You obviously don't know anyone who's ever been in an abusive relationship.
I resent that.
As a matter of fact, I dated a woman for a year who's relationship just prior to ours was a seven-year relationship where the guy would beat the hell out of her DAILY. He kicked her down flights of stairs, put out cigarettes on her arms, poked her with needles for kicks, yanked big chunks of her hair right out, you name it. He would call up his friends just to come over, so they could get drunk and wail on her. She had broken bones, and still has scars (but never on her face or hands so it wasn't obvious).
Her situation, the way she related it to me, and the discussions we had about it formed my opinions on abusive relationships. She didn't keep going back to him because he kept promising her it would be different, or because she thought she could change him. She was in grade 11 when she started dating this guy, and moved from Alberta to Ontario after high school because he took a job in Ottawa. That's where he started to abuse her. She tried a few times to get out of it, but he controlled her finances and refused to let her get a job or leave the house on her own so she couldn't look for her own place, she had no friends in the city that weren't also friends of his, her family was halfway across the country, and she didn't tell them or the cops because she was certain he'd kill her if her family or the police got involved. So, she says she stayed because the only other option she thought she had was to either kill him or live on the streets, which to her was worse because at home she at least got three meals a day and a warm bed at night (she didn't know about shelter options at the time). It all came to a head when he stabbed her in the stomach one night in a drunken rage, and she HAD to go to the hospital or she would have died, and she broke down and told the doctor everything. He called up a shelter and the police, and the guy was arrested and put in jail. She lived in the shelter for a few months, got a job, and saved up enough money to move to the city where I am before she got a loan and started a university degree, where I met her.
The point of all this is that it is not always about a "cycle of victimization", or whatever you want to call it. Some women simply do not have any other choices. Her abuser took all the options she had away from her. Those are the women I feel worst for. Rihanna has options - she has money, she has bodyguards, she has a job, she has her own house, etc. She can choose to leave any time. She could fly to Australia on a whim if she wanted to. She could tell Chris Brown to fuck off and there would be bodyguards around her that could stop him from ever coming within sight of her. But, she CHOSE, freely and of her own volition, to go back to him. By no means did she "deserve" to be hit (as some of the scum of the scum has said). After the incident I had a great deal of sympathy for her and was actively rooting for her to show how strong she can be and stand up to Chris Brown. She doesn't have to put up with it. The fact that she freely chose to go back to a man who came within inches of beating her to death (from the sounds of it) made me lose a lot of the sympathy I had for her, because of the fact that she could very easily get out of that situation. She's not trapped like my ex was, she has a choice, and she chose the path that will almost certainly lead to her being abused again. It's a shame, but what the fuck?