"Why doesn't she just leave?"

[iverglas]

I don't know how popular this Canadian comic strip is in the US. We get it here in the Toronto Star, which had an article on the weekend about a story line the author is doing.

http://www.thestar.com/living/article/510729

For Canadian cartoonist Sandra Bell-Lundy, storylines always come from problems real women experience.

So characters Maeve, Susan and Kim, who populate Bell-Lundy's comic strip Between Friends, have dealt with sensitive issues such as menopause, infertility and divorce since the comic was introduced in 1994.

Now, the topic is domestic abuse.

In a storyline introduced to the strip recently, Maeve's high school friend Tamara is being abused by her husband but hides it from the world. Tamara's issues are revealed and peak in the next three weeks as Bell-Lundy digs deep into the issue of spousal abuse during Domestic Violence Awareness Month.

... The characters in Between Friends, which is syndicated by King Features and runs in the Star, are a mosaic of Bell-Lundy and her friends. Tamara's character is loosely based on a woman Bell-Lundy knew in high school who, decades later, revealed that she survived an abusive relationship.

"It really surprised me and it stuck with me for such a long time," Bell-Lundy says.

She sat down and talked with her old friend for a long time before starting the story.

So here's the strip that hit me over the head. Sometimes something is just so simple it's easy to miss.

... Oh, damn, the strip isn't reproduced in the on-line article as it was in print, and I can't get access to it on line.

Well, it goes like this.


Two women friends are sitting on a park bench, continuing their discussion of their friend who is a victim of her husband's violence.

Friend One says: Why doesn't she just leave?

Friend Two says: Why doesn't he just stop?


A duh moment, for me, anyhow, and I'm not unusually dull of wit or tongue. The only reasonable response to the perennial question. If it doesn't stop anybody asking it -- whether sincerely or disingenuously -- dead in his/her tracks, it oughta.

Yes, it isn't an answer to the question. But on a moment's reflection, it should make it obvious that reducing a woman's situation to that question is simplistic in the extreme. Anyone who still fails to get that just isn't trying.

[Scout]

1. excellent

women in abusive relationships don't want, and shouldn't HAVE, to give up their entire lives, disrupt their children, their jobs, and goddess knows what else. and there's no guarantee that if she does those things she will be safe from him.

they just want the man they love, and who supposedly loves them, to stop being an abusive, violent asshole.