Giving Advice About Domestic Violence

[womenfirst]

Hi Everyone.

I wanted to share some thoughts I had after reading many threads where the OP is looking for help with a situation which could be classed as domestic abuse.

The only experience I have is being a survivor so these are just my thoughts based on this experience and what would have been helpful for me to hear. They are in no particular order.

When a woman posts on here about a domestic abuse situation, she is doing so because she feels safe here. The most important thing that you can do when giving her advice is to make sure that she continues to feel safe and supported.
She is most likely confused and scared and might have trouble realising or admitting that the situation could be very real and serious. She also may be experiencing, or have experienced, emotional abuse which could lead her to feel very low about herself.

Tell her that it is not her fault.

Tell her that the most important thing is that she (and the children) are safe and feel safe.

Advise her to always call the police whenever she feels frightened by her partners behaviour.

Encourage her and support her to seek professional help. Womens aid, Refuge, Citizens Advice, whatever is most appropriate to her situation. Help her hide her tracks by explaining how to delete her history/cookies, using a pay phone etc. You might want to offer to look into professional advice on her behalf if she feels to scared to do it herself. (If you are giving advice it is worth having a look at the websites for the above organisations so you can be really informed which will enable you to better help her.)

Encourage her to realise that it is abuse. The Womens Aid and Refuge have definitions of the different types of abuse on their websites, physical, emotional, sexual and financial. If you can post an official definition that applies to her then she might begin to to realise that what is happening to her is not normal and that it is not her fault.
If she is scared of her partner for any reason then she is probably being abused.

Do not judge her. Even if you have been in a similar situation, her experience is unique to her so what you did may not be right for her. Don't be offended or frustrated if she doesn't take your advice.

Don't try to tell her what to do. She most probably has a partner who does this and will be very sensitive to 'instructional' advice.

Try not to do anything to cause her to doubt her ability as a mother. While you may rightly be concerned for the welfare of her children in the situation you need to express this in a way which she won't perceive as a judgment on her parenting or herself. Her partner may constantly tell her she is a bad mother. Express concern in a sensitive way.

Encourage her to find someone to talk to in real life. Perhaps someone that is not in her immediate circle as she will be worried about being judged or her partner being judged. Her GP is also a good one to tell if she really doesn't want to tell family or friends.

Encourage her to look after herself. Going for a walk, having a bath etc will give her some space to come to terms with her feelings and confusion. Remind her to eat and to try to sleep.

Advice such as "leave now" while probably being sensible might not be helpful to her. She might not feel able to leave and if you express frustration or judgment about this then she might not want to post again because she is not being supported in the one place she has felt safe enough to talk about it. Instead try to be sensitive and sympathetic. Saying "I'm worried for you. This situation sounds serious and you might not be safe. Have you thought about leaving?" is much less confrontational and may encourage her to discuss reasons why she doesn't feel like she can leave.

Comments like "well if my DH ever did anything like that he would be out the door" might make her feel like a failure because she is too scared or unable for whatever reason to do the same.

Remember that she is asking for help.

As I said before, these are just things that might have been helpful for me to hear. They are no substitute for professional advice but I hope they might be of some help.

Can I support Mintyy here. I agree with her original comment about this maybe not being the ideal place for victims of DV, not becuase they might be trolls (what? where did this come from? nobody has said they might be trolling) or becuase they 'don't belong', after all, most of them are indeed parents and we're all women anyway, but becuase their needs go beyond that of a casual chat forum, which this essentially is.

As others have said, the reasons why women don't 'just leave' are complex and deep seated - most of us have no clue how to advise or how not to make the situation worse by asking the wrong questions.

The fact is, if you ask about DV on a non-pecialist forum there will be many non-specialist people there with no experience themselves of DV who will think 'why doesn't she just leave', and some of these people will post, though most won't dare.

I think this was what mintyy meant, not that DV victims don't belong here or that they aren't genuine, or that people with real experience shouldn't of course do all they can to help. It's that the help they need is that of trained and experienced professionals, which most of us are not.

Quite. Thank you Morris.

Well mintyy, glad you feel supported. Like Mamazon, I'm happy to help any woman in a dv relationship. I've been there and I'm grateful to have escaped. I'll also suck up the risk of being trolled 50% of the time.

I never would have found my way to a dv site when I was being abused. people don't realise they are in a DV situation at the time. I only really saw it clearly after I'd already left. SO these women trapped in horrible relationships who "should" be visiting specialist DV sites, that is an option that even occurs to them. At first they may want to hear reassurance that their situation is normal. They won't get that, and that real life real person feedback is what creates the first chink in their denial. A specialist site can't do that. Women in trouble might just want to post in a familiar environment and INTERACT with people who can give them supportive messages. That doesn't happen on a DV site either. There's no exchange there. All very dry and would feel totally foreign. Would feel like something that applied to 'other women'.

Also which specialist DV forum would you recommend because I can't think of any off the top of my head and I work in the field.

Maggie is right that in many cases people don't see what is happening to them as abuse because it is so slow and insidious and consequently they feel that it's a normal part of a relationship.

I looked at some DV sites AFTER I'd left,a nd it did help. It validated what I'd been through, and let me believe that I wasn't impossible to live with and an incompetent impetuous fool who left on a selfish whim.....and so on and so on.

I personally don't think that victims of DV 'should' do anything. If they come here seeking support and advice then the mainstay of that advice will always be, seek professional help, once it is established that indeed it is abuse and not just relationship problems that can be worked through.

It is up to us to do the 'should' part, we should offer such support as we can, and we should try our best to get the DV victim to access support in RL from professional sources.

chickybabe, lillypuss - you're in the right place. Don't worry, there's a lot of MNers, so there's always a lot of opinions.

I came here because I'm a parent. Lurked for a while, and started to realise that what I was in was an abusive relationship.

My first post (under a different name) was deemed by some to be from a troll - having recently re-read it and found out about a few of the more prolific and damaging / damaged trolls that have been on MN, I can see why people thought that. Especially since I could barely string a coherent sentence together.

But there was enough support, encouragement and understanding for me to realise that ultimately, I was heading in the right direction, and that I needed to seek support in RL.

So I, like others, will always remain sympathetic to anyone who has the courage to have their life discussed on MN.

Has MN become something of a place to discuss DV issues? I wouldn't know, not been here anything like long enough.

From what I've seen, MN is a place where people can really talk about absolutely anything. Primarily MN's about being a parent and relationships, and sadly DV often comes to the fore during and post pregnancy. Perhaps because the anonymity, ease of joining, and lack of censorship allows this to be a place where DV can be discussed.

Final thought - as has been mentioned by those posters whose work deals with DV, at least there's somewhere where DV can be discussed. Personally, I'd say MN would seem the best place for it.

There is a board dedicated to keeping chickens!! fgs! so why people would object to threads supporting or advising or even just reliving and venting about dv, I do NOT know...

Actually the reason that Mn is indeed the PERFECT place for a Dv victim is because ots not a specialised forum.

What they want is to have a friendly chat about how they feel. to hear stories of people who have been there and come through into the ligjht at the end of the tunnel.

they dont want to be informed and eductaed. yes they want and need advice but not in a recipe formatin. they want slow easy chatting from people they can consider friends.

I will alwaysd always advise someoen contacts womens aid. each and every time. but i also know the value of a non proffessional telling you it'll be ok because it was for them.

Mintyy your right, i don't know your circumstances. but your comments do indeed come across as if by someone who has no real knowledge of the situation. that doesn't make your opinion any more or less valid than mine of course.

I'd say there are degrees of DV, it's not always the classic escalating phycial violence but sometimes a combination of emotional abuse with a modicum of physical threat
In this situation you might not identify yourself as living with DV
The people who do are people, not some kind of extreme sub species
My experience is that I posted on a abusive relationship on mn many years ago, received a healthy perspective of what was acceptable and not (it was not something I could discuss in rl) and also a lot of support via email from someone on my antenatal thread
I left and am extremely happy as a lone p
I'd like to think others have benefitted also
You are in a closed in world with abuse, and lose track of what is normal

ninah That's a really helpful post.

Taht is very true Nina, you lose your ability to judge for yourself whether it's acceptable or not. I know I did. Strangers on a forum gave me more perspective. I left, partly because things couldn't get any worse, but also partly because strangers gave me their personal testimonies, and they were all to a woman glad they'd left and happier, despite the practical difficulties of leaving. You can't get that from DV website.

I wouldn't have dreamed of looking at a dv website
Dv doesn't happen to women like me .. or so I thought
He was stressed with work, I was scatty and irritating, he was worried about finances etc etc

Yes, and "we're incompatible" and, "we bring out the worst in eachother", and "he'd had a few drinks", and "he can't deal with small children's noise", "he has deadlines", "everybody at work is so unreasonable" "the house IS a mess", "he's right, I haven't done anything useful all day", (cos of lack of motivation, misery and low self-esteem - but that's not so clear in the eye of the storm).....

and the number one voice that went round my head.... I made this bed and I have to lie in it now, who is really happy anyway, what is happiness? AIBU to expect to be happy?

Just wanted to point out that on 'Netmums' they have a specific section (with advice and links) and a forum on domestic violence, and they have a worker from Women's Aid who works on the forum replying to posts. They recognise that domestic abuse often presents/worsens during pregnancy/the birth of a child which is why midwives and health visitors are trained to look out for it. Hence why it is something that frequently crops up on MN.

the problem with having a specific area for Dv is that it would attract the trolls and attention seekers.
and employing someone from WA would be expenisve and would have loads of liability implications im sure.

i thihnk it works ok as it is.

I agree.

I´m someone who realized my relationship involved DV only by posting on a different (general) board. One specialist board is www.hiddenhurt.co.uk but I had a lot of resistance to posting there and never did.

On the children in danger issue, don´t forget that a lot of women worry about residence/access issues after separation. If you don´t know what your XP might do to the children when you´re not around, you might feel you´re better off staying so at least you can run interference.

Please don´t tell someone she´s being a bad mother by staying. You are not helping her in any way, shape or form by undermining her confidence in her own judgement even more than her XP has already done.

You only have to read the threads on here entitled things like "is this abuse?" or "is this acceptable?" or "am I being oversensitive?" to understand that one of the first things that goes when you are in abusive relationship is your sense of perspective. Women always think it could be worse; he culd be hitting the kids too or he could be beating me to a pulp rather than only spitting and screaming in my face.

People have an image of DV as a situation where the woman gets a black eye on a Friday night after he rolls in from the pub typeof scenario. We all know there many different dv scenarios not all of them immediately obvious to the victim or meybe even the perpetrator. That is why most of the women who post these kind of threads need to be able to do it in a mainstream forum. Otherwise they won't do it at all.

You probably won't get threads on a DV forum about whether or not it is ok for someone to be called a "fcking cnting wh*re" in front of their toddler. You do get them here. And you get people expaining that, yes, this is abuse and, no, it isn't acceptable and that something should be done about it.