Recognizing intimate partner violence beyond physical violence
When people hear the words domestic violence or intimate partner violence, they may picture physical assault. But abuse within an intimate relationship does not always leave visible injuries.
It can look like having your choices gradually narrowed. Losing access to money. Becoming increasingly disconnected from people you care about. Being pressured into sexual activity. Having your movements, communications, or spending monitored. Being threatened, humiliated, intimidated, or made to question your own perceptions.
Sometimes, one of the clearest signs that something is wrong is not what your partner has done to you physically. It is how much of your life has become organized around trying to prevent their reaction.
Fear matters.
Intimate partner violence is also more common than many people realize. Canadian research has found that a substantial proportion of people who have had an intimate partner have experienced psychological, physical, or sexual violence within a relationship. These experiences can happen to people of any gender, sexual orientation, age, income, cultural background, or ability.
There is no single picture of what an abusive relationship looks like.
Intimate partner violence is often about power and control
Relationships involve compromise. Partners may disagree about money, feel jealous, want to spend more time together, or become upset with one another. Conflict, even unhealthy conflict, is not automatically abuse.
What can distinguish intimate partner violence is the use of behaviours that create fear, restrict another person's choices, or establish power and control within the relationship. Individual behaviours may not always look alarming from the outside. Sometimes, they may even be framed as love, concern, protection, or simply “how relationships work.”
A partner asking when you'll be home is different from a partner requiring you to account for your whereabouts because you're afraid of what will happen if you don't.
Sharing finances is different from having your access to money restricted or being required to justify ordinary purchases.
Wanting time together is different from making it increasingly difficult or costly for you to maintain relationships with other people.
Context matters. Patterns matter. And the effect on your freedom, safety, and sense of self matters.
At the same time, an established pattern of controlling behaviour is not required before a serious act deserves to be taken seriously. Sexual violence, physical assault, threats, and other harmful behaviours do not become insignificant because they happened once.
What can intimate partner violence look like?
Abuse can take many forms, and different forms often overlap.
Coercive control
Coercive control can involve gradually restricting another person's autonomy and freedom.
There may be rules about where you go, what you wear, who you speak to, how quickly you respond to messages, or what you are permitted to spend. You may find yourself asking permission for things you once decided for yourself.
Sometimes there is no explicit rule at all. Instead, you learn what will lead to anger, accusations, punishment, withdrawal, or intimidation, and begin changing your behaviour to prevent it.
Over time, your choices may stop feeling like your own.
Isolation
Isolation does not always look like being explicitly forbidden from seeing friends or family.
A partner may criticize the people you care about, create arguments before or after you see them, repeatedly interrupt your time away, accuse you of being disloyal, or make social contact so stressful that avoiding it begins to feel easier.
Gradually, your world may become smaller.
Financial abuse
Money can become a means of control.
Financial abuse may include restricting access to accounts, taking someone's income, creating debt in their name, preventing them from working or attending school, withholding money for necessities, or requiring them to account for ordinary purchases.
It can also be more subtle. Someone may technically have access to money while knowing that spending it will result in interrogation, accusations, or punishment.
Sexual violence and reproductive coercion
Being in a relationship does not remove someone's right to sexual and reproductive autonomy.
Sexual violence or coercion may involve pressure, manipulation, threats, intimidation, unwanted sexual contact, or continuing sexual activity after someone has indicated that they do not want it.
Reproductive coercion can include interfering with contraception, pressuring someone to become or remain pregnant, pressuring someone to end a pregnancy, or otherwise attempting to control reproductive decisions.
Consent still matters within long-term relationships and marriages.
Intimidation and threats
Someone does not have to physically hurt you to make you afraid that they might.
Intimidation may include destroying property, punching walls, blocking exits, driving dangerously, displaying threatening gestures, or using physical presence to create fear.
Threats may be directed at you, but they can also involve children, pets, people you care about, belongings, or things that are important to you. Threatening self-harm can also become coercive when it is used to force someone to stay, comply, or take responsibility for another person's actions.
Emotional and psychological abuse
Emotional and psychological abuse can gradually affect someone's confidence in their own perceptions and judgment.
It may include humiliation, insults, persistent criticism, degrading comments, blaming, manipulation, denying or minimizing things that happened, or repeatedly telling someone that they are irrational, unstable, oversensitive, or responsible for the other person's behaviour.
Over time, you may begin to question yourself more than you question what is happening.
Technology-facilitated abuse
Technology can create additional ways to monitor, intimidate, or control someone.
This may include demanding passwords, checking messages, tracking someone's location, monitoring social media, accessing accounts without permission, repeatedly contacting someone, using cameras or other devices for surveillance, or sharing or threatening to share intimate images without consent.
Digital monitoring can continue after a relationship ends.
Spiritual or religious abuse
Religious and spiritual beliefs can be important sources of meaning, identity, community, resilience, and comfort. They can also be used by an abusive partner as a means of power or control.
Spiritual or religious abuse might involve using beliefs, scripture, religious teachings, or community expectations to demand obedience, justify mistreatment, pressure someone to remain in a relationship, or create shame or fear.
It can include preventing someone from practising their faith, forcing religious practices or beliefs upon them, or suggesting that leaving, setting boundaries, or questioning a partner's behaviour would make them morally or spiritually wrong.
The concern is not faith or spirituality itself. It is the use of someone's beliefs or community as a means of restricting their autonomy or justifying harm.
Some circumstances can create additional ways to exert control
Intimate partner violence can affect anyone. At the same time, someone's circumstances can influence both how abuse is experienced and what options are realistically available to them.
Disability and dependence
People with disabilities may experience the same forms of intimate partner violence as anyone else, as well as forms of abuse that specifically exploit disability-related needs or dependence.
An abusive partner might withhold medication, food, personal care, transportation, mobility or communication devices, or assistance with hygiene or toileting. They may interfere with healthcare appointments, support workers, or relationships with other people who provide assistance. Needed items may be deliberately placed out of reach, equipment may be damaged or withheld, or necessary care may be threatened as a way to force compliance.
Disability can also be used to undermine someone's sense of worth.
An abusive partner may portray disability-related needs as a burden, suggest that nobody else would want or care for the person, or frame their own presence or assistance as something the person should be grateful to receive regardless of how they are treated.
Over time, these messages can make mistreatment feel like something a person has to tolerate in exchange for being loved, partnered with, or cared for.
Having support needs does not make someone less deserving of respect, autonomy, safety, or reciprocal love. Care is not a debt that must be repaid with compliance.
Disability can also create practical barriers to leaving. Accessible housing, adequate income, transportation, medication, mobility equipment, communication access, personal support, and continuity of healthcare may all need to be considered.
Dependence on an abusive partner is not the same thing as choosing the abuse.
Culture, community, immigration, and identity
Culture and community can shape how relationships, marriage, privacy, family roles, gender, sexuality, divorce, and caregiving are understood.
An abusive partner may use cultural or community expectations to create shame, discourage disclosure, threaten someone's connection to family or community, or pressure them to remain in a relationship.
At the same time, culture, faith, family, and community can be important sources of identity, belonging, resilience, and support. The concern is not the cultural value itself, but when it is used to justify harm or restrict someone's choices.
Immigration-related abuse may involve withholding important documents, threatening someone's immigration status or sponsorship, threatening deportation, or exploiting language barriers or unfamiliarity with Canadian systems.
LGBTQ+ people may face additional forms of coercion, including threats of being outed or fears that discrimination will affect how they are treated when they seek help.
These circumstances do not cause abuse. They can, however, affect how someone is controlled, what support feels safe to access, and what options are realistically available.
“But they've never hit me.”
People sometimes minimize what is happening because it does not resemble the version of abuse they expected.
They've never actually hurt me.
They only punched the wall.
They don't stop me from seeing my friends. They just make it miserable when I do.
They don't control my money. I just have to explain everything I spend.
I eventually said yes.
Maybe I'm overreacting.
Physical injury is not the threshold someone has to cross before their experience deserves to be taken seriously.
You may notice instead that you are constantly monitoring someone's mood. Rehearsing what you are going to say. Hiding ordinary things to avoid an argument. Changing what you wear, who you see, what you spend, or what you talk about. Feeling relief when your partner is not home. Becoming tense when you hear their car, their footsteps, or a notification from them.
Your fear matters. Your pain matters.
Nothing you did makes abuse justified
People in relationships make mistakes. They become angry. They say things they regret. They forget things, disappoint one another, disagree about money, and make decisions their partners dislike.
None of those things gives someone the right to frighten, control, coerce, humiliate, sexually violate, or physically harm their partner.
You are allowed to make mistakes. That does not make someone else's abusive behaviour acceptable.
If you have found yourself changing your behaviour to try to prevent your partner's reactions, you may have been trying to protect yourself, keep the peace, or reduce the risk of what might happen next. Sometimes those strategies may seem to help. Sometimes the abuse happens no matter how careful you are. You cannot control another person's choice to behave abusively by finding exactly the right way to behave.
Responsibility for abuse belongs to the person choosing to use it.
“Why don't they just leave?”
Leaving an abusive relationship can look straightforward from the outside. Living through that decision can be very different.
Someone may still love their partner. They may remember periods when the relationship felt safe or loving and hope things will change. They may share children, pets, finances, a home, family relationships, a faith community, or decades of history.
They may fear what their partner will do if they leave.
They may not have enough money to support themselves. They may have nowhere accessible or affordable to live. They may rely on their partner for transportation, medication, personal care, or immigration sponsorship. They may have become isolated from people who could otherwise help.
They may feel ashamed. They may fear that nobody will believe them. They may worry about what will happen to their children. They may simply not be ready.
Some people leave and return more than once.
Staying does not mean someone wanted the abuse. Returning doesn’t mean it was not serious. Loving someone who has harmed you does not make the harm acceptable.
Leaving does not always end the abuse. Harassment, stalking, monitoring, threats, financial abuse, and other forms of coercion may continue or intensify after separation.
The period around separation is also a particularly high-risk time in an abusive relationship. Risk can increase when someone is preparing to leave, during the separation itself, and after they have left. In some cases, violence escalates significantly during this period, including serious or lethal violence.
This does not mean that leaving will result in violence. It means that leaving is not always as simple as walking away. Careful, individualized safety planning is important.
Instead of asking, “Why don't they leave?” a more useful question may be: “What would they need in order to be safer?”
Safety planning isn't only about leaving
Safety planning is not only for people who are planning to leave a relationship.
Someone may safety-plan while remaining in a relationship, while wondering what they want to do, while preparing to leave, during separation, or after they have left.
A safety plan often considers trusted people, children, pets, medications, important documents, money, transportation, housing, disability and accessibility needs, technology, and ways of accessing emergency support.
But safety planning is highly individual. A strategy that is helpful in one situation could increase risk in another.
Specialized intimate partner violence services offer support with thinking through your circumstances, safety, and options, whether or not you are thinking about leaving.
If someone may be monitoring your phone, computer, accounts, or location, consider accessing information or support from a device they cannot access, if it is safe to do so. You might use a friend’s phone, a work phone, or a public phone, for example. Avoid making sudden changes to accounts or devices if doing so could alert someone who is monitoring them.
You don't have to know what comes next
Recognizing that something in your relationship feels frightening, controlling, coercive, or unsafe doesn’t mean you have to make every decision about your future today.
You do not need to decide immediately whether the word abuse fits your experience.
You do not have to confront your partner.
You do not have to make a police report in order to ask for support.
You do not have to tell everyone.
You do not have to have proof.
You do not have to be ready to leave.
You can learn about your options. You can speak with a specialized service. You can tell someone you trust. You can think about what might help you feel safer.
Or, for now, you may only know that something about this doesn't feel okay.
If you're concerned about someone you care about
It’s difficult to watch someone you care about experience a relationship that worries you, particularly when you want to protect them.
It can be tempting to tell someone what you think is happening in their relationship or what you think they should do. Giving them space to make sense of their own experience helps preserve their autonomy.
Instead of “Your partner is abusive. You need to leave,” focus on what you have noticed and leave room for them to share how they see the situation.
Listen without interrogating. Believe what they tell you. Avoid blaming them for staying, returning, or not taking action you think they should take.
Ask what kind of support would feel helpful to them.
Sometimes support is emotional. Sometimes it is practical: providing transportation, caring for a pet, helping with childcare, storing important items, researching resources together, or simply remaining someone they can contact without fear of judgment.
Be mindful of digital safety when contacting them, particularly if their partner might have access to their phone or accounts.
Concerns about a child’s safety can also raise child-protection responsibilities, depending on the circumstances. These requirements differ between Ontario and Quebec. If you are concerned that a child may need protection, contact your local Children's Aid Society in Ontario or the Director of Youth Protection (DYP) in Quebec for guidance.
Supporting someone's autonomy does not mean ignoring immediate safety concerns. It means preserving as much choice, dignity, and control as possible while responding appropriately to risk.
Support is available
You don't have to know what you want to do next to reach out for support.
If you are in immediate danger, call 911.
Ontario
Assaulted Women's Helpline
1-866-863-0511
24-hour crisis counselling, safety planning, emotional support, and referrals.
211 Ontario
Call or text 211
Information about community, social, health, housing, and other services.
Quebec
SOS violence conjugale
1-800-363-9010
Confidential, bilingual support, information, safety planning, and referrals, 24 hours a day.
Sexual Violence Helpline / Info-aide violence sexuelle
1-888-933-9007
Free, confidential support throughout Quebec.
Canada-wide
ShelterSafe
A Canada-wide directory of shelters and services for women and children experiencing violence.
If you are concerned that your device may be monitored, consider using a device the other person cannot access to look for information or contact support, if it is safe to do so. This could be a friend's phone, a work phone, a public phone, or another device they cannot access.
Access a list of free, downloadable Safety & Crisis Contacts from our Resources section.
Whatever you decide, you deserve support without judgment or pressure.
Therapy offers space to explore what you need, at your own pace. You do not need to have the right words, know what you want to do, or be ready to make a change.
Healing begins with connection.