'has been oppressive' is a correct and usable sentence in written English.
You can use it when you want to describe a situation in which someone or something has been unpleasantly or unfairly controlling of you or others. For example: "The oppressive heat of the summer has been unbearable this year."
But the Chinese Communist Party in the reform era has been oppressive politically — even worse lately, with the harshest clampdown in two decades — while hugely enriching its people.
The effect of the tragedies has been oppressive.
Every day black men and women are killed under a system that has been oppressive for generations.
The conflict in Darfur has been oppressive, its weight felt by many children through a lack of security and the sprawling camps of thousand of displaced people surrounding the town.The conflict in Darfur has been oppressive, its weight felt by many children through a lack of security and the sprawling camps of thousand of displaced people surrounding the town.
Passing sentence, the judge said he did not believe that Fulcher had been oppressive in how he interviewed Halliwell.
This may have been because her own experience of family life, growing up in the Boston suburb of Swampscott, had been oppressive.
The satirical intent is lightly handled; anything more explicit would have been oppressive, and this kind of comment is not the point anyway.
It is true, some nuns have been oppressive and narrow-minded; but there is also a case for including religious sisters in the canon of feminism, certainly when it comes to the education of girls.
But Gutmann also cites examples — ranging from the Boy Scouts to a Pueblo woman punished by her tribe for marrying outside it — in which these groups have been oppressive to their own members and discriminatory toward outsiders.
And, you have to ask yourself, given years growing up with a man who, towards the end of his life, would concede his parenting to have been "oppressive" and said he didn't "do" children, who could blame her? "How did you react to those pages," I ask, "when you first saw them?" "I just couldn't believe that he'd done it.
It also happens because all organised religions have been oppressive towards gender and sexuality, so many members of the community have distanced themselves from their faith.
