Domestic violence is a structural scourge present throughout the world. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), domestic violence can be defined as "any behavior within an intimate relationship that causes physical, psychological, or sexual harm or suffering to those involved in the relationship”1. Media attention is often directed – and rightly so – towards physical violence and feminicide, the two being linked in the overwhelming majority of cases. On average, Quebec police services record 20,000 offences per year committed in the context of domestic violence, 80 % of which are committed against women. In addition, 14 women were murdered by their partner in Quebec in 2022 and 160 in Canada in 2020. Although, according to sociologist Myrna Dawson, statistics and studies are sorely lacking to take the exact measure of these crimes. And what about the more insidious violence? As a page on the Quebec government's website reminds us, there can be conjugal violence without any physical injury and it can take many forms: psychological, verbal, economic, physical, sexual, and even in more than one form at the same time. This violence can also be present in all forms of intimacy, occur at any age and continue after the relationship has ended. While tools such as the Violence Meter exist to help raise awareness of an abnormal situation, some forms of violence are more difficult to identify and, therefore, to manage. Understanding insidious domestic violence therefore means thinking more broadly about violence and its intertwining with, among other things, economic, gender and intimate orientation logics. This scientific review will therefore focus on these invisible forms of domestic violence from an intersectional perspective.
1 The issue of violence is complex. Spousal violence, domestic violence or intimate violence, all these terms cover different realities, which sometimes intersect and sometimes oppose each other. We have chosen to retain the term "domestic violence" to focus on violence between intimate partners, but we will deal with other dimensions of this violence in future reviews.
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