Please check the about and the questions page for more information about this site and about what this site, the terms on it, and the experiences it describes are and are not.
This is intended to be a very very broad term and is intended to group together a very broad range of experiences, where certain words under "plural abuse" describe more specific experiences.
Here are some examples of things that are plural abuse:
* being abused by someone who knew you had a system and treated each alter differently
* abused for being a system
* being abused in the plural community
* someone manipulating you by taking advantage of your plurality (e.g. amnesia, switching, etc.)
* someone manipulating your headmates into abusing each other
"Plural", in this term, refers to the recipient of the abuse, not the perpetrator of it. It is meant to be like "child abuse" in that respect.
While forcishaping is a form of plural abuse, not all plural abuse is forcishaping. However, other forms of abuse that constitute plural abuse often happen during shaping, especially online or within the community.
In order for something to be plural abuse, it has to be another kind of abuse at the same time. It's not like how, say, physical abuse is physical abuse, where the word refers to the manner of the abuse.
For example, if you made friends with someone and your system started splitting headmates based on fan art they were sending you sometimes, that is not plural abuse. They had to have been manipulating you in some way, or they had to have been taking advantage of the fact that you split introjects similar to what they showed you.
Plural abuse is also not just an umbrella term for "bad experiences in the plural community". Plural abuse is abuse, not just a bad experience.
One way of looking at it is that, if it wouldn't have been abuse if it had happened to a singlet, it wouldn't be plural abuse if it happened to a system. However, if the exact way it happened wouldn't have happened to a singlet or a presumed singlet, it's plural abuse in addition to whatever kind of abuse it was.
The reason "plural abuse" would be an important term to have, even if it would be abusive towards a singlet too, is because some systems may feel that the way they were abused as a system is different than how they were abused by people who saw them as a singlet. They may also categorize those experiences differently, e.g. "my plural abuse was very confusing and involved more surreal media than my abuse from people who thought I was a singlet".
It's also possible to abuse systems in ways that are specific to systems and not singlets. For example, treating one headmate better than other headmates in the system, like when a parent treats one child better than the other children. While this form of plural abuse is similar to experiences that are not system-specific, the exact experience of someone doing that to different parts of yourself that you both recognize as different people is very different than basically any other way of experiencing that, including someone treating you differently at different times but they see you as a singlet.
Because plural abuse is not a commonly known term, it should probably not be used in abuse allegations. For example, if someone in the plural community groomed you, you should probably accuse them of grooming, not plural abuse.
Rather, "plural abuse" as a term is moreso for survivors to use in describing their own experiences. e.g. "My plural abuse feels different than my other abuse", "This headmate is a holder for all our plural abuse", "These sidesystems are based on our online abuse minus our plural abuse", etc.