✨Intimate Partner Violence

A Frog in Hot Waters

Imagine a frog being placed into a pot of boiling water, the frog will instantly feel the heat and the danger and jump out. 

Now picture that same frog but this time you place it in a pot of cool water, the frog senses no danger from the water and chooses to stay. You add some bugs and lily pads for the frog to feel safe and right at home. Sure enough the frog chooses to stay. You begin to turn up the heat under the pot, on low for at first, slowly warming the water, as the temp warms a little, you raise the heat even more and continue this cycle until the water comes to a boil. The frog does not notice the rising temperatures until it hit boiling, but the frog does not jump out. It’s too late, the rising temps were slowly weakening the frogs strength.

This is how people find themselves a victim of IPV. IPV does not happen overnight and rarely comes marching in with blow horns and flashing lights. If approached by someone with obvious violent tendencies, threatening to hurt you or your loved ones, you would run the other direction or send his ass to jail wouldn’t you?

Instead, you may not had noticed anything about Him/Her that seemed dangerous or off, the temperature of the water was fine, then over time, He/Her starts to change, subtle changes slowly growing worse, maybe by now they even start to add physical force, the water is hot, you must get out, you try to jump but realize your legs are too weak now, it doesn't matter how hot the water is anymore or how bad they treat you. You’re trapped

A common tactic used to lure a target into the water is called Love Bombing.  Love Bombing is a form of manipulation used by abusers to attract their target in the beginning and gain trust quickly.

Living In Fear

Once a victim realizes the water has gotten hot, their fight-or-flight mode kicks in. Many make their first attempts to escape, these attempts can come in different forms and don't always mean physically leaving their abuser that minute. Some of the first attempts is within themselves. Emotionally, and mentally escaping the abuser takes a lot, it is not easy to question the reality they made for you, the world where they love you and you two share an unbreakable connection. Questioning the world, you once knew brings punishment.

You attempted to take your first leap out of the water and came splashing down. The sound of the splash brought attention towards your desires to leave so a lid was placed over the pot, engulfing you into darkness.

For many, living in fear has become normal that many don’t recognize it as fear anymore, they have gone numb. This is when damage to the brain has occurred. If not treated properly, a survivor may develop PTSD

IPV includes the same list of horrors mentioned in DV but are only encountered between intimate partners.

Physical assault- inflicting physical harm or unwanted physical contact upon a person

Sexual assault- Attempted rape, unwanted sexual touching, forcing a victim to perform unwanted sexual acts or rape.

Neglect- denying food, water, or hygienic care

Emotional abuse- manipulating the victim through their emotions, bullying, and shaming. A tactic used to control the victim by isolating, discrediting, and silencing them.

Psychological Abuse- Manipulating the victim to question their own sanity, abuse tactics damage the brain and lead to an alarming list of medical illnesses (The main focus of RosiGoldx, I also show how one can recover. more on Recovery), 

Financial Abuse- control over the victim’s finances, denying them access to money or forcing them to remain unemployed. The most common way an abuser keeps their victim trapped. 

Medical abuse- This can include improperly giving unnecessary or high dosages of drugs to their victim, or yes, some abusers will go as far as having their victim deemed mentally unstable in the medical world in hopes no one would believe the victim in an attempt to escape, another horror I learned was common as I sat in the recreational room of a mental hospital (Yep, I was the looney in the looney bin as far as the world was concerned).

 

Psychological abuse seems like the least discussed, yet it is the most devastating and could lead to life-threatening effects on the victim and a laundry list of illnesses. Victims can be manipulated to question their own sanity as they slip away from reality. Medical abuse tactics play a role in phycological abuse as the abuser wrecks their mental credibility to society by reporting their victim for mental health issues, like suicide ideation, placing their victims into mental hospitals, some abusers even force their victim to take high dosages of their medicine to keep them sedated. This is to gain full control as the abuser can then file to be the legal caretaker and have all rights over their targets possession and rights, since they are now seen as psychotic.

In fact, more than 50 percent of women with a mental illness have previously experienced some sort of trauma such as physical or sexual abuse. (source)

Crime Facts

IPV accounts for: 

• 15% of all violent crimes, 
• 72% of all murder-suicides involve an intimate partner. 
• 94% of the victims of these murder-suicides are female. 
• Effects more than 1 in 3 women (35.6%) and more than 1 in 4 men (28.5%)in the S. (Source)
• On average, nearly 20 people per minute arephysicallyabused by an intimate partner in the United States. During one year, this equates to more than 10 million women and men (Source)

In 15 states, more than 40 percent of all homicides of women in each state involved intimate partner violence. In 36 states, more than 50 percent of intimate partner-related homicides of women in each state involved a gun. 

Every day in the United States, five women are murdered with guns. Many of these fatal shootings occur in the context of a domestic or intimate partner relationship. However, women are not the only victims. Shooters have often made children, police officers, and their broader communities additional targets of what begins as an intimate partner shooting (Source)

1 in 3 women and 1 in 4 men report having experienced rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime. The numbers only prove how common this evil goes on amongst us. Taking place in our own homes, involving those closest to us. 

IPV closely resembles scenes from a horror movie, only there’s no end to the filming, this is reality.

 

✨Stay Strong✨ Keep Fighting✨