What is Domestic & Family Violence?
Domestic and Family Violence
Child Abuse
Elder Abuse
Domestic and Family Violence
What is Domestic and Family Violence?
Domestic and family violence (DFV) occurs when one person in an intimate personal, family, or informal carer relationship uses violence or abuse to maintain power and control over the other person.
DFV does not always involve physical violence. DFV is usually an ongoing pattern of behaviour aimed at controlling a partner (also known as coercive control).
Domestic and Family Violence Can Include:
Emotional Abuse
Emotional abuse is not always easy to identify, but it can lower self-esteem and confidence, impacting your mental health and wellbeing.
Examples are:
- constant criticism, put downs and name calling, often in relation to appearance/attractiveness, parenting ability or likeability
- intentionally embarrassing you
- telling you what to wear or criticising your looks
- threatening to commit suicide or self-harm to intimidate and control you.
Verbal abuse can include:
- yelling, shouting or swearing
- using words to intimidate or cause fear
- frequently accusing you of having affairs
- constant criticism and put downs.
Financial Abuse
Financial abuse can start with subtle, controlling behaviours and result in someone having complete control over your finances.
For example:
- getting angry about you spending money
- taking your pay or restricting your access to joint bank accounts
- refusing to pay for your necessary items such as food and medicine
- stopping you from working or furthering your education.
Psychological Abuse
Psychological abuse can affect your inner thoughts and feelings as well as exert control over your life.
For example:
- controlling what you eat
- controlling access to medications
- undermining your perception of reality
- questioning your judgement
- trying to convince you or your support network that you are ’crazy’ or a ’liar’
- frequent abusive text messages or demanding phone calls.
Physical Abuse
Physical abuse involves causing or threatening physical harm to control you.
For example:
- slapping, kicking, punching
- choking, suffocation or strangulation – anything that prevents you from breathing normally
- anything that causes injury
- punching holes in walls or breaking furniture and belongings
- physically restricting your movement e.g. locking you in a room or house or preventing you from leaving
- threatening to harm your children, other loved ones or pets.
Psychological Abuse
Psychological abuse can affect your inner thoughts and feelings as well as exert control over your life.
For example:
- controlling what you eat
- controlling access to medications
- undermining your perception of reality
- questioning your judgement
- trying to convince you or your support network that you are ’crazy’ or a ’liar’
- frequent abusive text messages or demanding phone calls.
Social Abuse
Social abuse/social isolation can start with subtle, controlling behaviours that can end in completely isolating you from your friends, family and support networks.
For example:
- monitoring your phones and devices without permission
- controlling which friends and family members you have contact with
- continuously criticising your friends and family
- purposefully humiliating you in public or in front of other people
- moving you away to a geographically isolated location to further separate you from your support network.
Technology-based Abuse
Technology-based abuse and surveillance can include:
- constantly messaging or calling you
- checking your phone and other devices without permission
- inhibiting your access to technology
- monitoring you on social media, or actively abusing and humiliating you on these platforms
- tracking your movements
- monitoring your internet usage
- video or audio-recording of your home, car and workplace (with or without your consent or knowledge)
- posting sexually explicit images or videos of you online without your permission (this is also image-based abuse and a form of sexual abuse and may be referred to as ’revenge porn’).
Spiritual Abuse
Spiritual abuse can include:
- forcing you to participate in religious activities
- stopping you from taking part in your religious or cultural practices
- misusing spiritual or religious beliefs and practices to justify abuse and violence.
Sexual Abuse
Sexual abuse can include:
- forcing or coercing you to have sex or engage in sexual acts
- unwanted exposure to pornography
- deliberately causing pain during sex
- using sexually degrading insults or humiliation during sex.
Reproductive control is often a subset of sexual abuse and can include:
- not letting you use contraception or forcing you to use contraception that you do not want to
- tampering with your contraception without your knowledge
- pressuring you to have a termination you don’t want, or not allowing you to access a termination of pregnancy
- pressuring you to start a family or have more children when you are not ready.
Stalking and Surveillance
Stalking and surveillance can include:
- following you in your car or on foot
- frequent ‘drive-bys’ of your home or workplace
- waiting outside your home, workplace or educational facility
- leaving unwanted notes or gifts for you to find
- talking to friends, neighbours or your children about your movements or activities.
- constantly keeping check on where you are and what you are doing
- using tracking devices to monitor your whereabouts.
Identity-based Abuse
Identity-based abuse is often specifically targeted at people from the LGBTIQ+ communities and can include:
- threatening to reveal your sexual orientation – outing you – to others
- threatening to reveal your HIV status to others
- reinforcing your feelings of confusion, shame or guilt about your sexuality to coerce you
- using your concern that support services may be homophobic or transphobic to discourage you from seeking help
- isolating you from your family, community, or LGBTIQ+ spaces, or threatening to isolate you if the relationship ends.
Child abuse
a) any act committed against a child involving:
1. a sexual offence
2. grooming offences under section 49M(1) of the Crimes Act 1958
b) the infliction, on a child, of:
1. physical violence
2. serious emotional or psychological harm
c) the serious neglect of a child.
Source: Child Wellbeing and Safety Act 2005
Reference: Child Safe Standards – definitions
Emotional Child Abuse
Emotional child abuse occurs when a child is repeatedly rejected, isolated, or frightened by threats. It also includes hostility, derogatory name-calling and put-downs, and persistent coldness from a person to the extent that the child suffers, or is likely to suffer, emotional or psychological harm to their physical or developmental health.
Physical Child Abuse
Physical child abuse is any non-accidental infliction of physical violence on a child by any person. It can be inflicted in many ways, including beating, shaking or burning and assault with implements and female genital mutilation.
Child Sexual Abuse
Child sexual abuse is when a person uses power or authority over a child to involve them in sexual activity. It can include a wide range of sexual activity. Sexual offences are governed by the Crimes Act 1958 (Vic.)
Elder Abuse
What is elder abuse?
Elder abuse is any act which causes harm to an older person and is carried out by someone they know and trust.
The abuser may be a:
- son or daughter
- grandchild
- partner
- other family members
- friend
- neighbour
Abuse is usually intentional. The harm caused to an older person may range from the effects of verbal harassment through to serious physical injury inflicted deliberately. Harm can also include emotional harm and financial loss including the loss of a home and belongings.
The older person may be dependent on the abuser, for example if they rely on the abuser for care. It is also common for the abuser to depend on the support of the older person, for example for accommodation. Sometimes, there may be a co-dependent relationship where both the older person and the abuser depend on each other.
References:
Signs You are Experiencing Coercive Control
Isolating you from your support system. An abusive partner will cut you off from friends and family, or limit your contact with them so you don’t receive the support you need.
Monitoring your activity throughout the day.
Denying you freedom and autonomy. A person exerting coercive control may try to limit your freedom and independence. For example, not allowing you to go to work or school, restricting your access to transportation, stalking your every move when you’re out, taking your phone and changing passwords, etc.
Gaslighting, where the abuser makes you doubt your own truth, experience and sanity, by insisting that they are always right, and instils their narrative of a situation, even if the evidence points against this. Gaslighting in essence, is based on lies and manipulation of the truth.
Name-calling and severe criticism, as well as malicious put-downs which are all extreme forms of bullying.
Limiting access to money and controlling finances. This is a way of restricting your freedom and ability to leave the relationship. Financial abuse is listed above as a specific form of abuse but, within the context of coercive control, financial control is a tactic to keep a person disempowered, by utilising strategies such as:
- placing you on a strict budget that barely covers the essentials such as food or clothes
- limiting your access to bank accounts
- hiding financial resources from you
- preventing you from having a credit card
- rigorously monitoring what you spend.
Coercing you, to take care of all the domestic duties such as cleaning, cooking and childcare without sharing the responsibility and tasks involved to undertake these duties.
Turning your children against you. If you have children either with the abuser or someone else, they may try to weaponise the children against you by making comments that are critical of you, belittling you in front of the children, or telling them that you’re a bad parent. Sometimes the techniques are very subtle and insidious, involving slow drip-feeding of a narrative that regards you as abnormal.
Controlling aspects of your health and your body. The abuser will monitor and control how much you eat, sleep, exercise, or how much time you spend in the bathroom. They may also control where you go for medical help, and the medications you take.
Making jealous accusations about the time you spend with family or friends, either in person or online, as a way of phasing out all your contact with the external world, except for them.
Regulating your sexual relationship, for example making demands about the amount of times you engage in sex each day or week, and the kinds of activities you perform.
Threatening your children or pets as an extreme form of intimidation. When physical, emotional, or financial threats do not work for the abuser as desired, they may make threats against others such as your loved ones, children and pets, who are also beloved members of the household.