One of the costs of domestic abuse for women attempting to pursue literacy learning is embedded in the persistent claims I heard from women participating in the creative writing class and from literacy learners in Horsman’s (2000) text that they were slow learners or that they would never be able to get it right; that going back to school to earn a GED or college degree would be a waste of time or money; that, even if they did go back to school, they would not be able to finish. Responding to Horsman’s surveys of Canadian basic literacy programs, the teachers report having to run programs with flexible attendance policies to accommodate the crises—both material and psychological—that interrupt the students’ learning efforts. The women in my creative writing classes and the underprepared students I teach in IPFW’s version of “Basic Writing” also have had significant attendance problems concomitant with multiple “real life” emergencies that draw them away from focusing on their schoolwork. Moreover, I have encountered many students, as classmates or in my consulting work in the IPFW Writing Center, whose current life crises interrupt their abilities to focus on their academic work, most notably, a woman who told of lying wrapped in blankets on the floor of a friend’s car in order to leave her husband and a woman whose ex-husband of several years reappeared and threatened to kill her and their daughter. These interruptions suggest that stress itself in someway contributes to the self-perception of being a slow learner.

Horsman’s (2000) claim that “literacy learning is likely to work as a particularly strong trigger for memories of violence for many women” (p. 5) points to a more insidious stressor or cost of domestic abuse affecting a student’s self-perception as a learner. She explains that

… literacy [learning] takes learners back to their failure to learn to read well as children—[and perhaps] to memories of violence at home or school… [The] school-like situation for many learners, … in itself, may be terrifying and lead to panic. (p. 5)