We received an email recently from an educator who had found our resources helpful. They also shared a link to domestic violence prevention and resources and asked if we could link to it. The original link was made for the United States, so we have made this blog to speak directly to domestic violence resources in our jurisdiction, Alberta. I also completed a new training to better speak to this matter, called Domestic & Intimate Partner Violence: The Complete Guide to Identification, Documentation, Reporting and Trauma-Informed Responses. Thanks for the email and for suggesting this addition to our resources pages. 

Identifying Domestic Violence

The Alberta Council of Women’s Shelters (acws.ca) lists physical, psychological, emotional, sexual, financial, identity, cultural or spiritual, and stalking, as different forms of abuse, while the original Abusive Behavior Inventory includes physical, verbal, emotional, sexual, financial, and legal system abuse. The Domestic Violence workshop listed physical abuse, sexual abuse and coercion, emotional abuse, financial abuse, spiritual abuse, digital abuse, reproductive coercion, controlling behaviours, stalking, and coercive control. Overall, intimate partner violence involves attempts at controlling another person’s behaviours through threats, power, entitlement, manipulation, and force.  

Some signs of the less obvious forms of abuse, like psychological, verbal, and emotional, include constant threats and controlling a partner’s behaviour. It may look like encouraging dependency in a number of areas, increasing a partner’s isolation from the outside world, demands to know about a partner’s whereabouts at all times, control over who a partner associates with, and threatening to harm someone if the relationship ends. Other forms include humiliating, gaslighting, and threatening to hurt children or pets. This list is not exhaustive so I encourage the reader to check out other resources to help identify these behaviours. theduluthmodel.org is a good resource and includes the power and control wheel below. The revised and most recent version of the Abuse Behaviour inventory can be found here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0886260515581882.