By Vanessa Sanders
SAFETY NOTE: If you believe your device is being monitored, consider reading this on a safe device.
The path to living free from violence is different for every victim of intimate partner abuse. For many victims, gathering the courage to leave requires understanding the resources available to them, their legal rights, and a plan for leaving the abusive relationship safely. This article focuses on the safety planning stage of leaving an abusive relationship.
Abusers are notorious for trying to isolate their victims, trying to make their victims feel alone, and trying to convince them that no one else will care about them.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, 20 people per minute are victims of physical abuse at the hands of an intimate partner in the United States. While this is a staggering number (an average of 10 million victims of physical violence per year), there are other forms of intimate partner violence, such as emotional abuse, psychological abuse, sexual abuse, economic abuse, stalking, threatening, and exercising coercive control. Due to the prevalence of intimate partner violence in the United States, many resources are available to survivors.
Making a call to the National Domestic Violence Hotline (1.800.799.SAFE) can be both enlightening and empowering. Among other things, the National Domestic Violence Hotline can help you find a local domestic violence agency to provide you with various types of assistance. Local domestic violence agencies may provide individual and group counseling services, housing assistance, clothing, food, or other forms of relief.
Leaving an abusive relationship is hard. Some of the most common reasons that victims of intimate partner violence stay in abusive relationships are the fear of retaliation, being threatened by their abuser about the consequences of leaving, a sense of economic dependence on the abuser due to a lack of individual resources or access to resources, and concerns for the future of the children where children are involved.
Safety planning can help victims of intimate partner abuse gain the courage it takes to leave their abusers.
Using a Post Office Box can prevent an abuser from intercepting your mail and gathering information about you, including information about your plans to leave the abusive relationship.
In New York, survivors of intimate partner violence who have left the home, or are planning to do so, can keep their real address confidential by becoming part of New York State’s Address Confidentiality Program by filling out an application online. Those who are part of the program are given a physical address in Albany to use in place of their real address.
It is also possible to keep your address confidential during Court proceedings.
Using a phone that your abuser doesn’t know about can enable you to make calls to domestic violence hotlines, domestic violence agencies, friends, family, counselors, therapists, and attorneys, without alerting your abuser that you are seeking help or making plans to leave the relationship.
Securing a safe, alternative place to stay can be the single-most empowering step for survivors of intimate partner abuse. Your efforts might include discussing emergency housing options with friends, family members, or your local domestic violence agency in the event you need to flee the home due to violence, as well as planning for long term alternatives.
Abusers are known to try to isolate their victims and rely upon their victim’s silence. Building a support system can free you from the sense of isolation and help break the silence your abuser relies upon. If you have been alienated from your friends and family, your local domestic violence agency can help you build a support system. Counselors, therapists, and attorneys can also be powerful allies in your support system.
Agreeing to code words, phrases, or signals you can use with trusted friends or family members to let them know that you are scared, hurt, or in need of help, can enable you to seek help without alerting your abuser that you are doing so.
While safety planning may be an important step in leaving an abusive relationship, you should always call 911 in the event your are in immediate danger of physical harm.
A lack of identification can impact a victim of intimate partner violence in countless ways, including their ability to secure housing or employment, open a bank account, or drive a vehicle.
It can be surprisingly difficult to replace your social security card, birth certificate, license, passport, or similar documents if all of those documents are in the hands of your abuser because you generally need one form of identification to replace other forms of identification.
In an effort to maintain power and control over their victims, abusers often try to seize control over wallets, identification, social security cards, birth certificates, bank cards, important documents, cellphones, and keys, etc.
Using a safety deposit box, or other safe place to secure your most important documents and possessions as you prepare to leave is an important step in safety planning.
As you prepare to leave an abusive relationship, there are many reasons for gathering personal documents and putting them in a safe place. While it is important to protect your personal information, such as your banking information, from an abusive partner, copies of bank records, property records, and tax returns can be critical for seeking financial assistance, filling out applications, and legal actions such as a divorce.
Creating an email address your abusive partner knows nothing about will enable you to change the email address associated with all of your important personal, financial and social media accounts to prevent your abuser from accessing and/or seizing control over those accounts.
Abusive partners often seize control over the bank accounts, debit cards, email accounts, social media accounts, insurance policies, etc., by using their victim’s PIN numbers and passwords to quickly change usernames, passwords and PIN numbers. Abusers can also gain access to accounts without passwords if they have access to the email addresses associated with those accounts or know the answers to the security questions needed to reset passwords.
Abusers will typically attempt to cut their partners off from access to financial resources, such as joint or individual accounts by draining the accounts, shifting money to accounts in their own names, or changing passwords and PIN numbers. Emergency resources, secured away in a bank account the abuser cannot access, can help combat the economic harm of being cut-off from resources controlled by the abuser.
Abusers often track their victims’ movements, communications and online activities.
Some steps victims can take to protect themselves during the safety planning stages of leaving an abusive relationship are:
Check for spyware or tracking apps on your phone; and
Turn off shared device features (location sharing, cloud sync, shared Apple IDs); and
If you are being physically abused by an intimate partner, gathering evidence of the abuse can be instrumental in obtaining an order of protection against your abuser. Take photographs of your bruises, cuts, abrasions, black eyes, or any marks left on your body. If you do not feel safe keeping those pictures on your phone, you can send them to a trusted friend or family member or email them to your own private email account that your abuser doesn’t know about.
Most abusers lie to their victims about their rights, or threaten them with fictitious legal consequences, in order to get their victims to stay in the relationship, or stay quiet, and to make their victims feel powerless or worthless. The vast majority of what abusers tell their victims about their legal rights is pure fiction. Understanding your legal options and legal rights is incredibly empowering when you are in the planning stages of leaving an abusive relationship. Having an attorney that has experience handling domestic violence cases and feels passionate about helping survivors clear the path to a life free from violence can be life-altering.
No one deserves intimate partner violence. Abusers are typically critical of their victim, actively tearing away at the victim’s self-esteem and trying to make their victim feel worthless. It’s so important for victims of intimate partner violence to know that they are not worthless, they are not to blame, and they do not deserve the abuse they’ve been subjected to.
Vanessa Sanders, Esq., is a Senior Managing Partner at The Colwell Law Group, with an extensive history representing victims of intimate partner violence, and an unyielding passion for empowering victims of intimate partner violence on their path toward a life free from abuse.
At the Colwell Law Group, our number one priority is always our clients. The members of our team have decades of combined experience in negotiating and trying family law cases. We are able to use our experience and our knowledge of the courts and New York family law to act as advocates for our clients. Our lawyers are dedicated to serving our clients’ best interests while also allowing them to feel heard and understood. We want to ensure that they trust us and understand why we do what we do. Colwell Law has numerous attorneys who are experienced in Family Law that can help put you at ease. Call for a consultation.
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