Domestic Violence – Definition and Tactics

Definitions

Domestic Violence is a pattern of intentional coercive behavior used to gain or maintain power and control over an intimate partner. DV can include the use of various tactics including verbal, emotional, sexual, economic, physical, and spiritual. Without intervention domestic violence gets worse.

• DV is violence that occurs between people in intimate relationships. 90% of DV is perpetrated by men against women.

• Abuse is the use of physical, emotional, sexual or economic coercion or all four to control and maintain power over another. Though less visible, emotional abuse may have longer lasting effects than physical abuse.

• Battering is a pattern of repeated physical, sexual, emotional and/or economic abuse by intimate partners or ex-partners. It is a process of deliberate intimidation intended to coerce the victim to do the will of the victimizer.

Other Descriptions

Domestic Violence is sometimes called ’’wife beating,’’
’’spouse abuse,’’ ’’conjugal violence,’’ or ’’marital aggression”. Whatever the phrase used, these terms do not do justice to the gravity and complexity of the problems that are encompassed by these rather tame phrases. However, the definition and the understanding of what domestic violence means has evolved over the years. The 1977 Oregon Family Abuse Prevention Act defines domestic violence as:

Family abuse occurs when a family member purposely causes or tries to cause bodily injury to another family or household member, purposely places such person in fear of ’’imminent serious bodily injury,’’ or forces that person to engage in involuntary sexual relations. ORS 107.705

By 1990s, the understanding of domestic violence has evolved into including more than just physical injury. This is reflected in the definition of domestic violence given in a 1994 report Harassment to Homicide, published by Multnomah County:

Domestic violence is emotional, physical, psychological or sexual abuse or the threat thereof, perpetrated against a person by that person’s spouse, former spouse, partner, former partner, or adult relative, or by the other parent of a minor child. Abuse may include threats, harm, injury, harassment, control, terrorism, or damage to living beings or property. Domestic violence can be a single incident, ranging in intensity from harassment to homicide. Most often it is a systematic pattern of abuse that escalates over time in frequency and severity. It occurs between partners of the same or different sex.

Ann Jones, author of Next time she will be dead, defines domestic violence as “systematic, socially sanctioned brutality”. Simply stated, today we understand domestic violence as the system of abuse by a spouse or domestic partner involving psychological control, verbal harassment and abuse, bodily injury and involuntary sexual relations.

Excerpted from Domestic Violence - Everybody’s Business, City Club of Portland, July 97 & Ann Jones, Next time she will be dead.

FACT: 95% of reported domestic violence incidents are male to female violence.

Definition and Tactics - Microsoft Word Format