On the murder of Sania Khan
I was recently sent an article from Time Magazine about a woman who divorced an abusive husband and was then shot and killed by him, before he killed himself. You can read it here: https://time.com/6199574/sania-khan-murder-tiktok-stigma-divorce/
Tragic. Heartbreaking. According to the article and reports from her friends, she ‘did everything right’ in the eyes of the public. She separated from him, divorced, changed her locks – all the things. She was moving back to her hometown the same week as her murder.
The Time story is primarily about social stigma in the South Asian community around marriage and divorce. But I’d like to focus more on the fact that she left. The most common question I get as I travel across Texas speaking on Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) is this: Why didn’t she just leave? Let me start answering that by saying “just leaving” is never that simple. As Rachel Louise-Snyder says in her book, No Visible Bruises, when discussing the case of Michelle Monson Mosure, “She was smart. Smart enough to know that getting away from Rocky wasn’t something she’d be able to do overnight. It would require meticulous planning and preparation. Leaving is never an event; it’s a process.” We see this same experience play out time and time again with victims who seek safety at SafeHaven.
Second, leaving is dangerous. Sometimes that is a difficult concept for outsiders to understand. Decades of academic research points us to a common conclusion: that violence increases when the victim leaves and the three months that follow. It’s no surprise then, when we look at our 2019 Fatality Review Report from here in Tarrant County, that 7 of the 8 homicide victims that year had already ended their relationship with their abusers. The common refrain that leaving an abusive relationship is somehow safer than staying has not been proven in research or in our Tarrant County reality. In fact, quite the opposite is true.
Why, then? This seems to defy logic. You find yourself in an unsafe situation, so you should leave, right? In order to drill down to why this is, let’s look at why IPV exists. IPV is an issue of power and control – it is a pattern of behavior where one person has power over another person and they use that power to control the other person, a victim of their abuse. When a victim decides the relationship is over, and they leave the relationship, in essence they take their power back. An abuser cannot control a victim fully – or at least to the same extent – once the relationship is over. And that loss of control is a very real trigger for an abuser’s violence. The use of violence is an attempt to regain power and control over a victim.
We, as a society, expect victims to leave when they are unsafe and we – culturally – don’t provide a whole lot of support when this actually happens. Families aren’t often quick to welcome separated children back into their lives and homes. We lose patience with victims quickly; we value independence and self-sufficiency and repeat the old adage, “You got yourself into this mess, now get yourself out.”
How we respond to victims when they leave is a vital piece of their success in doing so. And patience is the biggest virtue here – we know that victims often need to leave multiple times, and return to their abuser, and leave again before that exit is permanent. Victims need to know your support of them is not conditional on them ending their relationship. If you have questions about how to support a victim who has revealed their situation to you, check out our guide here: https://www.safehaventc.org/gethelp. And let’s stop asking, “Why didn’t she just leave?” We know why. Let’s start asking, “Why do abusers hurt people? Why do abusers need to have all the power in a relationship? How can we best hold them accountable?”