10 Signs of Domestic Violence and Abuse
Important red flags to watch out for
Welcome
The post you’re about to read is one I’ve put together quickly in response to this extraordinary and brave Tweet from Joanna, a survivor, which has gone viral today. I’m mentioned in the thread under Joanna’s Tweet, where she named me as someone who can provide a good explanation of the ‘red flags’ for domestic violence and abuse. So here goes.
10 signs of domestic violence and abuse
The ‘relationship’ starts very intensely, moving at a fast pace. You feel giddy, swept off your feet, and like you’ve found your soul mate. This may be ‘love bombing’; something the abuser does to trick you to commit to them hard and fast. It is not safe for them to start abusing you until they have you deeply committed and entrapped, so they hurry this process along.
The person you are ‘dating’ says they have a ‘crazy’ or ‘vindictive’ ex. They may say this to discredit an ex who they have already abused, making you distrust this ex and keep your distance from them. This prevents you from finding out the truth about the past behaviour of the person you are ‘dating’, and makes you feel passionate about being a good partner to them after the previous ‘bad’ experiences they say they’ve had with their ex.
The person you are ‘dating’ likes to get their own way. They like to have the final say. They may start off expressing this in subtle ways. The relationship is happening much more on their terms than yours. There may be power imbalances between you and the person you are ‘dating’ that make this seem natural and sensible: They may be older, richer, and more professionally successful than you. They may be a citizen of the country you are in, and you may have only recently moved there.
Your ‘partner’ started off by placing you on a pedestal. You felt wonderful. Loved. Needed. But now they are making you feel small, stupid, incapable, less than.
They may be using this as a pretext to take control over your life, saying they can run it better than you can. They want to monitor and control what you are doing, claiming that this is a sign of their love and care for you and their desire to protect you. They may talk about how they are ‘chivalrous’ and ‘gentlemanly’ and want to take care of ‘their woman’. They show a great deal of jealousy and suspicion about your faithfulness and commitment.
Your boundaries and consent are constantly pushed and violated. You don’t like something, but you have to do it anyway. You want to stop doing something, but you dare not voice this. If you do voice it, your ‘partner’ does not react well. Your ‘partner’ shows little respect for your needs, choices or feelings. You are constantly having to push down your emotions and seem happy, when really you are uncomfortable and uneasy. You don’t even want to acknowledge to yourself how uncomfortable and uneasy you are feeling.
Your life and your ‘partner’s’ life have become entangled, fast. You now live with them, perhaps far away from your local area. Perhaps you have a child with them. You and your ‘partner’ have joint finances that perhaps you don’t have much say over.
You can’t see or contact the people who you care about as much as you’d like to because of how your ‘partner’ will react. Perhaps your loved ones don’t like your ‘partner’, making things awkward. Maybe your ‘partner’ tells you that your loved ones secretly don’t like you, making you feel insecure and anxious around them. Or maybe your loved ones think your ‘partner’ is wonderful because of how your ‘partner’ turns on the charm around them. Maybe you don’t dare tell your loved ones that things with your ‘partner’ are not as perfect as they seem. Maybe you get the sense that your loved ones don’t want to hear it.
You’re not the person you used to be. You question and doubt yourself a lot. You feel that the ‘relationship’ going wrong is your fault. You redouble your efforts to please your ‘partner’. You walk on eggshells around them. When they are angry (and they are angry much too often) you feel distressed and fearful.
You long for things to return to how they were at the start of the relationship. You alternate between hope and despair. When your ‘partner’ is ‘nice’ to you, you try to forget all the bad times and to enjoy their niceness, hoping and believing it will last forever. You might marry or conceive with them during one of these ‘nice’ periods.
You look for solutions. You think: maybe if my partner gets the help they need (the therapy, or the help to stay sober), then everything will be okay after all. At the same time, you don’t want to tell people how bad things are. It feels disloyal and dangerous to let anyone know.
Everything described above may happen with or without any physical assaults taking place. It is absolutely, 100%, still serious and dangerous abuse even if no assaults have taken place.
Domestic violence and abuse is never the victim’s or survivor’s fault. There is nothing wrong with victims or survivors. They are normal people. There is nothing about them that is causing them to be abused. Anyone can be abused, no matter how previously confident/unconfident, happy/unhappy, or educated they were. The victim or survivor did not consent to be abused. What they thought they were getting into was a happy, wonderful relationship. Everything that happened was based on the abuser’s severe coercion and manipulation, and this coercion and manipulation undermined the victim’s-survivor’s decision-making abilities.
Abusers are making the choice to abuse. They are harming another person and violating their human rights. The only thing that could potentially, possibly help a domestic abuser is a domestic abuse intervention that holds them accountable for their abuse and challenges them to change the attitudes, belief systems and expectations that are driving their abuse. But the abuser would have to be willing to engage in this work, and many abusers are not willing. They enjoy being abusive too much. They get too much pleasure and too many advantages out of their abusive behaviour to be willing to relinquish it. Some abusers are much too dangerous even to be admitted onto such an intervention. The book Why Does He Do That?, by Lundy Bancroft, does a great job of explaining this.
Domestic violence and abuse is severe and highly harmful. No one deserves to be treated in this way.
A blog post by Dr Emma Katz, PhD.
Follow my social media channels and see my domestic abuse research here: https://linktr.ee/dremmakatz
My book Coercive Control in Children’s and Mothers’ Lives is available from all major bookshops and online retailers.
Emma, this is such an important article. I think an under explored effort is in prevention and your identification of red flags and warning signs is right on target. It should be made into an oversized refrigerator magnet and stuck on every refrigerator around the world.
My only observation is that grooming from my perspective IS a tactic of abuse. It is a necessary building block in having the leverage to inflict additional tactics of abuse. It is psychophysiological abuse as it will induce a unidirectional, abuser induced hyper-attachment, sometimes called a trauma bond. IMO, the kiss is as much a tactic of abuse as the kick.
Finally, Joanna is amazing and brave. I salute her. This is why we tell our stories, in the hopes that it will help other people. She can rest assured knowing that she helped perhaps 20K plus people by sharing her story.
Thank you, Emma, for all that you do. You are truly a bright light and you have my deep respect and admiration.
I agree that this is such a useful summary of the sorts of behaviours that get this phenomenon underway. We hear often that coercive control is a pattern of abusive (correct), and IMPORTANTLY this is a pattern of behaviours that show how it STARTS, and how different in nature those behaviours are... that falling for them doesn't mean that you were stupid, especially as it wasn't a 'thing' 30 years ago! More like you just hit a purple patch, and got lucky in love!!
The value of this is inestimable for educating the public and women who may fall prey to it. It would have saved me, not only the misery of decades of abusive controlling confusing behaviour, but also my substantial personal wealth and career. That money now would make my life very comfortable indeed!