Types of Abuse
Physical Abuse
Physical abuse involves using force to hurt someone. This can include actions like slapping, pushing, hitting, punching, choking, or preventing someone from leaving by twisting their limbs or throwing objects. It also includes using weapons, breaking or damaging property, and getting rid of belongings without permission. The goal is to injure, control, or scare the person.
Sexual Abuse
Sexual abuse is any sexual activity that is forced or unwanted, including rape, unwanted kissing or touching, and forcing someone to look at pornography. It often involves humiliating the person.
Reproductive Control
This type of abuse relates to controlling a woman’s ability to manage her reproductive health. It includes forcing decisions about using birth control, pregnancy, or abortion, and having little say in the number and timing of children.
Verbal Abuse
Verbal abuse includes insults, constant criticism, name-calling, and yelling. It involves telling someone they are unattractive, inferior, or incompetent, and that they cannot succeed on their own. Verbal abuse is closely linked to emotional abuse.
Emotional/Psychological Abuse
Emotional or psychological abuse makes someone feel scared, intimidated, insane, stupid, or worthless. This includes threats to harm or kill the person or their children, using weapons to intimidate, hurting pets, denying or minimizing the abuse, and blaming the victim. It also involves confusing the person and withholding important information.
Social Abuse
Social abuse isolates a person from family and friends. It includes criticizing or being suspicious of loved ones, controlling phone and internet use, restricting access to the family car, isolating the person at home, or forcing them to move away from their support network. It also involves demanding to know their whereabouts at all times.
Financial Abuse
Financial abuse can cause poverty by controlling a person’s money. This includes denying access to bank accounts, forcing them to give up bank cards, preventing them from working, and making them ask for money for basic needs. It also involves forcing them to provide receipts for their spending.
Spiritual Abuse
Spiritual abuse undermines a person’s beliefs by criticizing their spirituality, using religious texts to justify abuse, and denying them the freedom to practice their religion or culture.
Damage to Property
This involves purposely breaking or damaging items that belong to the person, like household furniture, children’s toys, or cars. The goal is to intimidate and frighten.
Stalking
Stalking is meant to intimidate and harass. It includes following the person to work, school, home, or in public, and monitoring them through phone calls, texts, emails, or social media. It can also involve harassing their family and friends.
Technological Abuse
This is a form of abuse using technology to monitor and stalk someone. It includes posting personal information online, installing tracking devices in cars or phones, using GPS, spyware, hidden cameras, or keystroke-logging hardware.
Threats
Threatening to use any form of abuse is also a type of abuse. Often, multiple forms of abuse occur together and are interconnected.
