Abstract
D.Litt et Phil.
The study explored strategies abused women use to overcome power and control
in their intimate relationships, using their own self-agency. Data was collected through
the technique of triangulation in which three women who were legally divorced, wrote
their own stories, after which each was individually interviewed by the researcher to get
information about the process of leaving and staying away from their abusive relationships,
and clearing up and moving on with their lives. Grounded theory was used to
analyse the stories, the individual interviews, and the focused group discussion to
generate information about the process of leaving abusive relationships on a more abstract
level. The study is based on the epistemological underpinnings of post-modernism and
feminism. The categories of open coding were generated from the research process and
the data: These are abuse, emotional absence, dependence, resistance, use of absolutes,
expectations, idealism, independence, decision-making, empowerment, recovery, innate
strength and resources, self-esteem, culture and religion, introspection, verbal
conceptualisation, hope, spirituality, and absence of social justice. Participants used a
broad range of empowerment strategies in the process of leaving their abusive marital
relationships and showed that leaving an abusive relationship is a recursive process of
leaving and returning, for which women cannot be blamed. They had to make a paradigm
shift to establish a basis for leaving, use their internal and external resources to make it on their own, and utilise aspects of psychological, social, racial/cultural, and religious forms
of empowerment to advocate on their own behalf. The process of decision-making
enabled them to gradually reclaim control over their lives. The empowerment of abused
women was not necessarily equivalent to their full recovery from abuse, even though this
was a pivotal point in the recovery process that began long before the women left their
relationships. The results show that those women who had innate strength and were able
to use it to access community resources, were more likely to leave abusive relationships.
The women who participated in this study managed to leave their abusive marriages,
despite having their lives threatened; each of them grew and developed personally and
transformed their lives. Each has realised that there is life after abuse.