And how does patting a woman on the head and treating her like she is a child, help her to be strong and in charge of her life? This is what happens when agency is denied.
Yes. Welcome to Oprahworld; to the therapeutic state in which nobody is responsible for their behavior and responsible behavior is a scarce commodity. People like Bishopric and Dancer have supported patting woman, minorities (especially Black people), young people, and themselves, on the head for decades in the service of a ethos of social control and socially or biologically deterministic explanations of the human condition. These are the people who are medicating away childhood with Ritilin, looking for genetic "causes" for bad behavior (from alcoholism to career criminality), who seek reductionistic explanations for homosexuality, and who seek solace from personal responsibility within constructs such as "cycles of abuse", the "inner child", "codependency" and other reducing concepts that preclude the use of agency in charting one's own course away from darkness and struggling for positive change outside the crib of modern pop psychology.
There is, of course, a syndrome in which, at least in extreme cases, a woman can become so conditioned through fear to her condition that she stops seeking release from that condition and accountability for the perpetrator. John Wayne Gacy was able to leave some of his child victims untied and alone in his house while he went to work and later returned. His victims were terrified and paralyzed psychologically to the point that they wouldn't even dare try to escape when he left the door open for them. This would be an extreme case, however. Most modern woman are not going to tolerate such abuse, especially with all the options available to them. A woman today can put physical marks on herself and cast her husband into jail until the case is worked through. The law is fairly anti-male in general tenor. The male is always assumed to be guilty until shown otherwise. In that climate, there is no reason not to get out when real abuse is taking place.