About Domestic Violence

If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic violence, please click here.

What is Domestic Violence

Domestic violence is a repeated pattern of mental, physical, emotional, sexual, or economic abuse where one partner makes the other partner feel scared, weak, isolated, hurt, or sad.

• Abusive relationships are about power and control, not love.
• Abuse is not your fault. Nothing you do deserves or justifies abuse.
• When someone hits or yells at someone else, that is a choice they make. No person or circumstance can make someone attack his or her partner verbally or physically.

Know that abuse is a crime.

Types of Abuse

Physical Abuse is any forceful or violent physical behavior.

Sexual Abuse is any non-consenting sexual act or behavior.

Verbal or Emotional Abuse includes hurting another person's feeling by saying cruel, unfair comments or by name-calling.

Psychological Abuse is a threat to do bodily harm to a partner, child, family member, friends, pets or one's self (suicide). Psychological abuse involves hurt, anger, fear and degradation. Psychological abuse can render you emotionally insecure about your own self worth and can make you helpless to escape further physical, sexual and/or psychological abuse.

Economic Abuse includes controlling an intimate partner’s access to money through behaviors such as preventing a partner from going to work or causing a woman to lose her job.

If you feel that you or someone you know may be in an abusive relationship, read more about the signs of abuse.