Post-separation abuse
- Blocks access to money after separation
- Drains joint bank accounts or assets
- Uses stalking behaviours (property damage, excessive phone calls, phone threats and verbal abuse, phones and hangs up, etc.), particularly if you take a stand against what he wants
- Monitors your whereabouts and/or follows you
- Uses technology to stalk you
- Uses social media to talk about your case or slander your name
- Locks you out of the family home
- Increases threats and intimidation
- Escalates abusive behaviours when you have a new partner
- Threatens/causes harm to your new partner
- Makes false allegations to slander/undermine your new partner
- Destroys your/children’s belongings
- Uses children to justify breaking no contact orders
- Disrupts children’s routines (e.g., sleep, eating, sports, etc.)
- Withholds information about children
- Contradicts your rules for children
- Demands visitation schedules at your/children’s expense
- Makes false accusations of bad parenting
- Exploits “father’s rights” to gain sympathy/undermine you
- Withholds child/spousal support, medical insurance, financial contribution to children’s extra expenses (e.g., sports, daycare, school uniform/graduation costs)
- Neglects children during his time with them
- Uses violence in front of children
- Uses corporal punishment with children
- Ignores children’s schedules, needs, identities, fears
- Uses new partner to take on parental duties
- Tells children his new partner is their new mother
- Enforces strict gender roles with the children
- Degrades you to children/family members
- Uses children as spies/to monitor you
- Threatens to kidnap children
- Refuses to permit your travel with the children
- Refuses to sign for children’s passports/provide you with them
- Threatens to call CAS and have the children removed
Legal Abuse
- Denies the abuse
- Appears charming and conciliatory to the judge or other legal personnel, raising questions about the credibility of your story
- Has you counter-charged by the police, complaining that you assaulted him too
- Doesn’t allow children to call you when they are with him
- Acts as his own lawyer as a bullying strategy in which he cross-examines you as an intimidation tactic
- Makes endless motions over minor or inappropriate issues
- Uses intimidation and threats if you do not agree to financial arrangements that disadvantage you
- Pressures you to accept mediation and joint parenting arrangements even if you feel threatened and unsafe
- Coerces you to trade away some legal rights (e.g., the right to property or financial support) in exchange for others (e.g., child-related)
- Pressures you to change bail conditions or to try to have the charges dropped if he has been criminally charged
- Contacts you out of court under the guise of negotiating the case
- Uses delay tactics such as refusing to sell the matrimonial home or respond to legal offers, delaying providing financial information, etc.
- Repeatedly changes lawyers, thus slowing the process down
- Withholds information (such as financial disclosure) and then insists on unreasonable disclosure from you
- Threatens to take/keep the children if you insist on leaving
- Makes malicious reports slandering you to the court and other officials (child protection authorities, police, housing personnel, Ontario Works, etc.)
- Threatens harm/death if you pursue legal proceedings
- Attempts to interfere in the professional relationship you have with your lawyer in an effort to reduce your confidence in your own lawyer or make them reluctant to represent you
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