Why Can’t They Just Let Her Leave?

A woman decides she has had enough. Perhaps she says it aloud. Perhaps she quietly starts putting money aside, looking for somewhere to live, imagining a future in which she can shut her own front door and breathe.

And sometimes, the man who claims to love her decides she isn't allowed to have that future.

Why can’t he just let her go? It is such a simple question. People separate every day. It hurts. They argue over the house, the dog and whose turn it is to explain things to the children. Then, somehow, they carry on. Yet some men would rather kill their partner than accept that she has a life beyond them.

In Australia, 32 women were killed by a current or former intimate partner in 2024–25. That is about one woman every 11 days. By 19 September this year, a separate public tally had recorded 51 women killed by violence in 2026. Those 51 deaths are not all partner killings, and we should never blur the numbers to make a point. The real figures are dreadful enough.

I keep coming back to the word love. We use it in headlines about these deaths as though it explains something. He loved her too much. He couldn’t bear to lose her. He was devastated when she left. But a woman is not a possession someone has lost. She is a person who made a decision.

For some violent men, that decision means a loss of control. The threats, the checking of her phone, the rules about where she goes and whom she sees may have been there long before she tried to leave. Violence is more common where a man believes he owns his partner or has the right to make her decisions.

Then we tell women to leave, as if walking out is the end of the danger. Of course, women should be able to leave. They should also be able to survive doing it. A man who threatens to kill his partner needs to be taken seriously while she is still alive to be protected.

And the rest of us have a part in this. When a mate talks about his ex as though she owes him her time, her location or another chance, don’t laugh along. When he calls constant surveillance “caring”, say what it is. When a woman says she is frightened, believe her before her photograph appears beneath a headline.

I don’t want another solemn announcement that “something must be done” after another woman has died. I want her to be able to pack a bag, walk away and get on with the ordinary business of living.

Why can’t they just let her be?  :(