What is Domestic Violence?
Domestic
violence, or battering, is a pattern of coercive control that one
person exercises over another. Battering is behavior that physically
harms, arouses fear, prevents a woman from doing what she wishes,
or forces her to behave in ways she does not want.
Put another way, domestic violence is the
use of power and control to force another person into submission,
or to force a person to do something.
Domestic violence,
or battering, includes the use of physical and sexual violence,
threats and intimidation, emotional abuse, and economic deprivation.
Pushing, shoving,
slapping, punching, choking, raping, threatening, harassing,
humiliating, controlling what a person wears, controlling who
a person can talk to, controlling where a person can go and when,
and controlling how much a person can spend are all examples
of domestic violence.
