Central Florida Bonding wants to educate Central Florida residents about the different types of domestic violence as well as the potential charges and penalties that one can incur. When speaking about domestic abuse, most people think of physical abuse such as hitting, kicking, or punching one another but in reality, there are other types of abuse that can occur too.

Different types of abuse in a domestic violence situation can be:

•Physical abuse – this is aggressive behavior such as choking, pinching, beating, hitting, retraining another, holding the victim hostage

•Sexual abuse – this can be withholding of sex or forcing a person to have sex, rape, forcing a person into prostitution, accusing a victim of being unfaithful, excessive jealousy, ridiculing the victim’s body/ sexual preference/or criticizing sexual performance, denying birth control or forcing birth control

•Verbal abuse/Psychological abuse/Mental abuse – Ridiculing a victim, insulting a partner’s feelings, humiliating a victim, undermining the person’s sense of self-worth, criticizing the person constantly, name calling, making threats, gaslighting, neglecting the victim’s needs, eroding the victim’s judgment, making the victim doubt themselves and their thoughts/opinions, ignoring person’s feelings, making and breaking promises •Control – needing to know where the victim is at all times, monitoring social media/phones, constantly checking up on the victim, making them dress or act in a specific way, invading their privacy

•Economic abuse – Controlling the money, not letting the victim work, giving the victim a very small allowance of money to live off of, making the victim account for every penny spent, running up debt in the victim’s name, not letting a victim have access to their own bank account, forcing the victim to sign their name to loans or important documents

All of these examples are types of domestic abuse.