WHAT IS FAMILY VIOLENCE?
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It is not easy to explain what is meant by Family
Violence. As a rule though, it usually means abusive behaviour towards
other members of a family, including de-facto relationships, marriage, blood
ties, step families or relationships of a comparable type. Ordinarily,
the parties are now or have been residing together, however, this does not
always have to be the case.
Most people in an intimate relationship will encounter
family quarrels and other forms of conflict from time to time.
Family violence occurs when family quarrels and other conflicts are
replaced by threatening behaviour, harassment, and/or physical abuse and
when one person is in a position of superior power and they use that
power to control another.
Whilst Family Violence is most commonly understood in
the terms of physical or sexual abuse, power can also be exerted by the
use of social, financial, emotional, psychological, verbal abuse or
stalking. These forms of abuse may happen alone and without
physical or sexual abuse being present, although often they occur with
one or the other. Singly or combined with another form of abuse,
they can maintain a situation from which the victim of the abuse finds
it difficult to escape.
If there is to be any common understanding of what
interventions are to be made in cases of spouse abuse, we must have a clear
definition of what we mean by that term.
There are considered to be four (4) basic forms of
abuse:-
The most obvious form of violence is physical abuse.
On a continuum, this begins with lack of consideration for a physical
comfort or needs of others. It escalates to actions like shaking,
punching, bruising, twisting the limbs, breaking bones, denying sleep and
nutrition, denying needed medical care, causing internal injuries, using
household objects as weapons, causing permanent injury and finally murder.
A part of physical abuse is sexual abuse. On a
continuum this begins with the objectification of a victim through jokes,
humiliating or degrading comments or unwanted touching. It escalates
to demands for sex or punishment by rejection of them as a sexual partner,
degrading them while having sex, forcing sex, forcing sex after a beating or
under threat of a beating, using penetrating household objects in sex,
causing injury during sex.
This consists of the “putting down” of the victim.
It is an attempt to demean and de-power the victim to become dependent on
the perpetrator. It ranges from snide, joking comments such as “I
should have married the bloody freezer”, or “You can’t even boil an egg
properly”, through to fearsome haranguing “You’re a stupid, mindless, no
hoper”. “You’re a slut, a whore”. “You great ugly ape………”.
The purpose is to humiliate, degrade, demean and subjugate. Threats of
killing all the pets, suicide, turning the kids against you, murder, child
abuse are all means to this end.
Two (2) very common forms are encountered. One is
when the perpetrator hands over money (whether large amounts or small) and
demands that you do the impossible. “I give you $80.00 a week!!!”.
“Why can’t you feed and clothe us on that?” (Including four children).
Or, “What’s this final notice?”. “I gave you the $500.00 to finish
paying off the car!”. (There was $1,800.00 owing). The other
form is when you do paid work and they insist on controlling the money.
There are three (3) main manifestations of this.
First there is the verbal abuse of the victim in company. They are
laughed at, set up, put down - maybe in a joking way, maybe with cool
purpose. The victim is thus humiliated in front of friends, relatives
or strangers. |
