Types of Domestic Abuse

Domestic abuse can include threatening, controlling, coercive behaviour, violence or abuse. Abuse can take many forms including psychological, virtual, physical, verbal, sexual, financial or emotional.​

​​

Physical Abuse

Physical abuse involves any deliberate action with the intent to cause injury, disable or kill. Physical abuse can involve the use of a weapon or an object used as a weapon, restraint or using physical force to harm another person. In addition to acts of physical violence, physical abuse can also involve false imprisonment, exposure to heat or cold, force feeding or denial of food, preventing access to healthcare or improper administering of medication.

Psychological Abuse

Psychological abuse is a term that includes acts, threats of acts or coercive tactics to cause someone fear or to confuse and distort their thinking. Psychological abuse can include humiliation, controlling what the woman can and cannot do, withholding information, diminishing or embarrassing the woman and isolating her from her friends and family.

The abusive behaviour is often interspersed with warmth and kindness to desensitise the woman. Nearly half of survivors of psychological abuse report being regularly told they were mentally unstable, and abusers may use tactics such as presenting insults as jokes or presenting different versions of events (gaslighting).

Emotional Abuse

Emotional abuse can include withholding affection, turning a woman's children and her friends against her, preventing the woman from seeing her friends or family or preventing contact with children by breaching court orders. Emotional blackmail can be used to try and make the woman feel guilty by using emotional outbursts, sulking or threatening self-harm or suicide as a way to control the woman's behaviour.

​

Verbal Abuse

Verbal abuse can involve constant yelling and shouting, verbal humiliation either in private or in company, constantly being laughed at or made fun of, and name calling or the use of derogatory language. There are also more insidious methods such as constantly correcting or interrupting the woman or the use of prolonged silent treatment.

​

Sexual Abuse

Sexual abuse can involve sexual harassment, sexually degrading language, rape or the threat of rape, unwanted touching, criticising sexual performance, accusations of affairs, sexual assault and any sexual activity which is done without consent.

 

Financial Abuse

Abusers will often target a woman's financial independence as a way of controlling them and increasing their reliance on the abuser. Financial abuse can be broken down into the following three types:

 

• Economic exploitation – this is where the abuser depletes the resources and credit of the woman. This can be through stealing from the woman, gambling joint money, obtaining credit in the woman’s name; sometimes without the permission or knowledge of the woman, deliberately running up debt and defaulting on payments. Where child contact is being decided, the abuse may try to drag out court proceedings as means of costing the woman additional legal fees.

​

• Economic control – this can involve the abuser preventing the woman from having access to, or knowledge of resources. It can involve denial of basic essentials such as access to food, clothing and medication. It can also involve tracking of money such as the abuser having total control over the family income, making the woman account for every penny spent or not allowing the woman to spend money without permission.

 

• Employment sabotage – This includes behaviours that prevent women from gaining or maintaining employment with a view to preventing their financial independence. Behaviours can include forbidding or interfering with employment or education or harassment at the woman's workplace. The abuser may also interfere with other sources of income such as benefit payments for disability or child support.

​

Virtual

Virtual abuse encompasses digital stalking, placing false and malicious information about the woman on their own or others social media, online trolling, preventing the woman from having access to their content or not allowing them control over it, revenge pornography and monitoring or controlling of e-mail and phone calls (this can include work email and calls). Doxxing is where an abuser posts private information about the woman online without their consent. Deepfake pornography is where an abuser uses AI to generate explicit images/film that appear to be of the woman.

 

Coercive Control

 

Coercive control is a strategic pattern of behaviour designed to exploit, control, create dependency and dominate the woman. Coercive control is a form of grooming behaviour that over time erodes women's sense of self, their confidence and self-esteem and their ability to think and act for themselves without instruction from the abuser. The effect on the woman is that of being micro-managed, with all aspects of her daily life being controlled by the abuser. Due to its nature, many victims of coercive control may not realise that what they are experiencing is abuse.

 

Children

 

The abuser may make threats to take or hurt the children. Abuse may be carried out where it can be witnessed by the children. The abuser may criticise the woman's parenting skills, or use the children as a weapon, for example by encouraging or forcing them to join in with the abuse.

​​​​

If you are affected by domestic abuse YOU CAN call Women's Aid ABCLN on 028 25 632136 or email support@womensaidabcln.org  In an Emergency always call 999.

​​​

​