Some Facts About Domestic Violence

Domestic violence is a pattern of many behaviors directed at achieving and maintaining power and control over an intimate partner. Power and control tactics certainly include acts of physical violence of varying degrees of severity. However, in many abusive relationships, abusers use a variety of other tactics directed at controlling their partners. In the 1980s, The Domestic Abuse Intervention Project in Duluth, Minnesota developed a model to help explain and characterize abusive relationships. This model is called the Power and Control Wheel [we could try to get permission to have a link to a power and control wheel on the website] and explains the following tactics used by abusers:

Emotional Abuse: Abusers often speak to victims in humiliating and degrading ways geared at promoting a sense of worthlessness. This verbal abuse is sometimes accompanied by physical violence. These messages are conveyed both blatantly and subtly, leading victims to question their own value and abilities.

Isolation: It is common for victims of domestic violence to become isolated from family, friends, and others who could provide them with emotional or practical support. For example, the abuser may not allow the victim to spend time with others away from him or he may fail to pass on phone messages.

Minimizing, Denying, and Blaming: Acts that serve to both distort reality and normalize abuse include minimizing or denying the seriousness of abusive acts and blaming the victim for "causing" the abuse. Batterers often tell victims that "they were only kidding" about emotionally harmful or degrading statements. It is not uncommon to hear both victims and their abusers tell law enforcement officers or advocates that "it was only a slap" or "he only punched me once."

Children: Children easily become pawns in an abuser’s effort to control the victim. This may be the case regardless of whether the abuser and the victim currently live together. He may threaten to seek custody of the children if she leaves, refuse to comply with pre-arranged times for visitation exchanges after the parties have separated, or abuse the children as a means of controlling the victim.

Abuser Perceived Entitlement: Batterers believe it is their entitlement to maintain power in a relationship and control their intimate partners. They believe that big decisions should be theirs to make. Their perspectives about the relational roles of males and females tend to be traditional and male-dominant. They commonly believe it is their job to discipline their partners, physically, emotionally, and by denying victims necessities for themselves and the children.

Economic Abuse: When victims do not have economic autonomy, it is extremely difficult to leave an abusive situation and become self-sufficient. A batterer may sabotage the victim’s efforts to acquire and maintain employment by harassing her at work, hinder victims’ efforts to increase job skills or attend educational institutions, or deny her access to the family financial information and resources.

Coercion and Threats: Common coercive behaviors include: threatening to do something to hurt the victim; threatening to leave the victim; threatening to commit suicide; threatening to hurt her family members or friends; and threatening to report her to a welfare agency or the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Victims quickly learn that batterers have no qualms about carrying out their threats and batterers use the victims’ awareness of this fact and their fear to maintain control without having to commit acts of physical violence.

Intimidation: Victims learn to interpret and fear batterers’ looks, expressions, gestures or actions. These behaviors may be so subtle that others may not notice. Batterers also commonly destroy victims’ property, especially those things that hold sentimental value. Batterers may torture or kill pets. Batterers frequently own weapons and tend to brandish them to intimidate their victims. Unfortunately, batterers also use these weapons far too frequently.

What is domestic violence?
Domestic violence is a pattern of behavior that one intimate partner or spouse exerts over another as a means of control. Domestic violence may include physical violence, coercion, threats, intimidation, isolation, and emotional, sexual or economic abuse. Frequently, perpetrators use the children to manipulate victims: by harming or abducting the children; by threatening to harm or abduct the children; by forcing the children to participate in abuse of the victim; by using visitation as an occasion to harass or monitor victims; or by fighting protracted custody battles (See, e.g., Kim v. Kim, 1989) to punish victims. Perpetrators often invent complex rules about what victims or the children can or cannot do, and force victims to abide by these frequently changing rules.

Domestic violence is not defined solely by specific physical acts, but by a combination of psychological, social and familial factors. In some families, perpetrators of domestic violence may routinely beat their spouses until they require medical attention. In other families, the physical violence may have occurred in the past; perpetrators may currently exert power and control over their partners simply by looking at them a certain way or reminding them of prior episodes. In still other families, the violence may be sporadic, but may have the effect of controlling the abused partner. Dr. Mary Ann Dutton, a leading clinical psychologist, defines domestic violence as a pattern of interaction in which one intimate partner is forced to change his or her behavior in response to the threats or abuse of the other partner. (Dutton, 1994)

Domestic violence is often understood as the act of physical violence of one family member toward another. In reality, many survivors reveal that they suffer as much from verbal and emotional abuse as from the actual physical abuse. Therefore, domestic violence includes all language and actions which inflict suffering on the victim. Domestic violence also includes behaviors which force someone to do things they do not want to, or prevent them from doing activities that they do want to do

    The causes are rarely physiological, nor does the use of alcohol cause the violence to occur. Alcohol and chemical abuse are often found with abusive behavior, and their use can be determined as "factors". However, the problems of violent behavior are not caused by the alcohol or chemical substance. Violence is a learned behavior or learned response to stress, frustration and anger. In a broader context, it is a result of unequal power between men and women.