All of this means that, for an outsider who observes even some dubious parenting practice, it can be hard to tell whether a relationship is actually abusive, or whether you've simply caught a family on a bad day.
But in my view the really abusive thing that has emerged in the revelations over the last week is this tendency for some MP's to so-called 'flip' where they go from one home to the other and they transform themselves from MP's into sharp-suited property speculators doing up homes, selling them for a personal profit and then going onto the next property.