This Is Also Sexual Abuse

Expanding the definition — because what happened to you may have a name you were never given

Most of us were taught a narrow definition of sexual abuse. It involved force. It involved strangers or known predators. It involved physical violation — rape, unwanted touch, assault. And while those things are absolutely forms of sexual abuse, the definition stops there for most
people.

Which means that millions of people living inside relationships and marriages where their sexuality is being weaponised against them — through control, withholding, coercion, and humiliation — have no language for what is happening to them. They don’t call it abuse. They call it a difficult marriage. A sexually incompatible relationship. A personal failing. Something to pray through.

This piece is an invitation to look wider.

                                                   
                                                      Sexual abuse is not only what is forced upon you. It is also what is withheld from you,
                                                      weaponised against you, used to control you, or deployed to diminish your sense of
                                                      worth, agency, and safety within a relationship.

A broader definition

Sexual abuse is any pattern of behaviour in which one person uses sexuality — or the withholding of it — to exert power, control, punishment, or harm over another person. It includes physical acts, but it also includes emotional, psychological, and coercive behaviour that uses the sexual dimension of a relationship as a tool of dominance. It can happen within marriage. It can happen in long-term committed relationships. And it can be perpetrated by any person, regardless of gender.

The forms most people never name

Withholding intimacy as punishment. When a partner consistently withdraws physical affection, sex, or closeness as a way to punish, control, or manipulate — this is sexual coercion. It creates a dynamic where the other partner lives in a constant state of emotional and physical insecurity, never knowing when connection will be permitted and what they must do to earn it.

Using sexuality as a threat. This includes threats to seek sexual gratification elsewhere, to use pornography, or to masturbate — communicated in ways designed to make the partner feel inadequate, replaceable, or responsible for meeting sexual demands regardless of their own needs, exhaustion, or emotional state.

Masturbation used as a weapon. When a partner uses their own sexual behaviour not as a private act but as a deliberate tool — choosing to masturbate in ways or at times designed to make the other partner feel excluded, insufficient, or punished — and when they know this causes distress and continue regardless — this crosses from personal behaviour into relational harm.

Reproductive coercion. Deciding unilaterally when a partner should or should not become pregnant. Sabotaging contraception. Pressuring someone into a pregnancy or an abortion they do not want. These are profound violations of bodily autonomy and they constitute a form of
sexual and reproductive abuse.

Sexual entitlement within marriage. The belief that marriage grants one partner unlimited access to the other’s body, regardless of consent, mood, exhaustion, or desire. Marriage does not transfer ownership of a body. Consent is required every time, within marriage as outside of
it.

Sexual humiliation and shame. Using a partner’s sexual history, desires, body, or vulnerabilities against them. Shaming them for wanting sex, or shaming them for not wanting it. Disclosing private sexual information to others without consent.

A word about perpetrators

Sexual abuse is not only perpetrated by men against women. Women can and do perpetrate sexual abuse against male partners, female partners, and others. Men can be coerced, withheld from, humiliated, and reproductively controlled. Abuse is about power and harm — not about the gender of the person wielding it.

A word about faith and scripture

One of the most commonly misused passages is 1 Corinthians 7:3-5, which speaks of spouses having authority over each other’s bodies. Read carefully, the passage is entirely mutual — the husband’s body belongs to his wife just as her body belongs to him. And crucially, it explicitly names mutual consent as the governing principle. The concept of consent within marriage is not a modern invention. It is there in the text itself.

What has happened over generations is that the mutuality and the consent clause were quietly removed from the teaching, leaving behind a distorted version that gave one partner permission to demand and the other an obligation to comply. That distortion is not scripture. It is control dressed in the language of scripture.

How to know if what you experienced was abuse

Did you feel afraid, obligated, or coerced? Not just physically — but emotionally. Did you comply because you genuinely wanted to, or because the consequences of not complying felt too heavy to bear?

Was your body treated as something you had a right to? Or were your needs, exhaustion, and desires treated as inconveniences or obstacles?

Was sexuality used to punish, control, or diminish you? Whether through withholding, threats, humiliation, or demands?

Did you feel shame about your own sexual experience within the relationship? Shame that was placed there by your partner’s behaviour rather than arising from your own values?

You do not need a dramatic story to have experienced sexual abuse. You do not need bruises or police reports or a clear villain. You need only the honest recognition that something in your relationship used your body, your sexuality, or your reproductive capacity against you — and that you deserved better than that.

If this is your story
You are not alone. You are not dramatic. You are not making it up or making it bigger than it is. Naming what happened does not require you to immediately know what to do about it. It only requires you to tell yourself the truth — and to let that truth be the beginning of something.

                                         
                                              What was done to you had a name. You were just never given it. You have it now.

If this piece opened something for you — a question, a recognition, a memory you have been trying to find words for — I am here. This is exactly the kind of work I do, and I hold it with care. You are welcome to reach out.