Surviving domestic abuse goes beyond simply spotting red flags – it’s about protecting your children’s future and breaking the cycle of trauma. Every day you take action is a day closer to freedom. This guide will help you navigate the challenging journey of leaving an abusive marriage when children are involved.
The Hidden Wounds: Understanding Abuse in Family Settings
Economic Abuse:
Your child needs new shoes for school, but you have to beg for money. Your teenager’s college fund mysteriously empties. Your part-time job disappears because your partner keeps showing up there. These aren’t random acts of control – they’re calculated moves to keep you trapped. This is economic abuse, and it hurts your whole family.
Key Ways Economic Abuse Affects Parents:
- Being denied money for children’s basic needs
- Having your credit destroyed through forced debt or new “businesses” started in your name and with your credit
- Being forced to quit jobs through harassment or threats
- Watching your children go without while the abuser maintains control
- Having no access to family bank accounts or credit cards for emergencies
Digital Abuse in Modern Parenting:
Technology has given abusers new weapons. Your ex tracks your child’s phone to find you. They hack your social media to monitor playdates. They use family-sharing apps to stalk your movements. What seems like convenient family tech becomes a prison. Digital abuse extends the abuser’s reach into every corner of family life.
Modern Digital Abuse Tactics:
- Monitoring children’s phones or tablets to track family movements
- Using family location-sharing apps against you
- Threatening to share embarrassing family photos
- Creating fake social media accounts to watch your parenting activities
- Installing hidden tracking apps on shared devices
- Using children’s gaming consoles to monitor conversations
Movement Control: The Invisible Cage
When an abuser controls your movements, they’re not just controlling you – they’re imprisoning your children in an atmosphere of fear. Every restricted step teaches your children that love means control. Here’s what this often looks like for parents:
Transportation Tactics:
- Taking away car keys when you need to take kids to doctor appointments
- Disabling your vehicle before school pickup
- Demanding explanations for every minute spent outside the home
- Questioning children about where they went during the day
- Using GPS to track all car movements
- Forcing you to share your location at all times
Control over your movement isn’t just about you – it’s about isolating your children from support systems, medical care, and healthy relationships with extended family. It’s about making your world smaller until there’s nowhere left to turn.
The Prison of Home:
- Being forced to miss parent-teacher conferences
- Unable to take kids to playdates or birthday parties
- Missing family events and holidays
- Children watching you ask permission for basic outings
- Being trapped in endless household tasks to prevent leaving
- Having every outing timed and monitored
- Mobility Restriction: For children with physical disabilities, abusers may restrict access to wheelchairs, walkers, or other necessary equipment. This isn’t negligence – it’s calculated cruelty that renders the person immobile and totally dependent.
- Physical Confinement: During arguments or as punishment, some abusers will physically confine their partner to a room or area of the house. Your children hear your calls. They learn helplessness with each locked door.
Family Planning Abuse: Control Through Children
Your body and your children become tools of control in abusive relationships. The abuser might force pregnancies to keep you dependent or threaten existing children to maintain control. Every pregnancy decision becomes a battlefield. This form of abuse directly impacts your ability to plan your family’s future.
Signs of Family Planning Abuse:
- Being pressured to have more children than you want
- Threats about custody if you try to leave
- Forcing pregnancy to maintain financial dependence
- Interfering with birth control or reproductive choices, such as not picking them up as agreed from the pharmacy or refusing to pay for them
- Making decisions about your children’s future without your input
When Violence Becomes Physical: Your Children Are Watching
That first strike doesn’t just hurt you – it shatters your child’s sense of safety. Physical abuse teaches them devastating lessons about love and power.
What Your Children Learn from Witnessing Violence:
- That hurting people you love is normal
- That they should stay quiet to avoid making things worse
- That home isn’t a safe place
- That they are powerless to help the parent they love
- That fear is a normal part of family life
- That their feelings don’t matter
The Escalation: How Violence Grows
You whisper these lies to yourself: “At least they don’t hit the kids.” Or “The children are too young to understand.” But violence is like water – it finds every crack, seeps into every space. What starts as harsh words can end in violence, and children absorb every moment.
The Evolution of Family Violence:
- Criticism of your parenting becomes constant control
- Shouting becomes shoving becomes striking
- Threats expand to include the children
- Physical intimidation turns into actual violence
- Your kids start flinching at loud noises
- Family pets become targets of abuse
- Your home becomes a minefield of triggers
Finding Your Voice: The First Steps to Freedom
The hardest words you’ll ever say are “I need help.” You worry about judgment. About breaking up your children’s home. About whether anyone will believe you.
But here’s the truth your children already know: Every day you stay, they’re absorbing lessons about love and respect that could shape their entire lives. Your silence protects the wrong person.
Steps to Breaking Free:
- Start with one trusted confidant
- Connect with other parents who’ve survived abuse
- Find a therapist who understands family trauma
- Join online support groups for parents
- Build a network of people who can help your children
- Document everything – even the small things
- Create secret signals with trusted neighbors
Legal considerations:
- Document incidents of abuse (photos of injuries, medical records, police reports)
- Save evidence in multiple secure locations
- Consult with a domestic violence advocate or family law attorney about custody, visitation, restraining orders, etc.
- Secure important documents (IDs, passports, birth certificates, etc.)
- Consider filing for a restraining order to keep your partner away from you and your kids
- Learn your state’s custody and protection order laws
Financial planning:
- Build your escape fund to cover expenses when you leave
- Open a bank account in your name only
- Make copies of financial documents like tax returns, pay stubs, bank statements
- Plan how you will support yourself and your kids (job, public assistance, child support, etc.)
- Research local housing assistance programs
- Understand your legal rights to marital assets
Creating Your Safety Plan
A safety plan addresses all sources of risk. It forces you to think through questions like where will you be? What will you need? And Where shall you go?
Your safety plan is your roadmap to freedom. It compels you to assess the circumstances, threats, and deficits that you will negotiate in a DV assault.
The most dangerous moment in an abusive relationship is when you try to leave. Your trauma responses might tell you to stay – but your safety plan gives you the strength to go.
The First Days of Freedom
Trust your instincts. Prioritize your safety and your children’s safety above all else. Your gut knows the danger – listen to it. With careful planning and support, you can escape an abusive marriage and build a safer, happier life. No one deserves to live in fear.
The First 90 Days:
- Expect your children to act out – it’s normal
- Watch for signs of relief mixed with grief
- Maintain routines as much as possible
- Document every interaction with the abuser
- Celebrate small victories together
- Create new safety routines
- Let your children express all their feelings
Common Challenges:
- Children missing the abuser
- Financial pressure and housing stress
- School and routine disruptions
- Emotional overwhelm and guilt
- Managing court proceedings while parenting
- Discussing with professionals how to navigate shared custody safely
- Rebuilding your support network
Your New Normal:
- Building a violence-free home
- Creating new family traditions
- Healing together through therapy
- Learning healthy relationship patterns
- Growing stronger as a family unit
- Teaching children about healthy boundaries
- Finding joy in small freedoms
Final Words: Your Journey Matters
Every survivor’s path looks different. Take what helps from this guide and leave what doesn’t fit.
What You Might Have:
- A way to reach out, even if it’s small
- Understanding of your situation
- The ability to move toward safety
- An awareness that things need to change
- Love for your children
- Hope for a better future
- Moments to plan
- Resources, even if limited
- Someone who might help
- The strength to survive
If any of these feel out of reach, that’s okay. Call the National Domestic Violence Hotline. They’ve helped survivors with far less find their way to freedom.
Your escape is just the beginning – it’s about creating a new story for your family. One where love doesn’t hurt, where voices don’t need to be hushed, and where your children can finally exhale. You haven’t failed as a parent by staying, and you’re not failing as a parent by leaving. You’re succeeding by showing your children that everyone deserves safety and respect.
The strongest people aren’t those who never fell – they’re those who got back up. You’re getting up. You’re reading this. You’re planning. You’re already stronger than you know.
Appendix
Additional resources:
- National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-7233
- WomensLaw.org – state-specific legal information
- Love is Respect (for teens): 1-866-331-9474
- National Parent Helpline: 1-855-427-2736
- Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline: 1-800-422-4453
The most dangerous time is when you’re preparing to leave. Trust your instincts. Prioritize your safety and your children’s safety above all else. With careful planning and support, you can escape an abusive marriage and build a safer, happier life. No one deserves to live in fear.
Here is what a Safety Plan looks like:
- Name: ____________________________ Date: _______
These steps are my plan for safety and to get ready for how future violence may happen. Because I do not have control over my partner’s violence, I can choose how to get my kids and myself to safety.
STEP 1: Safety during a violent incident. Victims cannot always avoid violent incidents. In order to increase safety, battered partners may use a variety of strategies.
I can use some of the following strategies:
- If I decide to leave, I will ______________________________________________________. (Decide how, and practice how to get out safely. What doors, windows, elevators, stairwells, or fire escapes will I use?)
- I will keep my purse and car keys ready and put them (location) ___________________ _________________ in order to leave quickly.
- I can tell _____________________________ about the fights and request that he/she call the police if she/he hears loud noises coming from my house.
- I can teach my kids how to use the telephone to call police and 911.
- I will use _____________________________________________ as my code with my kids or my friends so they can call for help.
- If I have to leave my home, I will go to _________________________________________. (Decide this even if you don’t think there will be a next time.)
- I can also teach some of these plans to some or all of my kids.
- When I expect we’re going to have a fight, I’ll try to move to a safer place like __________________________________. ) I will try to not be in fights in the bathroom, garage, kitchen, near guns or knives, or in rooms that don’t have a door to the outside.)
- I will use my gut feelings. If it feels right, I can give my partner what he/she wants to calm him/her down. I have to protect myself until I/we can leave.
STEP 2: Safety when preparing to leave. I may have to leave my home to be safe. I will leave with a good plan in order to be safe. My partner may want to hit back at me if he/she thinks I want to leave her/him.
I can use some or all of these strategies:
- I will leave money and an extra set of keys with _________________________ so I can leave fast.
- I will keep copies of important papers or keys at _____________________________.
- I will open a savings account by ____________________, to save money for when I will need it. Other things I can do to take care of myself are: _______________________ ______________________________________________________________________________
- I can keep money to buy a ‘burner phone’ in a place I can find it all the time. I know that if I use my mobile phone, the next phone bill will show the numbers I called after I leave. To keep my phone calls private, I might ask to use a friend’s phone for a while, a burner phone when I first leave or get a phone only in my name if the phone is in my abuser’s name.
- I will check with _________________________ and _________________________ to see who would be able to let me stay with them or lend me some money.
- I can leave extra clothes or money with __________________________.
- I will sit down and check my safety plan every _______________ in order to plan the best and most safe way to leave my house. ________________________ (domestic violence advocate or friend’s name) will help me check this plan.
- I will practice my escape plan with my kids.
Telephone numbers I need to know:
Police Department Local: 911
or________________________________________________________
Police Department where I work: 911 or______________________________________________________________________
Police department at my kid’s school: 911 ___________________________________________________________________
Battered Women’s Program (local) _____________________________________________________________________ _
National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-SAFE (7223)
WomensLaw.org info on important laws I should know.
800-787-3224 (TTY) 787
County Registry of Protection Orders: _____________________________________________________________________
State registry of protection orders: _______________________________________________________________________
I WILL PRINT OUT COPIES OF THIS SAFETY PLAN TODAY AND GIVE IT TO FRIENDS/FAMILY I TRUST
I will keep this PLAN in a SAFE place and out of the reach of my abuser.
Review date: _________________________
Signed: __________________________________________________________________
Date: ____________________________
