Your analogy is defective in that abused spouses usually still cling to their abusers, which is why domestic violence is so persistent and bad. If a random person assaults you on the street, you're very unlikely to lie in court to keep him from going to prison; battered spouses do that kind of thing all the time.
Of course my analogy is "defective" -- that's a feature of analogies, not a bug because all analogies break down rapidly. An analogy is a loose likeness between two things; one is not a wholly accurate representation of the other.
