#intimate-partner-violence

#intimate-partner-violence

My husband has just been let go from his fourth job in five years. The first time it happened was during Covid when he was laid off, but it seemed to start a pattern.

"I thought it was normal as my mum really suffered [with period pains] too. But during my first year of university, the symptoms started happening every day, even when I was not bleeding."

For decades, work was designed around a fiction, that of the 'neutral' worker, an abstract individual assumed to be fully available, consistent, rational, and unaffected by bodily constraints. But this neutrality was never real.

Economic abuse, a pervasive form of coercive control, is linked to the death of a victim every three weeks across England and Wales, new analysis reveals. The charity Surviving Economic Abuse (SEA) described the findings as a 'wake-up call', emphasising that this type of abuse 'is not just a money problem' but a significant danger.

When I took the assessment, shortly after leaving my partner, he scored an 8/10. If I had gone through with our pregnancy, he would have scored a 10. But we didn't have children because five years earlier, in a Chicago clinic, I'd had a medication abortion. At the time, the danger only registered as a faint sense of unease, nothing like the five-alarm fire my life would later become.