Battered Woman Syndrome: What Do You Do when Your Adult Child Becomes a Victim of Physical Abuse?

This story is my nemesis. The words are wrung from my heart, one drop at a time, like blood from a wound. This is the story of our discovery that our daughter was in an abusive relationship and being beaten regularly by her boyfriend.

Our oldest daughter left home at age seventeen to move in with her boyfriend. Self-emancipation is legal for seventeen year old children. They cannot have their ears pierced without parental consent, but they can leave home. Needless to say, we were devastated. But we also knew our daughter well enough to know that once she made up her mind to do something, neither tsunami nor meteor would stop her. Miserable as we were, we figured that the best we could do was to keep the lines of communication open with our daughter and remain supportive.

Daughter and boyfriend lived in a succession of seedy and sordid friends homes and hotels. For a time, they moved out of state to stay with assorted relatives of the boyfriend. Our daughter maintained a job throughout this time, immediately finding work no matter where she lived. She worked long hours, late at night in unfamiliar cities with a bum leg, to support both herself and her boyfriend. Stop me if you've heard this one. Did the boyfriend work? Whenever we asked, we were informed that he was 'looking for work' or had 'quit his job because he was being treated unfairly' or some other verse of that painfully familiar song. We understood that he spent most of his time playing World of Warcraft on the Internet. We quit asking.

At one point, we paid for our daughter to come home for ankle reconstruction surgery. We cared for her until she was ready to return to her boyfriend in Georgia. At another point, she called us in the middle of the night, desperate, in a strange city, begging us to bring her home. We booked her a flight immediately. Some people might say that we were 'enabling her', 'bailing her out' or 'encouraging her'. All I can say in response to comments like that is, 'clearly you don't have a daughter.'