Domestic Violence

Emotional abuse always accompanies, and in most cases precedes, physical battering. Targeted, repeated emotional abuse can severely affect the victim's sense of self and of reality. Here is a list of emotionally abusive behaviors abusers use against their partners:

• Abuser makes hostile jokes about the habits and faults of women
  
  
• Ignores the victim's feelings
  
  
• Withholds approval as a form of punishment
  
  
• Yells at the victim
  
  
• Labels the victim with generally insulting terms: crazy, bitch, stupid
  
  
• Repeatedly delivers a series of insults specific to the victim and designed to inflict maximum psychological damage
  

• Repeatedly humiliates the victim in front of family members and others
  
  
• Isolates the victim socially, perhaps geographically as well (for example, by moving the family to a remote location)
  
  
• Blames the victim for all the abuser's troubles and failures
  
  
• Threatens physical violence and retaliation against the victim, children or other family members
  
  
• Puts down the victim's abilities as a mother, lover, worker, etc
  
  
• Demands all the victim's attention and resents the children
  

• Tells the victim about his sexual affairs
  
  
• Constantly accuses her of having affairs, even when she does not have the desire or freedom to have affairs
  
  
• Gives the victim the "silent treatment"
  
  
• Threatens to abuse the children and/or get custody of them
  
  
• Tells the victim she must stay with him because she needs him and she couldn't make it without him
  
  
• Accuses the victim of being violent if she acts in any way to protect herself
  

• Questions her sense of reality
  
  
• Forces economic dependency: He prevents the victim from working - either by forbidding her to get a job or by making her life so chaotic that she gets fired - and/or he takes her money
  
  
• Puts down or denies the victim's history, heritage, faith, values
  
  
• Hits the wall, not her, to display his power
  
  
• Breaks personal items that have sentimental value to her as a message that he can break her too
  

• Threatens, tortures or kills her/their pets
  
  
• Threatens suicide if the victim doesn't stay with him or do what he wants
  
  
• Spends hours cleaning guns or knives in front of the victim
  
  
• Threatens to kill her or her children
  
  
• Destroys victim's self esteem
  
  

     

24 hour hotline: (503) 399-7722 or toll free in Oregon 1 (866) 399-7722
May 2007 © Mid-Valley Women's Crisis Service