Oct 27, 2006

Examining Domestic Violence: Finding the strength to leave

Editor's Note: This is the final installment of a series examining domestic violence in San Mateo and Santa Clara counties. October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month.

By Melissa McRobbie

In the beginning, the intense attention seemed harmless enough, even flattering.

Martha Ayala's boyfriend wanted to spend as much time with her as possible. At first, she found it sweet when he would tell her he missed her and wanted to spend more time with her.

"Who doesn't want to hear that?" said Ayala, who is now 31 and lives in Menlo Park.

As time passed, his hold on her tightened. He began speculating that Ayala's male friends all wanted to have sex with her, and called her female friends "easy." He even got jealous of Ayala's friendship with his own brother. He would get angry and hit or throw things.

But Ayala loved him, and two years into the relationship, she married him.

One night, about four months later, Ayala argued with her husband in their car after a party. When she got out of the car and started walking, he drove up onto the sidewalk toward her. "He got out of the car and said, 'Don't play around with me, I may be more crazy than you think,'" she said.

A shaken Ayala went back home that night -- something that, looking back, she can't believe she did. She said she felt she had nowhere else to go because she couldn't tell her friends, her family was back in Peru, and her husband controlled all of her finances. She was also an illegal immigrant at the time, and her husband threatened to report her. So she stayed. And the abuse intensified.

Ayala started taking sleeping pills after fights. "Because I couldn't control anything and the only time when I couldn't feel things was when I was asleep," she said.

The relationship hit a low point after Ayala found out her husband, whom she described as muscular and weighing about 270 pounds, was taking steroids. During a confrontation about his steroid use, he threw her on the bed and punched her repeatedly. After the attack, she couldn't move her right arm. The incident pushed her to tell a man from her church what was happening.

"He kept telling me, 'This is domestic violence,'" she said.

She found that hard to accept. "I didn't think I fit the profile," she said. "I have a very regular education, my family never went through domestic violence, I'm not a drug addict, an alcoholic."

One night Ayala went to the Burlingame Police Department to report the abuse. A male police officer told her, "If you don't want him to hit you, leave him alone." She went home discouraged, but called back the next day and a female police receptionist told her to come in and file a report.

She got in touch with Community Overcoming Relationship Abuse, or CORA. Like many battered women, it took Ayala several tries to leave. Her friends got frustrated when she kept going back, but CORA didn't judge her, she said. The last straw came in early 2005, after about a year of marriage, when her husband pushed her because he thought she made eye contact with a male diner at a restaurant. She thought to herself, "This is it, you're never going to change and there's no way that I can do this."

Her husband gradually let go, which Ayala said was fortunate; statistics show that leaving can be the most dangerous time for a battered woman.

Ayala, now on CORA's board of directors, speaks on domestic violence at schools and in various communities in San Mateo County. She is about to receive her associates degree from Ca§ada College and hopes to transfer to a university next year. She plans to go to law school.

Two weeks ago, she was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, but she is optimistic. "The way I see it is, if the first time made me stronger, this time it's going to make me even stronger than I already am."