The woman who contacted the UK charity Refuge in late 2025 described a familiar sequence: her British husband had moved her to a country in southern Europe where she had no family, no income and, eventually, no passport. For months, she said, he belittled her in private, controlled the household finances and reminded her that she could not leave without his help. When she finally shouted back during an argument, he told her the marriage was over, called her “the abusive one” and flew home alone, leaving her stranded with an expired visa and less than €40 in her bank account.
Her experience is not an outlier. Refuge, the UK’s largest domestic abuse organization, reported a 21 percent rise in calls to its National Domestic Abuse Helpline between 2022 and early 2025, with caseworkers flagging transnational abandonment as a growing concern. In March 2026, a Home Affairs Select Committee evidence session heard testimony from immigration lawyers and abuse charities warning that gaps in cross-border legal protections leave hundreds of spouses vulnerable each year. The pattern they described, isolation abroad, coercive control and eventual abandonment, mirrors what researchers and frontline advocates have documented for more than a decade.
How verbal abuse escalates in isolation
Verbal abuse seldom begins with screaming. Survivors consistently describe a gradual process: a mocking comment about their accent, a dismissive remark about their cooking, a joke at their expense repeated until it stops feeling like a joke. Dr. Emma Katz, a researcher at Durham University and author of Coercive Control in Children’s and Mothers’ Lives, has written that abusers use this drip-feed of criticism to systematically undermine a partner’s confidence so that the target begins to doubt her own perceptions.
When that erosion happens abroad, the effect is magnified. The victim’s friends and family are thousands of miles away. Local services may operate in an unfamiliar language. Even a call to a helpline can feel impossible when the abuser monitors the phone. The U.S. Department of Justice’s Office for Victims of Crime has noted that once an abuser succeeds in isolating a victim, she has no one with whom to reality-check, making it far easier for him to convince her that she is responsible for the abuse. In a foreign country, that isolation can become nearly total, and a partner’s constant attacks can start to sound less like cruelty and more like the only truth available.
Control, blame-shifting and the cycle that keeps victims stuck
Domestic abuse researchers have long described a recurring cycle in abusive relationships: tension builds, a violent or aggressive incident occurs, and then the abuser shifts into a phase of minimization or false remorse before the tension climbs again. The government of Manitoba’s gender-based violence resource guide explains that after committing a violent act, abusers frequently blame others or manufacture excuses, sometimes insisting they “barely touched” the victim or that she provoked them.
When blame-shifting is layered on top of months of criticism, the target can internalize a corrosive belief: if only she were calmer, quieter or more grateful, the relationship would be peaceful. In England and Wales, this dynamic has had a legal name since 2015. Section 76 of the Serious Crime Act created the offense of controlling or coercive behaviour in an intimate or family relationship, recognizing that a pattern of intimidation, isolation and emotional manipulation can be as damaging as a single act of physical violence. In transnational relationships, that control often extends to immigration paperwork, joint bank accounts and the plane ticket home, meaning the victim’s ability to leave is not just emotionally difficult but logistically and legally blocked.
Stranded abroad with no way home
For spouses taken overseas, the power imbalance can harden into something more dangerous when the controlling partner holds all travel documents and money. UK immigration solicitors at OTS Solicitors have published guidance explaining that when a spouse leaves a partner stranded overseas, it can amount to coercive control, a recognized form of domestic abuse that can be used as evidence if the victim needs legal support to return to the United Kingdom.
The charity Rights of Women runs a dedicated immigration and asylum law line for women in exactly this position. Caseworkers there say the calls they receive follow a depressingly consistent script: a partner is brought abroad on the promise of a fresh start, stripped of financial independence, subjected to months of degradation, and then abandoned after a dramatic conflict. The abuser walks away. The spouse is left without documents, funds or local support, turning a private crisis into an emergency of housing, immigration status and basic safety.
When a survival reaction gets reframed as “the real abuse”
After months of insults and threats, many survivors eventually snap. They shout back, throw something or say words they later regret. Abusive partners frequently seize on that single incident to rewrite the entire history of the relationship,n claiming both sides were equally at fault or that the victim was the true aggressor.
Therapists sometimes use the term “reactive abuse” to describe this dynamic, though it is not a formal clinical diagnosis. Dr. Ramani Durvasula, a licensed clinical psychologist and professor at California State University, Los Angeles, has explained in her widely cited work on narcissistic abuse that a survivor’s defensive outburst after sustained provocation is not equivalent to the pattern of abuse that caused it. The reaction and the pattern are fundamentally different in intent, duration and power.
In the account described above, one angry outburst became the husband’s justification for declaring the marriage dead and casting himself as the injured party. Mental health professionals warn that this reframing is a textbook gaslighting tactic. By spotlighting the survivor’s reaction and ignoring the months of provocation behind it, the abuser sidesteps accountability and reinforces the narrative that she is unstable. Reducing a gaslighter’s influence, as the NHS domestic abuse guidance notes, often requires reducing or ending contact altogether, a step that is far harder when the victim is stuck abroad and dependent on the same person for shelter and transport.
The psychological toll and the turning point
The damage does not end when the flight home finally lands. A 2010 study published in the journal Psychosis found that when individuals endure severe abuse, the shock can cause a form of internal splitting that functions as a survival mechanism, helping them get through immediate danger at the cost of lasting psychological distress. Survivors of intimate partner violence frequently report intrusive memories, dissociation and a stubborn conviction that they are somehow to blame for what happened to them.
That self-blame, advocates stress, is a lie that trauma tells. The charity Women’s Aid notes that overwhelming shame, rumination and anxiety after leaving an abusive partner can be signs of trauma-related guilt or post-traumatic stress disorder, and encourages survivors to contact a trained domestic abuse advocate or therapist. Legal and counseling frameworks also describe a later stage sometimes called “responsibility,” the point at which a survivor recognizes that only the abuser is responsible for the violence. Reaching that recognition, as the legal resource on battered spouse syndrome explains, is often what finally enables a victim to leave. But when immigration status, finances and social stigma are all in play, that turning point can take years to reach.
If you or someone you know is affected
- National Domestic Abuse Helpline (UK): 0808 2000 247, run by Refuge, available 24 hours.
- Rights of Women immigration law line: 020 7490 7689, rightsofwomen.org.uk.
- National Domestic Violence Hotline (US): 1-800-799-7233, thehotline.org.
- Women’s Aid live chat: chat.womensaid.org.uk.
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