At all. Much less full custody, whilst the non-abusive parent only has visitation.
Gets just a BIT more complicated when you envision actually having to hand over your child week in and week out to
be abused, doesn’t it? Not able to protect them at all, much less have a say in how they’re raised at the other person’s home? (Because those rules & laws are set for normal divorces where differences of opinion are about snacks and religion; not DV & child abuse/neglect). As well as the
huge amount of destabilisation for a child thrust in and out of two wildly different environments (abusive & not, without any kind of protective “normal”), years and tens of thousands of dollars of court battles, CPS investigations, police intervention, therapy ...
... divorcing an abuser means YOU will be free, but you’re abandoning your kids to be abused
by order of the courts.
It’s a huge risk to take, when you know the abuser will go after custody.
And an incrediably hard decision.
All in a vacuum of support, because the general consensus is that all you have to do to escape abuse? Is leave. That’s where people’s understanding just stops. Leave, and it’s over, right? Not if you have kids the courts have ordered into the abuser’s care. Not for them, and not for you, as abusing your kids is the most common way abusers retain control over their exes.
(Well then call CPS. CPS wants 2 parent families. Removing a child from 1 parent -against court orders granting them custody- is a years long process that usually fails... and people just goggle. Because every parent’s 2nd greatest fear is having their kids taken from them, it doesn’t occur to people that the State tries really, really hard NOT to, and in the rare cases they do, nearly always gives them back. Foster parents know this, DV parents know this, but the rest of the country really seems to think “tell someone” & “leave” = the end of the story. So until your kids are grown? They will be being abused, and the idiot schools/doctors/etc. keep acting like this is a “new” thing where telling someone will make a difference, or not a thing at all and just a jealous ex, because the courts would never grant custody to an abuser, right??? :banghead: ).
People stay “for the kids” to try and protect them, to try and give them a decent life, to try and have
some degree of control, and because they’re afraid of the very real possibility their abuser will be IN their life, the rest of their lives... without any recourse to escape them. Because they’ve taken your kids hostage. By court order.
It’s a very hard decision. And a huge risk. No one I’ve ever met has made that decision -to stay or go- lightly. Both options are potentially brutal.
