Week Eleven - Domestic Violence Flashcards
Women and DV stats?
1 woman murdered a week
1 in 4 experience PA, EA, SA
3x more likely than men to experience
What is DV?
Use of violent, threatening or coercive behaviour to gain power. Can include PA, SA, EA or financial abuse from current or former partner
Insecure Reactors?
Simple domestic violence
- Use EV or PV to gain power
- In response to conflict
- Associated with sense of entitlement and frustration
- More likely to seek help/realise there is a problem with their behaviour
Coercive Controllers?
Emotionally dependent and Calculating manipulator
Coercion - Hurting and intimidating causing fear in the victim
Control - Isolation and regulation of the victims behaviour
Violence in Coercive Controllers?
There is frequently physical and sexual violence
Rees, Agnew-Davies, & Barkham (2006). Surveyed 500 women seeking refuge in the UK. They found:
- 70% choked or strangled at least once
- 60% forced to have sex against their will
Intimidation in Coercive Controllers?
Designed to keep abuse secret, create dependence and compliance
- threats
- stalking
- degradation
Isolation in Coercive controllers?
Like intimidation, designed to keep abuse secret, and also to deprive the victim of other supports or resources
- Rees et al 86% had been kept from leaving the house (47% said this happened often or all the time)
Deprivation in Coercive Controllers?
Often access to financial resources is removed, money stolen. Often control food/weight/dress, how housework is done, how children are disciplined.
Process of DV
Step 1. Establish Love & Trust Step 2. Isolate Step 3. Monopolise Perception Step 4. Induce Debility & Exhaustion Step 5. Enforce Trivial Demands Step 6. Demonstrate Omnipotence Step 7. Alternate punishments with reward Step 8. Threats Step 9. Degradation
What does Step 1. Establish Love & Trust involve?
Including ‘love bombing’ – showing intense interest and care, showering with gifts, ‘sweeping her off her feet’
Step 2. Isolate
- Geographically – moving to another location
- By driving away friends/family
• Sometime will collude with family where there is existing
difficulties
- Victims can self isolate, or just pretend all is well out of shame/fear
- Hiding car keys, intercepting calls/emails/threatening others
• Again can be under the guise of passion/obsessive love “I just
want you all to myself”
Step 3. Monopolise Perception
• With no external supports, it is easier to lose perspective.
• Redirect attention from perpetrator’s behaviour to
victim’s behaviour – any abuse is due to her faults. After
all, she’s the only one he’s doing this to – he’s a nice guy to everyone else.
• Alternatively, perpetrators can present as needing help –
‘you’re the only one who can make me a better man – I need you to support me, and you can support me by….’
Step 4. Induce Debility & Exhaustion
• Includes things like gaslighting – the perpetrator knowingly and intentionally lies, denies, manipulates situations to make the victim think they are unable to trust their own memory and judgement. And if someone is already isolated…
– Can also stop the victim from getting regular sleep, excessive work etc
Step 5. Enforce Trivial Demands
- Often changing, and can be contradictory
* Leads to hypervigilance to avoid anger/punishment
Step 6. Demonstrate Omnipotence
• Control over life or death – choking, strangulation are
huge warning signs for homicide (Glass et al., 2007) –
those who strangle are 8 time more likely to end up killing
their victim.
• Surveillance, particularly Technology Facilitated Abuse
