Zimmerman's girlfriend pregnant, that makes a felony charge automatic...

[Scootaloo]

53. Seriously?

My mother spent seventeen years with a guy who would beat the hell out of her. He smashed her orbital before I was born, threw her into a solid oak door, bet her bloody with a belt, and had he not been passed out drunk one time, likely would have killed her - she came home to find him on the couch, out cold, a shotgun leveled at the door.

Seventeen years. Each time, she'd believe his apologies. Each time, she'd come back. And each time, he'd do it again. Every. Time. This continued until a friend of the family forced some money into my mother's hand, threw our bags in her truck, and whisked us away to the New Orleans Amtrak station on a one-way trip to the West Coast. My dad left for work one morning, and came home to an empty house six hours later, by which time we were already en route to Seattle.

Why did my mother keep going back? It's certainly not because she's a stupid woman. She's no fool. She fell in love with this man after school, and wanted to keep loving him. Each 'apology' fed her the belief that it was both of their fault that he beat the hell out of her. She wanted to keep the relationship she had come into, she wanted to return to the man she had fallen in love with, and after every beating he not only offered that to her, but fed HER the guilt for "ruining it." Eventually it was less an issue of wanting the man she loved, and more about how going along with his abuse was less threatening than the alternatives she imagined.

I have nothing but sympathy for people in these positions. We can sit outside of this dynamic and cluck our tongues over these women and men "making bad decisions," as if we're so entitled. We're not. Abuse is more than blood and bruises, it's the wholesale destruction of a person, inside and out.