that job.” As a result of dependence on abusers, women described confusion over how to feel about the perpetrator or how to deal with the situation. There were many cases of women who were or had been in abusive relationships with their partners for several years.

Those women who suffered violence from an (ex)-partner, increasingly experienced controlling behaviors that culminated in their loss of autonomy. Their stories often noted increased demonstrations of jealously followed by the gradual intensification of their partner’s controlling behaviors. These behaviors included appeals for the woman not to work or study; control of her leaving the home; and restricted communication with friends and family. For example, a woman (31-years) in Queimados described controlling behaviors of her partner: “I couldn’t go out a lot. I worked and went straight home...he created this bubble; it was so effective that I actually believed that he was protecting me, but he wasn’t, you see? He wasn’t. I couldn’t go out to have a conversation with anybody. When I went to my sister’s house, he called me every five minutes, ‘where are you?’ ‘are you coming?’” As women conformed to demands – often to please the partner or protect the relationship – the controlling behaviors slowly led to their isolation from the workplace, from family and friends. These patterns are consistent with cross-cultural comparisons of data on domestic violence that argue that social isolation of women is both a cause and a consequence of wife abuse (Heise 1998); and studies have found that women living in situations of violence have fewer interactions with friends, neighbors and relatives (Neilsen, Russell and Ellington 1992, Cazenave and Straus 1979).

Events like changing neighborhoods or cities and pregnancy contributed to deepened social isolation. By staying at home to take care of the house and children, women lost contact with the outside world and with their social support systems. In these cases, restrictive social norms that naturalize the role of women as primary caregivers within the home and reinforce the stereotype of the “good wife” as the submissive, passive and accepting “homemaker” further remove women from protective social networks and access to information (see also Ellsberg et al. 2000). Social isolation became a conducive context for the escalation of the violence towards more physical forms, as the survivor lost financial and emotional autonomy. Many women cited the intensification of violence as a motivation to consider seeking help to put an end to the situation - either with family members or friends. Notably, it is also when they reported facing the first challenges to exit the abusive relationship in the attempt to break out of social isolation.

# 3.2 **The decision to reach out for some form of support**

The experiences shared by the women who were interviewed demonstrate that women tended to reach out first to family and friends. Interactions with formal services generally occurred after interacting with informal support networks. This finding is in line with population-based surveys (RHS/DHS data available for Latin America) that show that, while help-seeking behaviors by women who experience violence vary widely by country, women in the region tend to seek help from informal institutions (social networks, family and friends) at much higher rates than formal institutions (PAHO 2012).<sup>13</sup> It is commonly the immediate social network rather than formal services that serve as a first point of contact for women in

> 13 Among those women who experienced violence from a partner within the past 12 months, one-third (29.3 percent) in Honduras 2005/6 to almost two-thirds (65.5 percent) in El Salvador 2008 sought the help of family or friends. In all countries, the share of those who sought help from any institution was below that, ranging from 8.2 percent in Ecuador 2004 to 36.0 percent in El Salvador 2008. The share of women who reported physical or sexual violence by a partner in the past 12 months and sought any institutional (police, health center, women’s organization, church or religious institution) help varied between countries, ranging from 8.2 percent in Ecuador (2004) to 36 percent in El Salvador (2008). Police was consistently the most common sought-after institution among all the countries in the study.

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