When a domestic abuse survivor leaves a battering relationship and moves out, or speaks out, is she safe? Not necessarily so. Statistics show she is more often at greater risk after she leaves.

Far too often we hear about battered women falling through the cracks of the system on their way out of an abusive relationship. Many losing their civil liberties, their parental rights and/or their sanity in route to safety. Or, as those who live this know, as a price for peace.

Why these injustices to battered women?

When the abused reaches out beyond the battering relationship, the dynamic remains in tact but the weapons change. It may go from words, to fists, to riffle, to court agent, to court order for psychiatric testing, to a 30-day in-house psychiatric "evaluation."

The perpetrator has not changed even though the victim reaches out. And the dynamic of domestic abuse doesn't go away on its own. If anything, it magnifies.

When the victim reaches out or moves out beyond the relationship, violence will escalate so as to re-engage control. While violence is a manifestation of domestic abuse; domestic abuse is fundamentally about control. And the perpetrator can't bear to be out of control.

Now given the fact that domestic violence is generally considered a legal matter, who do you think will be brought in to intervene? If you're thinking the "blue," you're right.

Where this gets messy is when the perpetrator has the financial and/or political wherewithal to enlist support from the system. And this is not to say that perpetrator/system alliances always develop. Batterers can certainly be brought to justice via the system.

However, in the shuffle to administer justice, the perpetrator will most likely use any available financial or political clout to acquire a club of a higher order: the system and its agents.

What typically happens, even in cases having the appearance of being above board (to the law...without corruption), is that the victim is coerced into agreeing to psychiatric foreplay designed to ultimately discredit the victim, silence the abuse and save face for the perpetrator.

This is why an estimated 95% of domestic violence survivors end up with psychiatric labels in route to safety from domestic abuse. This is why many battered women have been parked in psychiatric hospitals at the bequest of their perpetrators. This is where the myth that she is crazy is solidified as public truth.