gothhabiba:

it’s crucial to realise that abuse cannot be reduced to a list of contextless behaviours. abusive actions are abusive, not because of their inherent nature, but because of the place that they take in a larger pattern of control or intimidation. if you try to paint a picture of what an abuser acts like without reference to these larger patterns, you’re inevitably going to describe a lot of the ways in which people who are being abused act–and many abusers know how to take advantage of that.

for example, an abuser may accuse their victim of witholding sex, saying that their victim is strategically denying them sexual access in order to control them. this falls into a larger pattern of the abuser feeling a sense of ownership towards their partner, feeling entitled to sexual access, and resenting their partner for exercising agency over their own body (& overwhelmingly, cases such as this involve a male abuser and a female victim). they may become angry when their partner understandably doesn’t want to have sex with them after they’ve been abusive towards them in other ways.

however, it’s also true that many abusers do strategically use sex as a control tactic, using their victim’s need for intimacy against them and refusing sex specifically as a form of punishment for other perceived slights. and the mere fact that one person is refusing sex with another person cannot tell you which of these, if either, is occurring.

similarly, abusers often use physical intimidation tactics such as stomping about, slamming doors, and breaking objects in order to create fear in their victims (and the expectation that perhaps they’re going to be hurt, whether or not the abuser has been physically violent before), or to punish them for stepping out of line. they’ll later claim that they just “lost it.”

but it’s wholly possible for victims of abuse to slam doors or to break objects out of understandable frustration with the terror to which they’re being subjected. without a reference to the overall dynamics of power in the relationship–whether or not the door was slammed in order to create fear, whether or not the person who broke an object also uses other tactics of manipulation and intimidation, and often whose objects were broken (abusers may claim that they “lose control” of themselves, but they conveniently seem to destroy only things that belong to their partners)–you can’t say that breaking an object = abuse.

& you have to keep in mind the fact that many abusers keep their victims on the defensive by accusing them of using their own manipulative tactics. someone (likely a man) who controls their partner through checking out other people & engaging in affairs may call their partner crazy or jealous or controlling for trying to put a stop to the behaviour–all the while being highly jealous and controlling of their victim, strategically fabricating suspicions about their infidelity in order to take the focus off of their (the abuser’s) behaviour.

or perhaps someone really is jealous–but feelings of jealousy do not automatically equal abuse in the absence of abusive behaviour relating to that jealousy. & you can apply the same concept to things such as crying or showing other signs of emotional upset when confronted with criticism, asking your partner to contribute more around the house, or a great deal of other things that I could name: these could all be manipulation tactics used by an abuser, responses to abuse manifested by victims (which the abusers may then spin around as evidence that they’re the ones being abused), or examples of simple conflicts that arise in nonabusive relationships that can be worked through in a constructive way.

abusers know how to manipulate shallow or inaccurate understandings of how abuse operates to the detriment of their victims, and they benefit from descriptions of abuse that abstract it away from dynamics of power and control. let’s avoid making their jobs easier for them.