The notion that the moves away from abuse and violence are tentative and vulnerable to old habits but, nevertheless, can be enhanced through literacy development stems also from my reading of Women’s Ways of Knowing, in which Mary Field Belenky, Blythe McVicker Clinchy, Nancy Rule Goldberger, and Jill Mattuck Tarule (1986) argue that the women they studied^{Endnote 5}, conceived of themselves in terms that fit into one of five epistemological categories or positions: Silent Knowers, Received Knowers, Subjective Knowers, Procedural Knowers, and Constructed Knowers. Crucial to the discussions in this essay, the first three epistemological positions, Silent, Received, and Subjective Knowers, indicate increasingly egocentric views of the world and one’s agency or authority within it. Leaving abuse, I am arguing, requires this increasing egocentrism or subjectivity. However, and as the enactionist theory discussed later in the essay demonstrates, that subjectivity must be supported socially in order to maintain the new “self without abuse” position. Therefore, enactionism suggests that for a woman to be successful in leaving abuse, she has to find her way to the last two epistemological positions, Procedural and Constructed Knowing. As Belenky et al. construct them, these positions suggest the knower’s increasing capacity to consider and account for the knowledge of others in conceiving of one’s agency and authority in the world without relinquishing subjective strength—certainly also a desired outcome from literacy learning in college. These epistemological categories help educators to become sensitive to and to listen for language associated with being a victim or being vulnerable to victimization in their students’ talk or writing, an attunement which in turn can inform attempts to educate students without perpetuating or perpetrating further victimization in students’ lives. Therefore, if revictimization can be avoided in the process, I see efforts to retain “special populations” in college as one means by which educators can assist people leaving abuse.