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80 | 4 Separation Dixie Shanahan did not have to kill her husband, according to Susan Christensen. Shanahan shot her husband Scott after enduring 19 years of abuse, including black eyes, bruises, threats, being dragged by her hair, held at gunpoint, tied up and left in a basement for days, and regular verbal abuse and degradation in front of family and friends. Shanahan shot her husband after a morning of being beaten, after being threatened at gunpoint, after her husband promised, “This day is not over yet. I will kill you.” At her murder trial, Shanahan testified that she shot her husband because she believed that she and her unborn child would not survive to see the next day unless she acted. Nonetheless, Susan Christensen believed, Dixie Shanahan had options, options that would have prevented that final confrontation on August 30, 2002. As Christensen testified during Shanahan’s trial, “I don’t believe this case had to end this way. I think that there were choices that we gave Dixie, in particular, that she chose not to take and those choices have been proven over and over to be effective if allowed to take their course.”1 Susan Christensen, the Assistant County Attorney for Shelby County, Iowa, had, in the years leading up to Scott’s death, offered Dixie Shanahan two choices: to seek a protective order against her husband and to cooperate with his criminal prosecution. Shanahan did, at various times, avail herself of those options. She filed for, and received, a protective order in 1997. She cooperated with the state during its first criminal prosecution of Scott that same year; Scott pled guilty to punching Dixie and spent two days in jail. Three months later, Scott was again prosecuted for assaulting his wife. On that occasion, Dixie refused to assist prosecutors, asking instead that the charges be dismissed. Scott was convicted and served four days in jail. Upon his release, Scott redoubled his abuse. Three years later, when the state of Iowa prosecuted Scott for felony domestic violence, Dixie refused to return from Texas (where she had fled to escape Scott’s abuse) to testify against him. While Christensen originally took “some comfort knowing that there was some distance between”2 Dixie and Scott, she later condemned Dixie’s deci- Separation | 81 sion not to return for the trial, which forced prosecutors to drop the charges. Christensen testified that although neither of the earlier prosecutions had stopped Scott’s violence against Dixie (and in fact, the violence had increased after each prosecution), she believed that if Dixie had cooperated that third time, the violence would have ended. That Christensen would equate separation with successful termination of the violence is hardly surprising; indeed, the inclination to conflate the two has oriented domestic violence law and policy since the early days of the battered women’s movement. Like many aspects of domestic violence law and policy, the focus on separation owes its preeminent position to psychologist Lenore Walker and the theory of learned helplessness. Walker argued that to eradicate learned helplessness, women must be removed from the context of the violent relationships that engender the condition. The only remedy for learned helplessness was separation. Law and policy development within the legal system accordingly prioritized separating women subjected to abuse from their abusive partners and made separation the litmus test for determining whether a victim was worthy of assistance. As law professor Christine Littleton writes, “[The legal system] does not blame all battered women for their plight, only those who do not immediately sever their relationships and leave their batterers.”3 The demand that women subjected to abuse separate from their abusive partnersrewritesculturalnormsaboutwomen’srolesinrelationships.Historically , women were urged to stay in violent relationships, to preserve their families and support their spouses. The law made it difficult for women to leave, setting impossibly high standards for divorce on the grounds of cruelty and denying them custody, child support, and marital property if they insisted on divorcing. The new norm, though, requires women subjected to abuse to leave their partners and use the legal system to enforce that separation through protective orders and criminal proceedings. The failure to immediately and willingly separate from a man who abuses has implications for a woman’s credibility . Judges, police, and prosecutors, vested in their roles as those who rescue women from abuse, are skeptical of the claims of women who are reluctant or unwilling to separate or who do not separate quickly enough. Christensen’s testimony highlighted...

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