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After Ted broke into her home while she was away, Dana called the police. When she produced her protective order, she was told, "We don't put people in jail for breaking a restraining order." Dana expected little better after Ted came at her with the knife on June 18. But this time a female cop, herself a battering victim, encouraged Dana to seek shelter. On Tuesday, Dana checked herself into a shelter for battered women. There, she sleeps on a floor with her two closest friends, Sam and Odie -- two cats. Odie is a survivor too. Two months ago, Ted tried to flush him down a toilet.
Though domestic violence usually goes undetected by neighbors, there is a predictable progression to relationships that end in murder. Typically it begins either with a steady diet of battery or isolated incidents of violence that can go on for years. Often the drama is fueled by both parties. A man wages an assault. The woman retaliates by deliberately trying to provoke his jealousy or anger. He strikes again. And the cycle repeats, with the two locked in a sick battle that binds -- and reassures -- even as it divides.
When the relationship is in risk of permanent rupture, the violence escalates. At that point the abused female may seek help outside the home, but frequently the man will refuse counseling, convinced that she, not he, is at fault. Instead he will reassert his authority by stepping up the assaults. "Battering is about maintaining power and dominance in a relationship," says Dick Bathrick, an instructor at the Atlanta-based Men Stopping Violence, a domestic-violence intervention group. "Men who batter believe that they have the right to do whatever it takes to regain control."
When the woman decides she has had enough, she may move out or demand that her partner leave. But "the men sometimes panic about losing ((their women)) and will do anything to prevent it from happening," says Deborah Burk, an Atlanta prosecutor. To combat feelings of helplessness and powerlessness, the man may stalk the woman or harass her by phone.
Women are most in danger when they seek to put a firm end to an abusive relationship. Experts warn that the two actions most likely to trigger deadly assault are moving out of a shared residence and beginning a relationship with another man. "There aren't many issues that arouse greater passion than infidelity and abandonment," says Dr. Park Dietz, a forensic psychiatrist who is a leading expert on homicide.
Disturbingly, the very pieces of paper designed to protect women -- divorce decrees, arrest warrants, court orders of protection -- are often read by enraged men as a license to kill. "A restraining order is a way of getting killed faster," warns Dietz. "Someone who is truly dangerous will see this as an extreme denial of what he's entitled to, his God-given right." That slip of paper, which documents his loss, may be interpreted by the man as a threat to his own life. "In a last-ditch, nihilistic act," says Roland Maiuro, director of Seattle's Harborview Anger Management and Domestic Violence Program, "he will engage in behavior that destroys the source of that threat." And in the expanding range of rage, victims can include children, a woman's lawyer, the judge who issues the restraining order, the cop who comes between. Anyone in the way.