Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, February 20, 1994                   TAG: 9402200065
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: A-5   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: LESLIE TAYLOR STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: SHE LEFT FIVE MONTHS AGO                                LENGTH: Short

HER ONLY ALTERNATIVE WAS TO LEAVE THE STATE

Please do not use her name, she asks. Her husband has no idea where she is, she says.

The thought of his finding out terrifies her.

"I just pray that he doesn't come this far," she says.

For most of her nine-year marriage, her husband abused her - physically, verbally and sexually, she says. He scratched her, punched her, loosened her front teeth, hit her while she was pregnant.

Yet, she says she would still be with him, if not for the effect the abuse had on the children.

"It had gotten so bad that my oldest child got fed up with the situation," she said. "She could no longer tolerate seeing me abused. I had to leave. The only alternative was to leave the state."

A relative put her in contact with a Roanoke-area shelter for battered women. She and her children stayed there for four months. She moved to one of the city's public housing projects three weeks ago.

She has been forced to go on welfare. It bothers her that a woman with a college education now needs government handouts, she says.

She left a good job with good advancement opportunity. She was politically active in her community.

"I sit back and wonder about all the education and achievement I had to just give up," she says. "I was a PTA president and worked on candidates' campaigns.

"I had to leave it to come here and become a statistic."