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Toughest hurdle in abuse cases: denial

Experts say spousal devotion to domestic and child abuse suspects is often a product of an unhealthy relationship.

By COLLEEN JENKINS
Published February 19, 2006

Wendy Hunsberger didn't break down until the bailiff fastened her husband's handcuffs.

Prosecutors, doctors, deputies and colleagues had called Aaron Hunsberger a child abuser. They said he had severely injured his own child, her child. He swore he was innocent.

She believed him.

On Jan. 13, Aaron Hunsberger was convicted on two counts of child abuse. Authorities said that, over the course of several months in mid 2003, he hurt his infant son badly enough to send him to intensive care with a fractured skull and bleeding around the brain.

Throughout his legal battle, Wendy Hunsberger stood by her husband.

"If I truly believed that he's guilty, my kids come first in my life," she said, sitting outside his trial, "and I never would have stayed by him so long."

Tammy Wynette crooned about standing by your man, but the wisdom rings hollow to those versed in the damaging effects of domestic violence. They say people who beat their children generally are abusive toward their spouses or paramours as well.

So when advocates and experts hear stories like Wendy Hunsberger's, they interpret her devotion as something more dangerous:

Denial.

"She sounds like she's been really, severely impaired because of this relationship," said Anita Barbee, a social work professor at the University of Louisville in Kentucky. "A person in a healthy relationship wouldn't stand by their guy for that."

Yet countless domestic violence victims do, despite efforts to protect them.

When authorities learned in August that an alleged domestic dispute had left Jeanette Planchard with a broken finger, broken nose and face injuries, the system sprang into action.

Her live-in boyfriend, Douglas Allen Johnson, was arrested and charged with attempted murder for firing a gun twice at Planchard as she tried to flee their New Port Richey home, court records said. A judge ordered Johnson to have no contact with Planchard, and another granted her a protective injunction.

Then Assistant State Attorney Mary Handsel received more troubling news: After Johnson posted bail and was released from jail, he and Planchard had married. The ceremony took place in November in Hudson, but the couple filed their marriage license in Lee County.

Handsel, a veteran prosecutor, had seen plenty of abuse victims go back to their abuser. In most cases, however, the victims called the State Attorney's Office to change their story or say they had forgiven the abuser.

This time, Handsel had heard nothing. And the lack of spoken denial worried her even more. On Jan. 23, she persuaded Circuit Judge Joe Bulone to send Johnson back to jail for violating the terms of his release.

"I'm concerned for the safety of the victim," she said. "As long as he knows where she is, he's going to have some sort of control over her."

Bulone set the trial for Feb. 20. Then Planchard wrote Handsel and the judge, asking them to drop the charge against her husband. In the letter, dated Jan. 24, Planchard blamed her alcoholism for the couple's violent night in August.

"Horrible mistakes were made on my part," she wrote, "and I'm truly sorry about all of this."

The letter didn't surprise Handsel.

"You usually hear from the victims," she said, "when (the couples) get back together."

Speaking generally, experts said that what seem like obvious danger zones to outsiders aren't so apparent for women and men who have suffered verbal or physical abuse at the hands of a loved one.

Years of abuse take a toll on the victims' self-esteem. The longer they are in the abusive relationship, Barbee said, the more they essentially are held hostage by fear.

"Then their whole worldview is distorted," the professor said.

So the abused stick around, rarely for better, usually for worse. Penny Morrill, who runs the Sunrise of Pasco County domestic violence center in Dade City, estimated that 75 percent of the kids getting abused have abused mothers as well.

"The denial can be huge," she said. "That's part of the reason these women don't leave. They think they can make it better. "It's my fault. If I can cook dinner better, it won't happen again.'

"In most cases," Morrill said of the women who stay, "it's because she loves him. She doesn't love his behavior."

Wendy Hunsberger said the only thing she and her family are victims of is an overzealous legal system.

An articulate, college-educated bank teller, Hunsberger was working the morning authorities say her stay-at-home husband shook their 51/2-month-old so hard that the baby sustained a fractured skull and retinal hemorrhages. After the baby was airlifted to a St. Petersburg hospital, doctors also discovered old and new bruises and healing fractures to his left collarbone and right arm.

During Aaron Hunsberger's trial, Wendy tried to explain the injuries. Maybe the rides she rode at Adventure Island during her pregnancy had caused them, or the times the baby's young sisters bumped into him.

Outside the courtroom, where the 29-year-old mother of three passed the time reading novels, she said people had wrongly painted her as a battered wife intimidated by her husband.

"That's not me at all," she said. "I would never put them in any situation where they'd be harmed. I'm not the brainwashed wife."

Several of Wendy Hunsberger's bank colleagues believed otherwise. During the investigation into allegations against her husband, three women told authorities they suspected Wendy had been physically abused after they noticed bruises on her face and arm. Wendy said she had run into a dresser, they recalled, then changed the subject.

"She was bruised all the time," one friend said, according to court documents.

The state asked Hunsberger about the friends' allegations, said Handsel, the prosecutor. Hunsberger denied them, and the state took no further action.

Pushing past denial is one of the biggest challenges prosecutors and domestic violence advocates face. Sunrise employees have watched many women come to their shelter resolving to leave their abusive partners only to return home later, Morrill said.

Each time, employees try to offer a little more education and remind the victims that, when they are ready, the shelter is there for them. Handsel and her colleagues do their part by trying to convict the abusers - with or without their victims' help.

"You can't make somebody come forward," she said. "All you can do is your best without them."

Angie Drobnic Holan contributed to this report.

[Last modified February 19, 2006, 01:09:21]