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Articles

Wife Abuse

Wife abuse is an attempt to control the behavior of a wife, common-law, partner or girlfriend. It is a misuse of power, which uses the bonds of intimacy, trust, and dependency to make women unequal, powerless and unsafe.

Types of Abuse:

Physical:
can involve slapping, punching, kicking, biting, shoving, choking, or using a weapon or other object to threaten or injure. It can and sometimes does result in death.

Sexual:
means the woman is forced to perform sexual acts against her will or to suffer pain or injury during sex. Sexual abuse can also include being infected with HIV, or with other sexually transmitted diseases because a husband or partner refuses to use a condom or does not tell the woman about the possibility of infection. In a sexual assault/abuse, sex is not the end - it is the means. Sex is used as a tool to demean and degrade women. Sexual abuse is about power, not sex.

Psychological:
includes excessive jealousy and attempts to control the woman's time, her activities, even how she dresses or wears her hair. Men who are psychologically abusive will try to limit whom their wives or partners visit or talk to on the phone so that the woman becomes isolated from friends and relatives. Psychological abuse can also involve being harassed at work by phone calls or visits, having prized possessions destroyed, being denies sex or affection and enduring suicide threats by a husband, partner or lover. Psychological abuse can include threats to that their children away. If the woman is an immigrant or refugee, her abuser may threaten to have her deported.

Verbal:
consists of constant criticism, name calling, and "put-downs". It includes unjust blaming, and false accusations about loyalties or sexual actions. It can include repeated threats of violence against a woman, her children, her friends, her relatives or her pets.

Financial:
meant that even if the family is not poor, the woman will have no access to the family's money, no say over what will be bought, and no money for her own.

Spiritual:
means that a woman's spiritual beliefs are made fun of or attacked, or that she is not allowed to attend the church, synagogue or temple of her choice. Sometimes, her children are raised in a different faith or tradition against her will.

Stats & Facts:

According to Stats Canada's 93 National Survey on Violence Against Women, 3 in 10 women currently or previously married, or lining in a common-law relationship in Canada have experienced at least one incident of physical or sexual violence - violence that is against the law - at the hands of their current partner or a former husband or common - law partner.

More than 200,000 women have been physically or sexually abused by their husbands or common-law partners in the past year.

One third of women who were assaulted by a partner feared for their lives at some point during the abusive relationship.

Over the period 1974-1992, a married woman was nine times as likely to be killed by her spouse than as by a stranger.

While men to can be abused by a partner, research has consistently shown that the man is the victim of abuse in fewer than 10% of the incident of partner abuse.

36% of ever-married women in BC have experienced violence in a current or previous marriage (national average is 29%)

1 in 5 women assaulted by a current or previous partner were assaulted during or after they separated from their partner. On 1.3 of cases, the violence increased at the time of separation.

43% of all wife assaults resulted in needing medical attention.

Ask yourself if you are being abused.
Start with the following questions:

	Does your partner continually criticize what you wear, what you say, how you act, and how you look?
	Does your partner often call you insulting and degrading names? Do you feel like you need to ask permission to go out and see your friends and family?
	Do you feel that no matter what you do, everything is always your fault?
	Do you feel that no matter what you do, everything is always your fault?
	Do you feel like you're always walking on eggshells trying to avoid an argument?
	When your late getting home, does your partner harass you about where you were and whom you were with?