Violence and Control in Relationships

Kim Ruse, CEO of FearIsNotLove, discusses why understanding power and control is essential to preventing domestic violence, and why meaningful engagement with men must begin with relationships.

Economic stress, job loss and financial insecurity can increase pressure within a relationship. But pressure alone does not cause someone to abuse their partner.

For Kim Ruse, CEO of FearIsNotLove and a partner in Men &, that distinction is critical. It shapes how we understand domestic violence, how we hold people accountable and how we invite men into conversations that can lead to safety and change.

Q: Domestic violence is sometimes seen as the result of someone losing their temper. What does that explanation miss?

Economic stress, job loss, financial insecurity and other pressures can absolutely increase risk and intensify violence in a relationship. Those are important realities to understand.But there’s a nuance we can’t overlook: anger or frustration doesn’t cause someone to abuse their partner.

Many people experience profound stress, disappointment and powerlessness without using violence or coercion against the people they love. 

Domestic violence is fundamentally about power, control and entitlement. That use of control is a choice.

Q: What can that control look like within a relationship?

We often see things like monitoring a partner’s spending, restricting access to money, isolating their partner from family and friends, tracking their location, undermining their parenting, controlling access to technology or threatening consequences.

These kinds of behaviours can create an environment where the person experiencing them is constantly calculating what they need to do to be safe.

So, the difference is that violence is frequently explained from the outside as a loss of control from anger or frustration, but it’s often actually the intentional use of control.

Q: Why does that distinction matter?

It changes how we respond.

Think of it this way: If we understand violence mostly as unmanaged anger or redirected frustration, our interventions naturally focus on stress management, emotional regulation and coping.

Those things may be helpful, but they are not sufficient to address the choice that someone makes to control their partner.

Effective intervention needs to also address beliefs about entitlement, patterns of coercion, taking responsibility for choices and the strategies people use to exert power over their partners.

Q: So, what questions should we be asking instead?

We often begin with, “What made the person using violence angry?”

A more useful question is: “How is power being used here, and what will increase safety, accountability and the possibility of change?”

The more accurately we understand violence, the better equipped we are to prevent it.

Q: What have you learned from Men & about reaching men earlier?

One thing we have learned through Men & is that prevention often begins with relational engagement.

There can be a tendency in prevention work to move quickly to education: What do we need to teach men? What language should they use? How do we train them to behave differently?

But there is an important distinction between engaging people and trying to change them.

When we enter a conversation having already decided the language men should use, the beliefs they should hold or the behaviours they should demonstrate, we’re not really beginning with engagement. We are beginning with our expected outcome and asking them to move toward it.

We can inadvertently make prevention something we do to men rather than something we build with them. And that doesn’t work.

Q: What does relational engagement look like in practice?

It starts with curiosity.

What matters to this person? What is happening in his life and relationships? What is he worried about? Where is there struggle, conflict or disconnection? What might make it possible to have a conversation that otherwise would not happen?

That does not mean abandoning expectations around safety or accountability.

A meaningful relationship can create the conditions for harder conversations about responsibility, impact, power and behaviours that may be causing harm.

Q: You’ve talked about the importance of the Men & Service Navigator before. Where does the Service Navigator fit into that work?

The Men & Service Navigator is one part of a broader service continuum.

Once someone starts looking for support, we want it to be easy for him to find counselling, programs and other options in his community. The goal is to connect people with appropriate help sooner.

But the technology isn’t the starting point. The starting point is the tone and approach of the engagement.

Q: What do you want practitioners to takeaway about how to do prevention more effectively in the field?

If we want to prevent violence earlier, we need to become as skilled at inviting men into meaningful relationships and conversations as we are at designing the interventions we hope they will eventually access.

Men also need to be at the table as those approaches are built.