Types of Violence that Occur in Intimate Relationships
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Coercive Controlling Domestic Violence (Battering) which is the ongoing use of coercive and controlling actions, including acts of intimidation and violence, targeting a victim whose autonomy and safety is thereby reduced; For more information about coercive controlling domestic violence and other types of violence, go to:
Women Against Abuse; Types of Abuse
National Domestic Violence Hotline; Types of Abuse
Resistive Violence including both legal and illegal use of force which is used by victims of battering to control their abuser’s use of coercive and controlling tactics or in reaction to other men’s violence against them as women.
Non-battering-related Violence which is used by one intimate partner against the other that is neither an ongoing attempt to exert control through coercion, nor a response to that coercion. It encompasses all other acts of intimate partner violence, which can again be subdivided into some general categories for the purposes of intervention:
pathological violence, in which ending or controlling the pathology would end the violence (mental illness, drug and alcohol addiction with no pattern of coercion and entrapment of the partner, brain damage);
anomie, violence associated with a breakdown in social order. Examples include the increase in rape and abuse of women by their partners in desperate social conditions, such as those experienced during war and in refugee camps. In such violence, women are often targets because of underlying gender asymmetry in the society, but the elements of attempting to control and assert entitlement in a personal relationship are not necessarily present; and
common couple’s violence, in which one or both parties use violence, but it is not part of an ongoing pattern of coercion and intimidation; no element of entrapment is present.