Common Indicators

Of Domestic Violence

Using Emotional Abuse

• Putting you down and/or calling you names
• Making you feel bad about yourself
• Making you think you’re crazy
• Playing mind games
• Humiliating you
• Making you feel guilty
• Constant criticism
• Repeatedly making and breaking promises
• Subverting your relationship with your children
• Silent treatment
• Manipulating your feelings
• Belittling your abilities and competencies

Using Isolation

• Controlling what you do, who you talk to and see, what you read and where you go
• Limiting your outside involvement with other people
• Withholding or limiting access to phone usage
• Undermining your friendships
• Harassing your friends or family
• Constant accompaniment
• Constant “checking up”
• Use of unfounded accusations or rumors
• Forced imprisonment

Using Coercion and Threats

• Making or carrying out threats to hurt you
• The threat or actual use of blackmail
• Threatening to leave you
• Threatening to hurt self
• Threatening to commit suicide
• Threatening to report you to CPS or DSHS
• Threatening to report you to welfare, INS, etc.
• Threatening to call the police
• Making you drop charges or change your story in court
• Making you do illegal things
• Making you lie to law enforcement officers

Using Intimidation

• Making you afraid by looks, gestures, or actions
• Destroying property
• Abusing pets
• Displaying weapons

Using Economic Abuse

• Making or attempting to make you financially dependent by maintaining total control over your financial resources
• Withholding money or access to money
• Forbidding or restricting school or employment
• Requiring accountability and justification for all money spent
• Forced welfare fraud
• Making you pay for his personal bills and debts
• Preventing you from getting or keeping a job
• Making you ask for money
• Giving you an allowance
• Taking your money
• Not letting you know about or have access to family income

Sexual Abuse

• Coercing or attempting to coerce any sexual contact without consent, including but not limited to: marital rape, acquaintance rape, forced sex after physical beating, attacks on sexual parts of your body, unprotected sex, use of pornography, painful sex, humiliating sex
• Attempts to undermine your sexuality by treating you in a derogatory manner, criticizing sexual performance and desirability
• Accusations of infidelity
• Withholding of sex

Using Children

• Making you feel guilty about the children
• Using the children to relay messages
• Using visitation to harass you
• Threatening to take the children away
• Threatening, or actually harming the children
• Intentionally exposing the children to violence

Minimizing, Denying, Blaming

• Making light of the abuse and not taking your concerns (or others’) about it seriously
• Saying the abuse didn’t happen, or you caused it
• Shifting responsibility for abusing behavior

Using “Male Privilege”

• Treating you like a servant
• Making all the big decisions
• Acting like “master of the castle”
• Being the one to define men’s and women’s roles

Physical Abuse

• Inflicting or attempting to inflict physical injury and/or illness by grabbing, pinching, shoving, slapping, hitting, hair-pulling, biting, arm-twisting, kicking, punching, hitting with blunt objects, stabbing, shooting
• Withholding access to resources necessary to maintain your health, such as medications, prescriptions, doctor appointments, food or fluids, hygienic assistance
• Forced use of alcohol or other drug use

You Don’t Have to Live With It

Domestic abuse affects people of all ages, races, religions, sexual orientation and social status. It happens to dating teens, newlyweds and long established married couples. It is not healthy or normal to be in an abusive relationship of any kind.