About Domestic Assault

Domestic Assault is a community for recognizing patterns of abuse, coercion and control—in our relationships, our institutions and our country.

I created this publication because abuse is too often misunderstood as a series of separate incidents.

It rarely is.

The pattern matters.

I write about coercive control, gaslighting, manipulation, intimidation, isolation, institutional failure, life after abuse, and the ways power can be used to make people doubt themselves, submit, stay silent or look away.

Some of that writing comes from lived experience. Some comes from decades of thinking about behavior, health, resilience and power. Some begins with a film, documentary, court case, news story, law, book or cultural moment that reveals something worth examining.

Domestic Assault also looks beyond intimate relationships.

The same questions about power, obedience, intimidation, normalization, resistance and institutional complicity can matter in workplaces, organizations, communities and public life. That includes what is happening in America today.

The situations are not identical.

The patterns can still teach us something.

This Is a Community

I want Domestic Assault to be a place where people read, recognize, think, talk and feel less alone.

It is for people living through abuse, people who have left, people still understanding what happened years later, people worried about someone they love, and people trying to understand how coercion and abuse of power work.

You do not have to tell your story to belong here.

You can simply read.

About Me

I’m Joyce Strong, RN, BSN—a writer, nurse, coach and survivor of domestic abuse.

I write from experience, research, curiosity and a lifelong interest in why people behave as they do and what helps us survive, rebuild and resist.

I don’t write because I have every answer.

I write because recognizing the pattern can change what we understand, help us heal, keep us safer, restore trust in our own perceptions, and make room for something abuse tries to take from us: the ability to fully engage in the joy of life.

Supporting the Work

Domestic Assault is an independent publication and community.

Paid memberships support the work so that everything I publish here can remain free to everyone, regardless of their ability to pay.

We are living through a period in American life when understanding abuse of power has become urgent.

Most of us have either experienced domestic abuse ourselves or know someone close to us who has. We have seen how coercion works inside a relationship: the gaslighting, intimidation, escalating boundary violations, demands for obedience, punishment for resistance, isolation, control of information, and gradual normalization of behavior that once would have been unthinkable.

Those patterns do not stop at the front door.

They can operate inside families, churches, workplaces, institutions and governments.

We are watching them operate on a national scale now.

Understanding coercive control helps us understand more than abusive relationships. It helps us recognize what happens when power is used to frighten people into compliance, make them doubt what they can plainly see, exhaust resistance, punish dissent and persuade everyone watching that each new violation is simply another isolated event.

It isn’t.

The pattern is the story.

We see that pattern when a domestic-abuse victim cannot get people to understand what is happening until the danger has become undeniable. We see it when victims of sexual exploitation spend years fighting powerful people and institutions for accountability. We see it in the Epstein story and in the continuing questions about who enabled him, who failed his victims, what information remains concealed or disputed, and whether institutions entrusted with the truth are protecting victims or protecting power.

And we see it in our country when institutions, leaders and citizens are pressured to accommodate conduct they once would have recognized immediately as unacceptable.

That is why this work is urgent.

My hope is that Domestic Assault becomes a place where people find language for what they have lived through, recognize what they are seeing around them, feel less alone, and become better able to protect themselves and one another.

I also want this to be about what comes next.

Recognizing the pattern can change what we understand, help us heal, keep us safer, restore trust in our own perceptions, and make room for something abuse tries very hard to take from us: our ability to fully engage in the joy of life.