A MODEL FOR ABUSE IN POLYAMORY: DULUTH WHEEL

The theoretical and cultural understandings of how abuse operates, presents and the impacts it has on individuals and communities, still not inclusive of the experiences of non-monogamous relationships.  Services providers, literature and general information available about abuse assume a monogamous relationship, and as such individuals seeking support and information are just as likely to be alienates and ostracised as they are to be helped - polyamory or non-monogamy is likely to be understood as a symptom of the abuse or a tool of the abuser. 

While many of the red flags and tactics of abuse may be similar to dyadic or monogamous relationships, without explicitly expanding our definitions and concepts to include non-monogamy, we allow tactics in non-monogamous relationships to become invisible and un-named. When something is unnamed, unlabelled or without reference, it becomes much harder to talk about it and call out abusive behaviour. And this is exactly what has happened.  From the well-documented decades of abuse by Franklin Veaux, to the recent legal case against Eliot Winter for human trafficking and sexual assault, polyamory has become a hunting ground, refuge or fertile soil for men who wish to harm, control and exploit women. 

As such, there is a need for tools to taxonomically catalogue, the various strategies used for abuse in polyamory and account for how they present in non-monogamous relationships. The Duluth Wheel of Power and Control is one such tool: a visual resource to aid us in a comprehensive understanding of the tactics used by abusers, and how these tactics interact to maintain control and power in a relationship.
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History: 
In 1984, staff at the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project (DAIP) in Duluth, Minnesota began developing a curricula for groups on "men who batter and victims of domestic violence". They wanted a way to describe "battering" for victims, offenders, practitioners in the criminal justice system and the general public. Over several months, and through many focus groups with women who had been "battered" they documented the most common abusive behaviours or tactics that were used against these women. The tactics chosen for the wheel were those that were most universally experienced by victims of domestic assault and violence.

The wheel is a product of it's time and so uses highly gendered languages, as-well as being very mono- and hetero- normative. This is a deliberate and concious choice by the DAIP who claims that the week "does not attempt to give a broad understanding of all violence in the home or community but instead offers a more precise explanation of the tactics men use to batter women." 

DAIP say: 
We keep our focus on women’s experience because the battering of women by men continues to be a significant social problem–men commit 86 to 97 percent of all criminal assaults and women are killed 3.5 times more often than men in domestic homicides. When women use violence in an intimate relationship, the context of that violence tends to differ from men. First, men’s use of violence against women is learned and reinforced through many social, cultural and institutional avenues, while women’s use of violence does not have the same kind of societal support. Secondly, many women who do use violence against their male partners are being battered. Their violence is primarily used to respond to and resist the controlling violence being used against them. On the societal level, women’s violence against men has a trivial effect on men compared to the devastating effect of men’s violence against women. Making the Power and Control Wheel gender neutral would hide the power imbalances in relationships between men and women that reflect power imbalances in society. By naming the power differences, we can more clearly provide advocacy and support for victims, accountability and opportunities for change for offenders, and system and societal changes that end violence against women.

The Duluth Wheel of Power and Control offers eight types of tactics that an abuse will use to maintain power and control, often but not always reinforced by physical or sexual violence. These are as follows: 

• Coercion and threats
• Intimidation 
• Male Privilege 
• Economic Abuse 
• Using Children 
• Minimising, denying and blaming 
• Isolation 
• Emotional Abuse

With only a few changes (for example expanding male privilege to including couples privilege), we can use this wheel to understand the ways these tactics may present uniquely in polyamorous or non-monogamous relationships. 

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What does it look like?

Coercion and Threats 

​Intimidation 

Privilege 

​Economic Abuse

Isolation 

Minimising, Denial and Blame

Emotional Abuse

Using Children

CLAIRE LOUISE TRAVERS

This is (c) Claire Louise Travers: an academic author, researcher and polyamorous community organiser. You can tip here on PayPal: @claireltravers