Emotional or Psychological Abuse
Emotional Abuse is a highly effective means of establishing a power imbalance within a relationship and is as harmful as physical violence.
It includes:
• Constantly being put down and criticized, in private and public.
• Not listening or responding to you when you do something they don’t approve of
• Being referred to using derogatory language including calling women 'it', 'bitch'
• Being jealous of and not allowing friends / family to the house or preventing access to them, telling lies about you.
• Restricting travel, monitoring the distance you have travelled.
• Lying or withholding information.
• Having other relationships.
• Having your phone monitored by spyware or and secretly installing cameras in the house
• Opening your post and emails.
• Being stalked
• Never being left on your own; women being followed room to room; being accompanied to all outside activities
• Threatening to harm you, themselves, your family members, the children or pets.
• Property being destroyed including their cars, furniture, clothes, and home.
Gaslighting and Coercive Control
In society, new terms are derived which sometimes end up confusing us and we don’t really understand what it means. Both gaslighting and coercive control are now recognised as common components in domestic violence and the terms go a long way to help us to understand the experience for women who become trapped in emotionally abusive relationships.
Coercive control is a pattern of sustained emotional abuse of a partner and is a strategy specifically designed to dominate and conquer. It achieves this through emotional, physical and sexual violence by making victims afraid, depriving them of their rights, resources, and liberties. It can include threats, intimidation, control and restrictions of liberty.
Gaslighting is an element of coercive control where tricks are played to make the woman question herself in everything she does. Both tend to interplay with each other. Over time a person comes to believe they are losing their mind and their sense of reality.
Digital Abuse
This term is used to describe stalking and harassment through social media and online.
It can include:
• Checking your search history.
• Using spyware to monitor your whereabouts via mobile phone app.
• Demanding your passwords
• Harassment by sending threatening text messages and emails.
• Monitoring all of your online activity.
• Making false profiles to monitor your movements.
• Sharing intimate or private pictures online (or threatening to).
