Family violence, also known as domestic violence, is a pattern of abusive, threatening or coercive behaviour towards a current or former family member or partner, that causes the person experiencing the behaviour to feel fear. It can range from physical and sexual violence to economic and social abuse. Coercive control tends to be present in all instances of family violence.
While family violence is most commonly used by men against current or former partners, it can also occur:
- in intimate relationships between people of all genders
- when carers, who may or may not be family members, abuse people with disability
- when older children and young people abuse their parents, siblings or other family members
- in kinship or ’family of choice’ relationships.
Types of family violence
Family violence isn’t always physical. It can also include:
- Threats: threatening to ‘out’ someone’s gender identity if you don’t do what they want. Or threatening to hurt children or pets if you don’t do what they want.
- Intimidation: making you feel afraid. Sometimes this can be a gesture, or a look. This is part of a pattern of coercive control.
- Using children: Using child contact times to harass/pressure you into decision making outside of parenting agreements. Using children to relay threatening messages.
- Isolation: Preventing you from seeing who you want, or having people visit. It can also look like things such as taking up all of your attention so that you cannot attend to, or contact others (including children, family and friends).
- Technological abuse: using technology to stalk, threaten or monitor your movements, including threatening or harassing phone calls and messages.
- Verbal/emotional abuse: using words or behaviour to threaten, control or intimidate you. This can include using ‘silent treatment’ as a form of punishment to get you to do or agree to something you don’t want to do.
- Psychological abuse: using words or behaviours to frighten and manipulate. This can include making you question your version of events (‘gaslighting’)
What can family violence look like?
Family violence can look like things such as:
- Stopping someone from seeing their friends or family.
- Pressuring or forcing someone to engage in sexual activity. This can include expecting sex as a form of reconciliation.
- Threatening suicide or harm to the other person or children or pets.
- Calling someone names, belittling them.
- Financial control such as monitoring or limiting access to money, or not contributing to household expenses.
- Monitoring movements, such as constantly calling to check on where someone is, stalking, surveillance such as through location sharing and via social media.
- Deliberately undermining someone’s confidence, or ability to trust their reality (commonly referred to as ‘gaslighting’)
- Jealousy/possessiveness
- Spiritual abuse, including belittling someone’s beliefs and manipulating religious teachings or cultural traditions to excuse violence.