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Yesterday, a reader sent me a Belfast Telegraph article about a woman (a fully qualified doctor from Northern Ireland), who was subjected to severe physical and psychological violence by her abusive boyfriend. He strangled her repeatedly, spat at her, called her names, and filmed her as he forced her to eat food from the floor. When neighbours alerted police in 2023, officers found her crawling away from her home, covered in bruises at different stages of healing. When I discussed the case with colleagues over lunch, one expressed surprise that such violence could be inflicted on a woman who was educated, professional, and financially independent.
That reaction is common, and revealing. It reflects a lingering belief that education, income, or professional success can protect women from abuse, as if knowledge or money could neutralise coercive power or stop a punch. Yet coercive control is not born of ignorance or poverty; it is a deliberate strategy of domination. Perpetrators adapt their methods to the environments they inhabit. In middle-class or professional relationships, the violence can be just as brutal — strangulation, assault, humiliation—but often intertwined with psychological, reputational, or emotional control. Isolation is disguised as concern, degradation as intimacy, manipulation as care. What changes is not the logic of domination, but the tools through which it is enforced.
In The Invisible Abuser, I interviewed women who were financially independent and professionally established. Their abusers weren’t poor or uneducated. On the contrary, they were often respected, well-liked men who used psychological and emotional tactics to dominate their partners. They didn’t rely on financial control. They didn’t have to. The absence of visible dependency made the abuse harder to name, resist, or prove.
This post explores three common forms of abuse—physical, psychological, and financial—to show that domestic violence is not confined to any social class. It’s not a failure of education or income. It’s a strategy of control used by perpetrators, across all backgrounds, to erode autonomy, induce fear, and maintain power in intimate relationships.
Physical abuse
This is often the easiest type of abuse to explain, even to colleagues who were surprised that a well-educated doctor could be a victim. Physical abuse does not lose its impact in middle- or upper-class settings. Being hit by a man in a suit hurts just as much as being hit by one in work boots. Yet in professional or higher-income contexts, violence is often minimised, concealed, or reframed as a loss of control, a “bad night,” or an unfortunate exception. Victims may struggle to be believed, even by friends or professionals, because their abuser doesn’t match the stereotype. He may be articulate, respected, and socially polished. But violence is not mitigated by class. The injuries are the same. What changes is the social response: more disbelief, more silence, and greater institutional reluctance to intervene.
Part of the difficulty in recognising abuse, especially in middle-class contexts, comes from how domination and humiliation have been romanticised in popular culture. Narratives like Fifty Shades of Grey package coercion as intimacy and control as erotic preference. In these stories, emotional withdrawal becomes mystery, possessiveness becomes passion, and degradation is rebranded as desire. This cultural framing does not just obscure the reality of abuse, it actively teaches women to interpret harm as love, and men to see power over women as an expression of care. In professional environments where image, autonomy, and sophistication are prized, these dynamics become harder to name and easier to excuse. But no amount of wealth, polish, or pseudo-consent sanitises domination. It only makes it easier to hide, harder to name, and more difficult to escape.
Psychological Abuse
Psychological abuse is often the least visible and most misunderstood form of domestic violence, especially when it occurs in relationships that appear stable, successful, or loving from the outside. In The Invisible Abuser, I showed how perpetrators construct emotional captivity not through force, but through manipulation, contradiction, and deliberate emotional destabilisation. They manufacture entrapment by alternating cruelty with care and punishment with reward, a cycle known as intermittent reinforcement. Many participants described their abuser as “two-faced”—charming and generous in public, cruel and controlling in private. This unpredictability fosters confusion, self-doubt, and longing, making the victim feel both responsible for the abuse and desperate to earn back affection. Over time, perpetrators erode autonomy and bind their victims through what feels like love but functions as control. It is not passivity that keeps women in these relationships but the active, calculated strategies of perpetrators who use psychological manipulation to dominate without needing to raise a hand or control money.
Psychological entrapment operates through what behavioural psychology describes as a variable-ratio reinforcement schedule, commonly referred to as “slot-machine logic.” Perpetrators alternate affection with cruelty in unpredictable cycles, producing a powerful neurobiological compulsion in the victim. This pattern destabilises the nervous system, impairs self-regulation, and gradually undermines autonomy. Importantly, this mechanism is not dependent on material vulnerability. The effects of coercive conditioning can impact individuals across all social classes, irrespective of income, education, or professional status.
Financial Abuse
Financial abuse in upper-class contexts is not just present, it is often more powerful and harder to escape. Perpetrators with wealth don’t need to restrict money to control it; they weaponise access, reputation, and legal resources. A perpetrator with 3 million pounds in his account has the potential to do far more damage than one with none; he can fund litigation, control housing, silence dissent, and maintain credibility in professional and social circles. His power is not only economic but institutional. In such cases, financial abuse is not the absence of funds, but the strategic use of wealth to entrap, discredit, or punish. The more resources he controls, the more sophisticated and far-reaching the coercion becomes.
Domestic Violence Essential Reads
But even when a woman has her own money, she is not necessarily free and she is not necessarily safe. Financial independence does not shield against coercive control; it just changes the weapons used. A woman can be earning six figures and still be degraded, threatened, humiliated, or killed. Financial abuse is not the cause of violence but one of many tools. The most dangerous men don’t need to control your bank account. They control your mind, your time, your options, your body and your sense of reality.
When we focus only on economic dependence, we miss the women most likely to be overlooked: those who appear independent, capable, and secure, yet may still be experiencing violence, manipulation, and coercive control. Domination doesn’t require poverty; it requires access and intent. For many middle‑class and professional women, abuse thrives behind a veneer of stability, hidden by respectability and silence. These victims are harder to see, harder to believe, and easier to dismiss.
