Physical & Emotional Abuse Support Group
Abuse is a general term for the treatment of someone that causes some kind of harm (to the abused person, to the abusers themselves, or to someone else) that is unlawful or wrongful. No one deserves abuse, period. Abuse can be emotional, physical, or sexual.
It's been about 6 years since I've been on any of these support groups, but back then, they truly saved my life. I am not sure if it's appropriate or allowed to ask this, but over the last several years, I've put myself through school (sociology and criminal justice) as a single mom and I'm currently looking at doing some various research that might be helpful to understanding various aspects of abuse. If this is not okay, I'm perfectly okay with it being removed or ignored completely or whatever is felt best. At the moment, what I am looking into is variances in social media presence, such as "putting on the perfect, happy face" versus avoiding posting all together versus posts being monitored or influenced versus posting with more "silent screams" via vague posts etc. Right now, I am just looking for general responses to see if this might be an area where further research might be helpful. If it's okay, any responses here or via direct messaging would be helpful. I do have an outline of more specific questions as I move forward, but I would prefer that to be later/more voluntary and make sure even asking is something that would be welcomed here down the road. Any initial responses would not be used in any way, outside of my own thoughts of whether it may be worth it moving forward with this as an important aspect with abuse for further research.
Thank you for the time to at least skim this here.
Rania
I certainly feel strongly we need more studies done on abuse, especially the more covert forms like financial, emotional, and religious abuse, and especially in adult relationships (there's been a fair amount of research done on abuse of children and the negative outcomes). Also, there is a serious lack of research regarding abuse of minorities, LGBTQA, and among more general populations. Much of the research done on adult abusive relationships uses populations in DV shelters, which may or may not generalize well the abuse in more general populations because those individuals often suffer the most egregious physical abuse and have the least available resources compared to a more general population of abused persons which exists out there and could be studied. Personally, I think research done with any of the less studied, more covert forms of abuse would help close the research gap there. Also like I said minorities would also be a great area of study.
In my experience the research in this area is so haphazard and poor there are not even clearly defined psychological constructs to measure......for example in the literature reviews I've read some studies describing emotional abuse and psychological abuse as different constructs, and other researches don't delineate that way and call the whole range of behaviors emotional abuse. So with the academics they aren't even yet using the same language to define what abuse is.......what a mess!!! How can research build upon a foundation this way??? So, any research you did on the specific dimensions of abuse, that would help clarify the actual individual psych9logical constructs to be measured and studied would also benefit the field.
Research has done on a typology of abuses would be interesting too. The field always seems to want to throw anger management with these abusers for example. Some abusers have anger management problems, others do not. If we understood more about the different types of abusers maybe we could design more effective treatment plans and make them available instead of a cookie cutter approach.
These are some research ideas just off the top of my head. SOOOO many areas needed to be explored for this topic, and it could lead to improving countless people's lives, and diminish many of the societal problems abuse creates. ABSOLUTELY worthwhile IMHO! I'd love to hear what you choose to pursue!