difference between potentially abusive and abusive relatiosh

[AvocadoLime]

What is the difference between a potentially abusive relationship and an abusive relationship? I see all this mention of red flags of potentially abusive relationships and some of the red flags are things like 'controls who one sees.' 'forces you to have unwanted sexual contact.' 'calls you names.' 'pushes, hits or slaps you.'. How are these things signs of 'potential abuse'? Aren't they abuse?

[Keda]

It is a tricky line to draw. All those behaviours you mentioned are indeed abusive behaviours - and lots more besides - and they are, absolutely, wrong; anyone who's doing any of those things in a relationship shouldn't be in relationships until they've learned to treat partners with, at the very least, basic respect and care. But abuse in the sense of an abusive relationship needs a pattern: a situation in which one person consistently takes away the other's autonomy and control over certain aspects of their life.

It's not a perfect test, but I find it useful to think in terms of how easily the victim can leave: in an otherwise healthy relationship where, for example, one partner starts interfering with the other's birth control, the victim of that behaviour can end the relationship as easily as they could if that behaviour hadn't occurred. In an abusive relationship, the abuser uses multiple tactics to make the victim feel beholden to them, feel like their fears or hurts don't matter or aren't worth as much as the abuser's happiness, to cut them off from people who would be able to help them leave (giving them somewhere to stay, emotional support etc.), and generally to make it very difficult, emotionally, financially and/or physically, to end or meaningfully renegotiate the relationship.

If you're interested, I'd recommend reading Why Does He Do That? by Lundy Bancroft; it's a book which gives a really good insight into the behaviours and attitudes of men who abuse their female partners, a lot of which is also pretty generalisable to other kinds of abuse.

This probably isn't the only, or the best, answer, but it's the one that fits best with what I've learned over the past couple of years.

[Redskies]

I wonder if some of the issue here is different people's different use of the phrase/concept "red flags". The examples you listed, AvocadoLime, are all abusive behaviours, yes, no matter the context or frequency or anything else. Thinking about where I've seen "red flags" used, I think that some people use the concept to mean "that thing, it is a bad thing, it is a crystal clear very important signal to Stop on whatever path we're talking about" - that would make perfect sense, then, to use the phrase "red flag" about a behaviour that's abusive.

I think some other people use "red flag" to mean something more like "this is a warning sign of danger ahead". Used that way, it makes sense that people might use "red flag" to describe behaviours which are not themselves abusive but which give strong suggestions that the person doing them may progress to abusive behaviours and/or seem like they have control or violence as their roots. For example, if a (fictitious) partner says to me that I'm so much better than they are at all the chores, that I'm wonderful at them and the house is Perfect only after I and not they have done the chores... in and by itself, that's probably not abusive, but it stinks of manipulation. (Repeated or as part of a pattern, yes, that's emotional abuse.) It's waving a big red warning flag that this is a person who is prepared to use manipulation on me and doesn't care about my well-being as much as they do about their fun.

Does that help clear up what you were asking, AvocadoLime?

[AvocadoLime]

I think so, Redskies.

I have a family member, Alice, that I am not close to. I do talk regularly to people who are close to Alice. They have said some extremely alarming things about what her partner does to her. Major manipulation keeping her from getting medical treatment, name calling, smashing of property when angry, etc. I raised my concerns with the people who are close to Alice and they said they didn't think she was being abused but in the end I was able to convince them to contact a prominent domestic violence hotline. The person on the hotline apparently told my family members that "This is a potentially abusive relationship. All the signs are there." and my family members have focused on the "Potentially" and say that because Alice says that her partner loves her, there is no problem.

I know you can't know why this other organization said what they did, but I also used to post on a board specifically for survivors of rape and sexual assault. So many many times somebody would post saying something like "My partner gets angry if I want to go to the grocery store when he wants me to stay at home. He hides the keys and shouts and punches the wall. And I can never tell him no to sex." And people would respond by saying "those are some red flags. You'd better be careful. He might become abusive. This relationship could potentially be abusive." It was so frustrating and heart breaking to see this even from people who were survivors themselves.

I guess I was looking partly for clarification around the use of these terms and also to ask if there is a reason they are used, since the only results I've seen from them the phrases are that people think unacceptable behavior is in fact acceptable.

[Keda]

I think part of the reason why people sometimes say "red flag" when they should say "that's abuse/abusive" is because it's quite a big thing, to declare that someone else's relationship - especially when you don't know the people involved well - is abusive. It can seem a bit arrogant, I guess - sometimes arrogance is a good thing! But certainly I can understand how if you hear a story second-hand, it can seem more prudent to say "That might be abuse" than to say "That is abuse", simply because you don't know if you're being lied to, or if the story had suffered chinese whispers, or if there's been some monumental miscommunication, or something.

Another thing that I think maybe the hotline person might have been considering was that it can kind of be a softer way to say it; rather than telling someone "Your loved one is being abused, you need to seek help right now", it could be seen as somehow kinder to say "Your loved one might be being abused, you should go and look for yourself" and hope that the person involved comes to the correct conclusion on their own. I don't think that's a good approach, but it's one I can imagine someone taking.

I'm sorry about what you saw on that forum. For that one I really don't know what the posters' thought processes could be, to get them to such a horrible misapprehension.

[Redskies]

To clarify something Keda said above: interfering with any birth control method is a form of abuse, and it's a serious abuse because it takes away that person's reproductive autonomy.

I think a little of this is a language problem: "potential" is a bit of a slippery word. What I hope the person on the hotline meant is "this may well be an abusive relationship", rather than "this relationship has the potential to become abusive". Still, I think it's better to use language that's clear about what we mean when we're working on a service like that, or indeed this one right here. We can't know what your family members said - if, for example, they only discussed Alice and Alice's behaviour or interaction between the two that didn't seem quite right, then a response talking about "signs" of an abusive relationship may be reasonable. If they described the abusive behaviours that you listed, AvocadoLime, then I really think it was not good service, because it's not "signs", those things are abusive.

I think Keda's identified the bulk of the problem: a reluctance to be definite about something. In some ways, that's a good thing: when we're working a service like this, we have a responsibility to not tell people what their lives are like. For a start, we're never going to be precisely right about everything, but it also means we'd be more likely to stop listening closely and it's also just disrespectful. In the world at large, it's also generally not ok to make sweeping statements about someone else's relationship, and for good reason. However. Especially in a venue where someone's come to seek advice or guidance, there are a huge bunch of definitive statements we can make, for example, statements like "X behaviour is an abusive behaviour". That's a factual statement, and there's no need for prevarication or hedging. Absolutely, it may be very hard for many people to hear that, so a large amount of sensitivity is required; but still, any lack of clarity is doing them a disservice, not a kindness. If someone's asking a specialist service, then at least on some level (if not all the levels, which is many people) they want the real answer.

I'm really sorry that your family members are handling this so poorly and acting on such a poor understanding of abuse

General societal messages about abuse are so very limited that it's not surprising that survivors can also have limited understandings, as sad as that is. It's still too common that people think "abuse" only means physical injury. Some survivors who are still mid-way in their healing journey may also not have been ready to come to terms with some of their own situation, so they might not recognise someone else's experiences as abuse because they can't recognise their own similar ones as abuse yet. If someone's subjected to an abusive situation for any period of time, it's almost certain that the abusive person was normalising their own abusive behaviour, so it's not surprising that survivors carry some of that normalisation around until we can unlearn it. It may also depend on the kind of environment that leaders/moderators of such a community create: whether they allow some kinds of abuse to be minimised or explained away. (I'm not being down on abuse survivors here, not in the least - I am myself, and there are many astonishing and wonderful survivors, some of whom I have the pleasure to work here with. It's simply that survivors are humans like all others, across the same broad spectrum.)

[AvocadoLime]

Thanks for all your replies. Redskies, I figured that people were saying such things on the other forum because everybody was at very different places with regards to healing, I think some of them had never experienced a healthy relationship so they genuinely didn't know what was possible, and the moderators were also still in abusive relationships sometimes. Like I said I stopped posting/going there because it was too heartbreaking for me to see so many people who were so hurt, and so frustrating to see so many people told that their situation was 'normal' or 'not that bad' when it seemed like they were asking for validation that they deserved more. I'm not knocking survivors as a whole, either, I am one. One of my best friends is one. etc. That forum was just not a place for me.

Oh and, I'm totally in favor of not defining people's experiences for them, but if nobody will label abusive behaviors as bad/abusive/unacceptable/etc. then that's not ok in my mine. (Which is why i appreciate scarleteen.)