Is it Abuse?

Sometimes people experiencing domestic abuse, dating abuse, sexual assault, and human trafficking may not be aware of it. It can happen to anyone without regard to age, gender, sexual orientation, race, or socio-economic status. Below you will find some resources intended to help you reflect on whether or not your relationship is healthy for you.

Dating/Domestic Abuse

Human Trafficking

Sexual Assault

What is...

Domestic abuse is a pattern of behaviors used to maintain power and control over another person. However, the relationship does not need to be romantic, sexual, or intimate for it to be domestic abuse. Elder abuse, sibling abuse, and child abuse may fall into this category as well.

Dating abuse is a pattern of behaviors used to maintain power and control over another person that occurs within a dating relationship. This type of abuse can occur whether you met your partner three weeks ago or have been with them for numerous years. Abuse can happen regardless of the amount of time you've been together.

Human trafficking involves the use of force, fraud, or coercion to obtain some type of labor or commercial sex act. For instance, if a person forces their partner to perform physical labor or forces them to engage in selling sex (prostitution or pornography, that is considered human trafficking.

Sexual assault refers to sexual contact or behavior that occurs without explicit consent of the person experiencing it.

Dating/Domestic Abuse

Since 1 in 4 women, 1 in 7 men, and 1 in 3 teenagers have experienced abuse, it is very likely that someone you know is currently experiencing dating or domestic abuse. However, just because it’s common, does not mean that it is normal. No one should make you feel unsafe in your relationship.

Signs of an unhealthy relationship:

- Intense romantic interest and passion immediately
- Insisting that you must text or call constantly
- Attempting to isolate you from loved ones
- Excessively tracking your location
- Being overly critical of you
- Never taking accountability for being wrong
- Extreme jealousy of other people

Types of Abuse

There is a common misconception that domestic violence is only physical. However, there are numerous types of abuse that do not include anything physical. If you are concerned about your relationship and need support, the MFJC is always here.

Emotional Abuse

This type of abuse refers to nonphysical behaviors intended to exploit another person’s vulnerabilities, insecurities, or character. For instance, constantly criticizing you, making you feel guilty, manipulating you, or trying to control you.

Signs of emotional abuse:

Insulting, criticizing, or undermining your self-confidence
Doing things to make you feel like you’re losing your mind
Neglecting your needs or request
Embarrassing or humiliating you
Using guilt to manipulate or control you

Financial Abuse

Financial abuse occurs in 99% of all abusive relationships. Designed to impact your ability to access money, make money, or maintain financial stability, this form of abuse is often why people don’t feel comfortable leaving their abusive relationships. In fact, according to National Network to End Domestic Violence, “surveys of survivors reflect that concerns over their ability to provide financially for themselves and their children was one of the top reasons for staying in and returning to an abusive partner.”

Signs of financial abuse:

Compromising your ability to work
Sabotaging your career advancement opportunities
Controlling all the financial decisions
Ruining your financial stability
Withholding funds that support basic needs

Without monetary assets, survivors can struggle to find affordable housing and may have difficulty acquiring the funds necessary to provide for themselves and their children. With ruined credit scores, inconsistent employment history, and legal issues caused by abuse, it’s difficult to leave an abusive partner.

Intimidation

Regardless of whether or not your partner has been physically abusive in the past or uses physical abuse as a method of control, intimidation tactics suggest that there is a potential for violence. Intimidating another person can often provide the abusive partner with the control that they are seeking because it’s intended to make you feel at risk if you don’t.

Signs of intimidation:

Making someone feel afraid:
- This could be done with just a look, action or gesture designed to make you feel at risk or intimidated in some way. This could be done by abusing pets, displaying weapons, or other behaviors that make you feel scared

Physically aggressive behavior not directed at you:
- Throwing a remote across the room, punching a wall during an argument, smashing something in frustration, destroying property are all forms of intimidation

Isolation

Closely connected to controlling behaviors, isolation is the outcome of multiple forms of abusive behaviors. As the name suggests, isolation refers to any behavior that removes you from your support group, interests, and goals. To prevent you from leaving the relationship, your partner may keep you from seeing who you want, doing what you want, and controlling your thoughts. This makes accessing both personal and public resources more difficult. Additionally, preventing you from seeing friends, family, or acquaintances ensures that you aren’t around people who may challenge the perceptions or beliefs that your abusive partner uses to maintain control.

Signs of Isolation:

Using jealousy to justify actions
Controlling your social groups
Controlling your actions

Mental Health Coercion

Since individuals experiencing domestic violence are three times more likely to report symptoms of severe depression, mental health coercion may be a powerful method of control. According to the Delaware Coalition Against Domestic Violence, 50% of individuals experiencing domestic violence say that their partner threatened to report their mental health to limit things they wanted or needed.

Signs of Mental Health Coercion:

Controlling your medications
Undermining your sanity
Threatening to report mental health issues
Using stigma around mental health

Denying, Minimizing, Blaming

A person using abuse may minimize or deny their abusive behavior to make you second guess yourself. These behaviors can make you question your own judgement and wonder whether or not you overreacted to a situation. Additionally, when a person blames you for their abusive behavior, it can reinforce the notion that changing your behavior will stop the abuse. Memories of the relationship before the abuse began can make you believe that it is possible to “go back” to the way things were before if you could just “stop doing” certain behaviors.

Signs of minimizing, denying, and blaming:

Making light of the abusive behavior
Not taking your concerns seriously
Claiming the abuse did not happen
Insisting that you are making up the abuse

Reproductive Coercion

When a person takes your ability to control your own reproductive system, that is known as reproductive coercion. This can be difficult to identify because it’s a less visible form of abuse. It can appear as pressure, guilt, or shame about you having, wanting to have, or not wanting to have children.

Signs of reproductive coercion:

Forcing you to get an abortion
Forcing you to get In vitro fertilization treatments
Pressuring you into becoming pregnant
Sabotaging your birth control
Controlling your access to reproductive healthcare or education

Sexual Abuse

To discuss sexual abuse, it’s important to understand consent. Consent is an active choice and is only possible when there is equal power. Consent is not giving in because of fear, going along with something because of feeling badly, or being deceived into it. Sometimes you may not feel safe saying no. It’s important to remember that consenting to sexual activity in the past does not indicate current consent.

Signs of Sexual Abuse:

Your partner has forced you to do things sexually that you were uncomfortable with
Your partner has pressured you into having sex
Your partner has had sex with you while you were sleeping or severely intoxicated/high
Your partner forced you to perform sexual acts against your will
You were afraid to say no to your partner when sex was requested

Spiritual Abuse

Spiritual abuse can happen in any form of religion or denomination. However, the power rests in how much you value these spiritual beliefs. For people who have a strong faith, an abusive partner might use spiritual abuse to manipulate or control your behaviors.

Signs of Spiritual Abuse:

Isolating you from your church or faith community
Using scripture or religious beliefs to justify their abuse
Degrading or belittling you for your religious beliefs
Using their status in the faith community to intimidate you

Stalking

Stalking is the willful, malicious, and repeated following or harassing of another person which is accompanied by a credible threat of violence. When a person using abuse engages in stalking during a relationship or after it has ended, this is considered a high-risk behavior.

Stalking Includes:

Mailing you cards or cryptic messages
Breaking windows or vandalizing your home
Destroying your property to scare or intimidate you
Leaving things, such as flowers, on your doorstep or at work
Watching you from a distance, hiding in bushes, or other methods of surveillance
Filing for custody of children regardless of their needs
Not respecting visitation limitations, harassing telephone calls, violating restraining orders

Status Abuse

When a person uses their privilege or societal status to threaten you or treat you as less than, that is known as status abuse. This can refer to any type of status including: immigration status, cisgender privilege, white privilege, male privilege, or status within the community as a political leader, law enforcement officer, celebrity, faith leader, or more.

Signs of Status Abuse:

Treating you like a servant
Excluding you from the decision-making process
Acting like a dictator

Substance Abuse Coercion

As part of a broader pattern of abuse and control, substance abuse coercion refers to the active use of substance abuse issues against a partner. According to the Delaware Coalition Against Domestic Violence, 47%-90% of women in substance use disorder treatment have experienced domestic violence in their lifetime, 60% of participants in the Substance Abuse Coercion Study report their partners had tried to interfere with their treatment, and 90% of women attending a methadone clinic had experienced domestic violence.

Signs of Substance Abuse Coercion:

Introducing you to substances and forcing you to use them more than you want
Forcing you into withdrawal or using addition to control
Coercing you to engage in illegal acts
Deliberately sabotaging your recovery efforts or access to treatment
Using the stigma around substance abuse to make you think no one will believe you about the abuse you’re experiencing

Technology Abuse

Technology abuse refers to the use of the internet or other electronic means to stalk or harass an individual, group, or organization. This could include false accusations, defamation, monitoring, slander and libel, or gathering information to threaten, embarrass, or harass. Technology abuse usually happens in five main categories: disrupting, impersonating, harassing, monitoring/stalking, and revenge porn.

Types of Technology Abuse:

Disrupting:
- This includes things like hacking into your online account and locking you out, forbidding you from using you technological devices, or breaking those devices.
Impersonating:
- When a person creates accounts presenting to be you to harass you, your friends, and family.
Harassing:
- This is defined as sending messages repeatedly through texts, email, or other messaging applications
Monitoring/Stalking:
- One of the most common forms of technology abuse, monitoring/stalking can be done through computer/cell phone software, hidden cameras, GPS, picture tagging, family phone plans, or fitness trackers.
Revenge porn:
- This refers to distributing sexual photos or videos without your consent. Regardless of whether you consented to be in the photos or videos, distribution is illegal and threats to distribute these can trap you in a relationship.

Threats and Coercion

Even if you’re not sure whether or not the threat could be carried out, the potential of the threat is enough to control another person.

Threats and Coercion can include:

Making or carrying out threats to hurt someone or their family
Threatening to make a report to welfare
Threatening to take custody of the children
Threatening to leave or commit suicide

The threat of suicide should always be taken seriously. The majority of murder/suicides in the US are connected to domestic violence, so a threat of suicide could also indicate that the life of the person being abused and/or their children may also be in danger.

Coercion is the use of manipulation to control your thoughts, actions, and behaviors. This can include making you drop charges or do illegal things. However, it can refer to a more nuance dynamic called coercive control. This is a form of psychological abuse where the person being abusive carriers out a pattern or controlling and manipulative behaviors to establish power over you.

Human Trafficking

At this very moment, more than 27 million people across the world are experiencing human trafficking. These are people of all ages, backgrounds, and nationalities that have been exploited by another person. While human trafficking has been dramatized in movies, it’s not a mysterious villain committing these atrocities – sometimes it’s a person’s own romantic partner.

There is an inherent link between domestic abuse and human trafficking because the dynamics used to establish and maintain power and control are very similar. According to the Human Trafficking Legal Center, it is not uncommon for a trafficked person's romantic partner, spouse, or casual lover to be their trafficker. In fact, romantic interest or sexual attraction is a tool that traffickers may use to manipulate and control the trafficked person. They make promises of love, marriage, and whirlwind romances until to coerce the victim into commercial sex, forced labor, or involuntary servitude.

For instance, an abusive partner might say, ‘we need money to pay this bill, I know a quick way to make that money’ and force their partner to perform sex acts for money. It has become so common that the Department of Justice’s Human Trafficking Task Force expressly lists domestic violence as a crime that may overlap with human trafficking. The grooming and method that traffickers get their victims often mimics that of intimate partner relationships.

For instance, both traffickers and abusive partners may intentionally impregnate their victim, use children to control their victim’s behaviors, isolate them from everyone, control their finances, and threaten to expose personal information, such as sexuality or immigration status, to maintain power and control.

Examples of Trafficking:

*Paraphrased from Freedom Network USA

Involuntary servitude: Traffickers may force their partner to perform certain services including house work, sex work, or supporting the family business. They may use physical and sexual abuse against their spouse and prevent them from leaving by threatening their citizenship, documentation, or other legal consequences.

Sexual economies: This occurs when a person is recruited into sex trafficking by someone that pretends to show romantic interest in them. When this occurs, there is frequently sexual assault and a pattern of domestic abuse designed to control the person being trafficked, including forcing them to partake in prostitution or pornography.

Other forced labor: People experiencing human trafficking may also be trafficked by family members and forced to perform labor. This can be restaurant work, farm work, sales work, or janitorial work.

Sexual Assault

Sexual assault refers to sexual contact or behavior that occurs without explicit consent of the person experiencing it. Forms of sexual abuse (such as assault and rape) are used to intimidate, control and demean a person experiencing domestic abuse. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, "women who are sexually abused by intimate partners (or romantic partners) report more risk factors for intimate partner homicides than non-sexually abused women."

However, women are not the only gender that experiences sexual abuse. Men, transgender, and gender non-conforming people may all experience sexual abuse as well.

As noted by Helping Survivors, "intimate partner sexual violence is often an extension of verbal and physical abuse. Victims of intimate partner sexual violence are forced to live with the perpetrator and face high risks of repeat encounters." Some people experiencing sexual abuse may not even realize it because they are married and believe that having sex is their duty to the relationship.

You can be sexually abused even if you’re married to the person causing the abuse

Is it Abuse?

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