AIBU for struggling to understand why my neighbour does not leave?

And it's usually v v subtle and starts small and then they switch back to being really charming and lovely again and you start thinking oh wait, did I imagine that? Oh they're having a bad day etc and it's creeps up like that until one day you're in the thick of it and can't see a way out.

They're usually not horrible until you've been with them a while, often it's when the baby is born or later. They're exceptionally good at pretending to be nice and lovely and charming

Keep doing it.

it builds a pattern of evidence that may prompt the police or social services to act or provide supporting evidence if she’s becomes brave enough to act herself.

Oh blimey! Can you not see how difficult that would be? If she's out in the garden crying every day, if he won't let her leave the house (apart from school runs, before you nit pick), if he won't ler her have friends, if he's made her tie up all her money in the paying for the house and running of the house, he's obviously not a reasonable man. If she were to ask/tell him to leave, he is not going to say "Oh, ok then."

If you can op contact the school the child goes to and let them know. They are often better at support for the child than social services.

@Howyoudoingssay you had to leave your husband tomorrow?
where would you go? What if you had no family ?
How would you pay for it eg a new rental ? Some mothers don’t have a job.
How would you get him out if he refused to leave?
What if he was violent and you were terrified of him?
What if there was no room at the refuge ?
MANY reasons it can be extremely dangerous and hard to leave.

All this "But I don't understand".

There is a wealth of information out there on the internet about DV and why abused women feel they can't leave.

Given how involved you are with your neighbour, have you honestly not researched it?

Tbh OP it's more unusual that you haven't repeated the pattern. I would ask why do you think that is? What helped for you to be able to have self worth and see these types of people for what they are and steer clear? It's only become more widespread and available knowledge with the internet etc and since Me Too that women are openly talking about this stuff and as others have said, the police and courts are woeful at dealing with these men, often until it's too late. And even then, they are working with a woman's lifetime of abuse and psychology that can't see a way out or they can and know it will be dangerous and they're too scared to risk it so stay with what they know, trying to appease them.

If she leaves the relationship but not the property then he has to leave.

he has keys. He may have got spare keys cut.

she can ask for the keys back but is he likely to give them?

to be safe she needs to change the locks otherwise he could get in at any time and then she’s in danger.

changing the locks while he is out will work but it will also make him angry. Angry people are likely to try to take revenge.

His belongings - clothes, etc - still belong to him even if he’s not on the tenancy. She needs to arrange for him to collect them/them to be taken somewhere he can collect them.

again, the police are not going to give a shit about this.

some people arrange for a storage unit or similar. Others go away and arrange for some 6 foot 4 large blokes from their family to be in when he collects his belongings.

the mechanics of ending this are not simple.

Well one purely practical one is that the house is in her name. She has a contract with the landlord. She'll still have to pay for it, even if she leaves, as well as finding the money to pay for somewhere else for her and the child. Perhaps she just can't afford it. Surely you can see that?

Domestic abuse is psychological warfare. Victims are essentially brainwashed into believing they cannot survive without their abusers. Look into Albert Biderman’s chart of coercion to understand more about how this works.

Also - and this is really important - 75% of domestic homicides happen at the point of separation or within one year of separation. Women often stay because they understand on some level that it is safer than leaving. There doesn’t have to have been any previous violence either. It’s all about control. Once the abuser senses they have lost control of their victim, all bets are off.

I am autistic. Grew up with abusive parents and have been in abusive relationships. There are many reasons:
My dad's abuse normalised misogyny to me
Both my mum and dad's treatment of me, and my school teachers backing them up, convinced me for many years that I was the problem. I thought I deserved bad treatment and was causing it
These men are master manipulators, they constantly gaslight and blame you until you start to believe that you are the abusive one
They're not always bad to you and you literally become addicted to the times they are nice to you. Look up "trauma bond"
And of course, you're afraid they might kill you or your child if you end it. They make threats that make you afraid to leave them. Survivor bias. You don't have the energy. You don't believe the police will help. You think people will blame you as you stayed... So many reasons.

Where would you suggest she leaves, OP, considering it's her flat?

It can be very difficult for social services to prove they have threshold to intervene; abusers are often very good at putting on a front when professionals are around.
The most likely way is if you call police when something is actually happening, and they go out before there's time for the couple to get everything in order. That police will then share that info with social services and that may be the evidence they need to make working with them mandatory.

Reasons:

many men who are domestic abusers kill women who leave them. It’s widely acknowledged to be a very dangerous time.

being alive is generally seen as better than being dead.

https://www.leeds.gov.uk/one-minute-guides/one-minute-guide-domestic-abuse-risk-point-of-separation

reason two: someone who is physically hurting someone close to them is demonstrating repeatedly they don’t give a shit about the law and are happy to hurt people. The police are widely known to be pretty ineffective at stopping domestic violence and stalking and are generally only reactive.
if you leave, you can get legal sanctions telling the abuser to stay away. (Non molestation orders).

evidence suggests that this actually increases the risk to the person who has left and certainly someone who has already demonstrated they don’t give a shit about the law just what they can get away with a non molestation order is laughably ineffective.

Thirdly, if you have a child it is well known that the courts will not protect them from physical emotional or sexual abuse and in fact are likely to insist on contact even where there is documented proven physical or sexual abuse that the perpetrator has spent time in jail for.
there’s a presumption in favour of parental contact and if there has been abuse this will usually start in a contact centre where the contact is supervised but after a relatively short period of time (maybe up to a year) will go unsupervised.

so if there is a child the perpetrator can easily take revenge on the child and the courts do very little about this.

In extreme cases the perpetrators will kill all the children and then themselves. It’s known as family annihilation.

see eg this research paper.

https://scholarsarchive.library.albany.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1022&context=honorscollege_cj

so it’s not complex at all, it’s just that the system at the moment is set up so that particularly if there is a child the abuser has 99% certainty of being able to exact revenge in one way or another.

the system does not protect victims of domestic abuse and in many cases deliberately offers up the children as further victims.

Lots of reasons:

You won't cope without me.

You're mentally ill. You'd fall apart if I wasn't here. (he was gaslighting and causing confusion).

They'll take the children off you because you're mentally unstable.

You don't have any friends or support (as he drove them all away and isolated me).

Nobody else will take you on with all your baggage.

You're too fat and ugly. People don't help people like you.

You've made a complete mess of things. People won't help because all of this is your fault.

Your parents will turn on you because you've messed this relationship up.

The children need a man in their lives. The stigma of being brought up by a single mother will ruin them.

Even when I did find the strength to leave and he was arrested and charged with domestic abuse offences, I still was wavering about it and wanting him to change his ways and come back to us. It took a lot of work from social services and child protection to convince me I was better off without him.

And do you know what, none of the things above happened. I've coped with everything and raised some lovely children who I'm proud of. I just couldn't see that at the time.

It’s very mind-bendy when the abuser convinces you that you are the problem. She is clearly in that place, even if she knows in her heart it’s not her. The message is there, daily, he makes sure. Sadly, he will start on the kid next, if he hasn’t already. Their young brain will absorb that they are wrong too. He is always right. It’s heartbreaking to see, hear it.

It sounds like you broke the cycle OP but many women who grow up in abusive homes simply cannot see abusers for who they are until it's too late and by that point it's all tied up with "love" and history and as others have said, they will have been psychologically broken down by the abuser and can't think straight and can't see how they will function without them. Often people don't know who they are separately to an abusive or sick person, they are only a carer or support in some way to this other person who "needs" them. It's a kind of brainwashing in a way that's often set up in childhood and usually takes years to untangle. This is hard to do when you're living with someone 24 hours a day who frightens you, all you can think about is trying to keep things calm and get through the next minute.

Her self esteem and self worth has been destroyed by him, she is going through terror and frozen, maybe feels like she cant leave? Still under his abusive spell potentially? Poor woman, just be there for her when she finally gets the strength to leave.