It is often puzzling to outsiders as to why a battered woman stays in an abusive relationship. However, there are many factors and reasons that can hinder a victim from leaving.

Some of the most common barriers are:

• lack of resources - many abusers prevent their victim from holding a job or having access to family bank accounts or keep them from owning anything of value. Many battered women also do not have access to child care or do not know where to go for or how to apply for public assistance programs.
• fear - that the abuser will catch her leaving or find her later, that she will not be able to handle things as a single parent, that the abuser will take the children away from her, that the abuser will harm other family members or friends, or that she will be stalked or harrassed by the abuser.
• hope - believing that her abuser will change
• responsibility - believing that she is responsible for making the marriage work, for the abuse itself, or for getting the abuser to change.
• isolation - she may feel that she has nowhere or no one to turn to for help.
• low self-esteem and self-blame - she may not feel worthy of anything other than an abusive partner and may believe that the abuse is her fault (neither is true, of course)
• learned helplessness - the experiences with her abuser may have led her to believe that there is nothing she can do to stop the abuse.
• love - even in the face of abuse, many battered women maintain deep feelings of love and caring for their abusive partner and may be gravely concerned about his well-being if she were to leave him.
• mental health issues - depression, anxiety, post traumatic stress disorder and other mental health conditions caused by the abuse can rob her of emotional, physical, and mental resources that could enable her to leave.
• religion - religious beliefs and spiritual leaders may make her feel that divorce is a sin and that the marriage must be saved at all costs.
• the children - she may have been raised to believe that single parent households are unacceptable and that it is better for children to have a violent father rather than no father at all.
• responses from police and the criminal justice system - being persuaded by police not to file charges, having prosecutors who are reluctant to press charges, seeing that local judges rarely give serious sentences to abusers, or having a restraining order that is ineffective.
• denying, minimizing, or rationalizing the abuser's behavior - she may blame the abuser's violence on stress, alcohol, unemployment, etc., may deny the abuse altogether, or rationalize that the abuser is really a "good man" who has to "let off steam sometimes" or that he does not abuse her all the time. All of these responses are common psychological defense mechanisms in the face of trauma.