Helpful Information
In Balance
Partners in relationships based on equality:
- Show mutual respect
- Value each other's opinions
- Trust each other
- Support each other's goals and rights
- Are honest and can admit they are wrong
- Seek mutually satisfying solutions to conflict
- Are willing to compromise
- Communicate openly
- Are responsible parents and share parental responsibilities
- Make family and monetary decisions together
- Make sure both partners benefit from financial arrangements
- Feel safe and comfortable expressing themselves
Out of Balance
One partner controls another in relationships based on inequality by:
- Making threatening actions or gestures, destroying property, abuse pets, and displaying weapons
- Making and/or carrying out threats to hurt the woman; threatening to leave her, commit suicide, or report her to welfare authorities; make her do illegal acts
- Putting a woman down and making her feel badly about herself; humiliate her, making her feel guilty
- Controlling what a woman does, who she sees and talks to, what she reads, and where she goes; limiting her outside involvement
- Using children to relay messages; threatening to take children away
- Treating a woman like a servant and making all the major decisions
- Preventing her from getting or keeping a job, making her ask for money; taking her money; or giving her an allowance
- Making light of the abuse, deny abuse, and blaming the woman herself for the abuse
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