The article "Choice within Entrapment and Entrapment within Choice" analyzes the challenges faced by battered women who stay with their abusers. It includes a study that evaluates the "differential meaning of choice among battered women who stay in violent relationships and challenged the paradigm that evaluates leaving with choice and staying with entrapment." In response to this article I believe that there was a great culture bias in conducting the interviews, as they were from Israel. However, due to the sensitivity of the battered women syndrome, findings would be similar in most cultures. Two of these finding being women who stay with their abuser by choice or lack of choice, do so because of external restraints or internal restraints.
Violence and abuse itself is an external restraint. Fear of further violence is a major reason that women stay with their abusive mates. Economic dependence is a second major factor; women often do not work and lack employable skills because the batterer has prevented the woman from working especially during marriage. Alternately women who already have well-paying jobs may have to quit those jobs if they leave their partners, who will harass them at work. Finally, a woman may have no where to go: relatives may be unable or afraid to take her in. Battered women's shelters are too few and inadequately funded and affordable housing that is also safe is extremely difficult to locate. Internal restraints are that of women who as girls observed their mothers being beaten by their fathers or who themselves were abused as children may internalize a belief that violence is a normal expression of love. Depression, feelings of low self-worth and beliefs that women somehow deserved the violence along with guilt that she provoked the violence, are all too common and may keep women from leaving their abusers. Women who feel guilt or shame may be reluctant to come forward at all or even admit to themselves that they are battered women.