"This is not what love looks like"
When 38-year-old Angela Brower tried to leave her abusive boyfriend, he assaulted her.
"He punched me in the eye with every bit of force that he had and it knocked me unconscious," Brower said.
The beating left Brower with multiple bruises, a broken nose, and a broken eye socket. The Tennessee woman posted pictures of her injuries on Facebook.
"I posted the pictures because they helped me," she said.
"They helped me to see what the man I loved had done to me, and then after all of the responses that I got, and all of the messages and all of the other women responded the way that they did, I continued to put my pictures on Facebook to make other women aware that this is not what love looks like."
Following the emergence of a video showing the NFL's Ray Rice hitting his then-fiance, focus has turned to domestic violence in the United States.
CBS News spoke with a 29-year-old woman in Newark, New Jersey, who is afraid to show her face or give her name. She's in a shelter now, along with a three-week-old baby whose father, she says, beat and raped her.
"I'm still scared of him, even though he's locked up right now," she said.
Every minute, 20 people are victims of physical violence by a partner or spouse. That's ten million victims a year, according to the CDC. Eighty-five percent of them are women.
Lil Corcoran runs a women's shelter in Northern New Jersey. She doesn't like it when people ask, "Why did she stay?"
"When we join in that sort of pile on, we're kind of just reinforcing this idea that there must be something wrong with her, she must be stupid, 'why can't she figure this out?" Corcoran said.
"And I like to see the focus change on 'what's wrong with him?'" she added. "Why do we do this?"
Corcoran said the most dangerous time for a woman in an abusive relationship is the period when she tries to leave. It's why Angela Brower believes her boyfriend tried to kill her.
"I would tell any women that first time abuse walk away because it never gets any better," said Brower. "It only gets worse."
