UNIVERSITY POLICE
Important Crime Definitions
Assailant/Perpetrator/Offender/Abuser: is someone who attacks another. This is someone who is a perpetrator of violence or abuse. These terms can be used more or less interchangeably.
Battering: is a sociological term coined by the battered women's movement to describe a pattern of physical violence, intimidation, coercion, and other forms of abuse committed by a person (the batterer) to establish or maintain control of his or her partner.
Dating Violence: is the verbal, physical, and/or sexual abuse of one partner by the other in an intimate relationship. Relationship violence implies that the "couple" is not married, does not have a child in common and is not living together. This type of abuse may involve pushing, shoving, hitting, choking, intimidation, threats, humiliation, insults, pressure, destruction of property, isolation, sexual relations without consent, unwanted sexual touching, or pressure to engage in humiliating or degrading sexual activity.
Domestic Violence: refers to any criminal offense involving the use or threatened use of physical force, in which the offender and the victim have a familial or household relationship. Domestic violence is a pattern of physically, sexually, and/or emotionally abusive behaviors used by one individual to assert power or maintain control over another in the context of an intimate or family relationship.
Gang Rape: is when two or more offenders act together to rape the same victim. The offenders include those who actually obtain sexual relations with the victim as well as those who threaten or use force to make the victim submit but do not themselves have sexual relations.
Indecent Exposure: (sometimes referred to as "flashing") refers to an individual exposing sexual body parts to another when it is unwanted and unasked for.