Monitoring
Demanding passwords, checking messages or location, constant calling, or controlling social media activity.
Public education
Learn the signs.
Respond without judgment.
Domestic abuse can be physical, sexual, emotional, financial, or digital. Learning to notice patterns—and listening when someone reaches out—can make a meaningful difference.
What to notice
Abuse is often a pattern of power and control
No checklist can diagnose a relationship. One or two behaviors can still be warning signs, especially when they intensify or make someone afraid.
Isolation
Keeping someone from friends, family, work, school, medical care, or other sources of support.
Control
Controlling money, transportation, clothing, work, healthcare, or reproductive decisions.
Intimidation
Humiliation, destroying property, stalking, displaying weapons, or threatening a person, child, pet, or themselves.
Physical or sexual harm
Hitting, choking, restraining, blocking exits, unwanted sexual activity, or interfering with contraception.
Blame and fear
Making the harmed person responsible for the abuse, minimizing what happened, or causing them to change behavior out of fear.
Understanding repeated calls
Why might someone ask for help more than once?
Leaving or reporting can be dangerous and rarely follows a straight line. Fear, financial dependence, children or pets, isolation, housing, immigration concerns, and escalating threats can all narrow a person’s choices.
A return home or another call does not make an earlier report false. A police response may capture only one moment in a longer pattern. Listen, document what the person chooses to share, offer options, and let them decide what feels safest.
Helpful language
“I believe you. This is not your fault. How can I support you safely?”
Avoid confronting the suspected abusive person or taking over the survivor’s decisions.
Help in your area
Local services and shelters
Browse approved public listings by state and city. Services, eligibility, bed availability, locations, and hours can change—contact the organization safely to confirm what is currently available.
Ohio
Columbus, Ohio
Choices Columbus Ohio
Shelter
View service informationStay informed locally
Community alert signups
Find official public-safety notification programs by state. Some programs cover a whole county while others offer city or township options. Review the provider’s choices before subscribing.
Ohio1 alert signup
Ohio
County: Franklin
ALERT Franklin County
Franklin County Emergency Management & Homeland Security
Official signup information for county emergency and severe-weather notifications delivered by phone, text, or email.
Open official signup informationWatch, read, understand
Education library
VideoPolice and system response
Veteran's Wife Silently Signals Police... A Terrified Look That Saved Her Life!
From Legal Action Cam
Police body-camera footage illustrating how a brief response may capture only one moment and why repeated calls for help should not be dismissed. Use it as a discussion prompt, not legal guidance.
Content warning: Police body-camera footage and distressing domestic-abuse themes.
Open resourceGuide or toolkitDigital safety
Franklin County Ohio Abuser Registry
sign up for email registry
Open resourceGuide or toolkitPolice and system response
Franklin County Ohio Court Case
search for court cases on violent people
Open resource
Trusted starting points:
The Hotline: warning signs
Office on Women’s Health
CDC: intimate partner violence
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