High-Income Victims of Abuse

    An increasing number of savvy professional women and men are finding themselves among the battered and bruised as victims of domestic abuse, according to national experts. “Domestic violence affects people across all socioeconomic levels. We’ve helped many doctors, lawyers and other professional women,” says Patty Perez, spokesperson for the National Domestic Violence Hotline. “Juanita Bynum’s case is in many ways typical.” 

African-American Pentecostal Prophetess Juanita Bynum recently made headlines – not for her preaching empire or her ever-expanding business lines or best-selling books – but for the brutal beating she received in the parking lot of the Renaissance Hotel near Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Airport. After a short separation, Bynum reportedly met with husband Bishop Thomas Weeks III at the hotel to patch things up. 

According to police reports, a hotel bellman pulled Weeks off of Bynum as the man allegedly “savagely beat her” choking, kicking and stomping her all over the blacktop. “It doesn’t matter how smart or rich a person is,” says Aurea McGarry, author of "I Won’t Survive…I’ll Thrive. “It’s about our need to nurture, our need to fix things. We keep thinking we can make it all better if we just try harder, do something different, or be stronger.” 

According to the National Domestic Violence Hotline, one out of every three women around the world has been beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused during her lifetime. Four million American women experience a serious assault by a partner during an average 12-month period. 

Perez says that the number of high-income, well-educated women within these statistics is growing at a rapid pace. She points to a support group called PRADA (People Recovering After Domestic Abuse), a program by Dallas-based The Family Place, a nonprofit agency that helps domestic violence victims, as an example of the prevalence of abuse among affluent women.  “The first group was quickly filled so they had to start a second group almost right away,” she says. 

PRADA quickly brought to light the growing number of high-income women seeking help. Several group members, along with other Dallas women, were featured in a Lifetime Television documentary called "Terror at Home: Domestic Violence in America."

Similar groups are popping up across the country. The Weitzman Center in Chicago, founded by author and therapist Dr. Susan Weitzman, helps women caught in what she terms “upscale violence.” “It's not unusual for women dealing with upscale violence to pick up what I refer to as early warning signs, and yet either doubt or ignore them, or minimize them. And of course we all want to think the best of our partners,” says Dr. Weitzman in her book "Not to People Like Us."
 
That dangerous state of denial among otherwise savvy women is widespread.  “A very accomplished divorce attorney I know fell for a man that was married six times before, all the while thinking she could change him. Her head knew better but her heart still fell for the guy,” says Atlanta-based George Stern, one of the most respected and successful divorce attorneys in the nation. Stern is a Fellow of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers and a member of its Board of Governors, as well as co-author of Domestic Relations. “Everyone thinks their situation is different,” he says. “It isn’t.”