In Becoming Better Helpers, the FVDRC outlined the importance of language to provide a more accurate description of the violence women were experiencing. The language policy makers and practitioners use redefines women’s experiences of abuse, often minimising, disregarding or refuting the victim’s version of events (page 27).70 The following terms help to highlight the context in which the violence is taking place: power and control: an outcome of the use of multiple different strategies (including threats, intimidation, emotional abuse, isolation, minimising, economic abuse, using children) to dominate an intimate partner71 coercive control: a combination of the use of force or threats to intimidate or hurt victims and instil fear, and tactics designed to isolate the victim and foster their dependence on the abusive partner72 social entrapment the social isolation, fear and coercion the abusive partner’s violence creates in the victim’s life the indifference of powerful institutions to the victim’s suffering the ways in which coercive control (and the indifference of powerful institutions) can be aggravated by the structural inequities of gender, class and racism73 violence as a pattern of behaviour: there is a pattern of behaviours that can encompass multiple victims (adults and children) – past, current and future.74 Becoming Better Helpers was based on an Interactional and Discursive View of Violence and Resistance proposed by Coates and Wade (2007). The analytic framework is centred on six tenets: Interaction 1. Violence is social and unilateral: Violent behaviour is both social, in that it occurs in specific interactions comprised of at least two people, and unilateral, in that it entails actions by one individual against the will and well-being of another. 2. Violence is deliberate: The perpetrators of violence anticipate resistance from their victims and take specific steps to suppress and conceal it. Virtually all forms of violence and systems of oppression entail strategies designed specifically for the suppression of overt and covert resistance. 3. Resistance is ubiquitous: Whenever individuals are subjected to violence, they resist. Alongside each history of violence, there runs a parallel history of resistance. Victims of violence face the threat of further violence, from mild censure to extreme brutality, for any act of open defiance. Consequently, open defiance is the least common form of resistance.75 Social Discourse 4. Misrepresentation: Misrepresentation is an ever-present feature of asymmetrical power relations76 and personalized violence. In cases of violence, public appearances are often highly misleading and the risk of inadvertent collusion with the offender is high. 5. Fitting words to deeds: There are no impartial accounts. All accounts of violence influence the perception and treatment of victims and offenders. Where there is violence, the question of which words are fitted to which deeds is crucial.77 6. Four discursive operations: Language can be used to conceal violence, obscure and mitigate offenders’ responsibility, conceal victims’ resistance, and blame and pathologize victims. Alternatively, language can be used to expose violence, clarify offenders’ responsibility, elucidate and honour victims’ resistance, and contest the blaming and pathologizing of victims.78