Signs of abusive behavior may include:

• Digital/Cyber: Demands access to emails, social media accounts or phone/text messages.
• Economic: Makes, or attempts to make, someone financially dependent by controlling financial resources or forbidding class/work attendance.
• Emotional Abuse: Undermines another’s self-worth and self-esteem. Can include constant criticism about body image, diminishing one’s abilities, name-calling and damaging interpersonal relationships.
• Physical: Hitting, slapping, shoving, grabbing, pinching, biting and/or hair pulling. Also includes the denial of medical care and forced drug/alcohol use.

• Psychological Abuse: Induces fear with intimidation. Can include threats of physical harm to self, others, pets and property, as well as forced isolation from friends, clubs/organizations, school and work.
• Sexual Abuse: Coercion, or attempted coercion; sexual contact/behavior without consent. Can include marital rape, attacks on sexual body parts and sexually demeaning behavior.
• Threats: Words, gestures or weapons that express the intent of causing injury or disability.

The Cycle of Violence

The Cycle of Violence is a pattern often experienced in abusive relationships — the honeymoon, tension-building and acute or abusive phases repeating over and over. Domestic violence is a pattern of abuse in an intimate relationship that escalates over time. The Cycle of Violence is intergenerational. It not only repeats itself in an abusive relationship, it also repeats itself by emerging later in the relationships of people who experienced and witnessed violence in the home as they grew up.