The Salvation Army USA Eastern Territory Women's Ministries

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Abuse

The Salvation Army is committed to upholding Christian standards of love, care, protection and respect for the whole person in all relationships and to providing a safe and nurturing environment in its ministry to meet those ends.

Abuse is misuse of power in interpersonal relationships. It is expressed primarily in sexual abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse and economic exploitation. The victims of abusive relationships are often children, the elderly and spouses, primarily women.

The Salvation Army is against all forms of abuse, whether individual or systemic, and seeks to help abused persons and change abusive systems whenever possible.

By Sam Vaknin

Abuse is about control and the fear of losing it. Ill-treatment is an absurd effort to maintain and enhance the abuser's hegemony - social, cultural, legal, and, above all, psychological. Abusers exploit, lie, insult, demean, ignore (the "silent treatment"), manipulate, and control. There are a million ways to abuse, directly and by proxy. To expect too much, to denigrate, to ignore - are all modes of abuse. There is physical abuse, verbal abuse, psychological abuse, sexual abuse. The list is long. Most abusers abuse surreptitiously. They are "stealth abusers". You have to actually live with one in order to witness the mistreatment.

National survey in Canada found that:

One in four women have been assaulted by a current or previous intimate partner. Three-quarters of these women had also been emotionally abused.
Women with a disability or a disabling health problem were at greater risk of being abused.
The rate of wife assault for women aged 18 to 24 is four times the national average.
Twenty-one per cent of women abused by a marital partner were assaulted during pregnancy. Forty per cent of these women said the abuse began during pregnancy.
Children witnessed violence against their mothers in almost 40 per cent of cases.
In a majority of violent episodes the abuse of alcohol was a factor.
One-third of women who were assaulted feared for their lives at some point during the abusive relationship.
Almost one-half of cases resulted in physical injury to the woman.
Eighty-five per cent of women who had been assaulted said they experienced negative emotional effects like anger, fear, becoming less trusting, lowered self-esteem.

Reported in Karen Hodges, "Wife Assault: The Findings of a National Survey," Juristat, Vol.1, no. 9, March 1994.