Preface

Abstract

Extract More than one in three women in the United States have experienced rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime (Black et al. 2011).1Close In this book I refer to these actions as intimate partner violence and abuse (IPV/A). I made a deliberate choice to use IPV/A rather than IPV or IPA or domestic violence (DV), since IPV/A is a broader term that encompasses a wide range of victimizing acts committed by a previous or current dating partner, lover, or spouse. Most intimate partner abuse does not consist of the stereotypical physical violence but rather is best characterized by coercive control (Stark 2007) and other behaviors such as financial abuse (Adams et al. 2008), stalking, pet abuse (Hardesty et al. 2013), cyberstalking (Southworth et al. 2007), spiritual abuse (Dehan and Levi 2009), proxy abuse (Melton 2004, 2007), and paper abuse (S. Miller and Smolter 2011; overall, see also Belknap 2015, 392–93). I also recognize that nonphysical abuse can be more frightening (Crossman, Hardesty, and Raffaelli 2016) and can cause greater long-term trauma and emotional scars for some victims/survivors than physical violence (Fleury-Steiner, Fleury-Steiner, and Miller 2011). My acronym IPV/A is more inclusive: it can extend to some women in my study who did not “count” themselves as “domestic violence victims” because their abuser was not physically violent, but whose horrendous emotional abuse was nonetheless profoundly controlling and traumatizing. This term varies across disciplines—and thus practitioners and scholars—with some relying on the term domestic violence while others use abuse and maltreatment. I believe that domestic violence is a weak euphemism that does not fully convey the panoply of tactics and the gendered power aspects of this violence. Some of the women I interviewed, however, did use this term, and in being true to their voices I use their word choices when I quote from their narratives.