Understanding Coercive Control

A draft of a presentation I will be making; work in progress; feedback welcomed

Draft # 3

Understanding Coercive Control

In conceptualizing domestic violence as the perpetration of coercive control, domestic violence is understood as more than an ‘abusive relationship’. With focus on the role of coercion, control, and entrapment as organizing principles of the perpetrator’s behavior, coercive control is understood as a “liberty crime”, a human rights violation (Stark, 2007, 2012, 2023a). Dr. Evan Stark, the most prominent proponent of the concept, describes coercive control as a  “strategic course of oppressive conduct” meant to “intimidate, degrade, isolate and control victims” (Stark, 2012, p.18). In the context of intimate partner violence, coercive control is a multi-faceted, continuous course of conduct  in which the perpetrator engages in a persistent pattern of behavior in order to dominate a selected target.

Rather than a set of discrete, separate episodes of violence, as Lenore Walker’s cycle of (physical ) violence concept would suggest, coercive control represents an ongoing campaign of abuse (Katz, 2022; Stark, 2007; Walker, 1979, 1989). The chronic tension produced by this campaign of violence has been described by victims as feeling like “walking on eggshells” (Hill, 2019). Tactics are often sequenced so as to set the stage for the implementation of other, more severe tactics (Dutton & Goodman, 2005; Katz, 2022; Monckton-Smith, 2020, 2021; Pitman, 2017; Stark, 2007, 2023a, 2023b). Some tactics, such as isolation, deception, manipulation, and gaslighting, amongst many others, may remain invisible to victim-survivors (Katz, 2022). As opposed to causing injury exclusively, the perpetrator operates with the intent to control, exploit, and entrap their prey. Perpetrators do this for the benefits this provides them, depriving the victim of liberty and other fundamental human rights (Fontes, 2015; Katz, 2022; Stark, 2007, 2023a, 2023b; Stark & Gruev-Vintilla, 2024).

This intent to control and exploit impacts every aspect of the way a perpetrator relates to his victim and their children (Katz, 2022; Stark, 2023b). The urge to control informs the way perpetrators select victims, engage in courtship, and groom their unsuspecting targets (Bancroft, 2002; Crown Prosecuting Services, 2023; Hennessy, 2012; Monckton-Smith, 2020, 2021; Wiener, 2017).  Findings from interviews conducted with perpetrators supports the perspective that perpetrators intentionally select targets with the desire to control and exploit them (Bancroft, 2002; Hennessy, 2012).

As a tactic of control, perpetrators weaponize their children and seek to sabotage the relationship they have with the targeted parent (Katz, 2022; Stark, 2023b). Their children may even be the product of reproduction coercion or birth control sabotage as a tactic of entrapment (Miller et al, 2010). When children are directly harmed, it is understood that this is in service of punishing or controlling the targeted victim (Stark, 2023b). Victims of coercive control are likely to face post-separation abuse as well. Perpetrators use litigation abuse such as with the false allegation of parental alienation, amongst other legal and judicial tactics (Katz, 2022; Ricci e Pereira, 2021; Stark, 2023b). Finally, leaving a perpetrator of coercive control is never easy, nor safe (Monckton-Smith, 2020, 2021). When faced with the loss of control, some perpetrators will  seek to exact the ultimate in control by murdering their partner (Monckton-Smith, 2020, 2021).

North-American sociologist, Dr. Evan Stark, building upon the efforts of U.S. feminist scholars’ writing about the use of non-physical types of abuse in the domestic violence of women in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s (Herman, 1992; Hill, 2019; Russell, 1990; Schecter, 1982), is perhaps the most prominent proponent of the concept of coercive control. In his groundbreaking publication, Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Their Private Lives (2007), Stark describes the perpetration of coercive control as a “course of calculated, malevolent conduct” (p.xi). Emphasizing the role and function of entrapment, he likens coercive control to “other capture crimes”, such as kidnapping or hostage taking (Stark, 2007, p.203). A victim may not realize that they have been taken hostage until they wish to leave.

The suffering of the women Stark had interviewed was not resultant from simply what had been done to them but rather from what they “had been prevented from doing for themselves by appropriating their resources; undermining their social support; subverting their rights to privacy, self-respect, and autonomy; and depriving them of substantive equality” (p.xi). Furthermore, Stark (2023b) underscores that the perpetration of coercive control is not unintentional, random or haphazard behavior, but rather that  “the criminal intent involved in coercive control is predatory, calculated, and self-serving…” (p.5). Even that which appears to be spontaneous, Stark identifies as “losing control to gain control” (p.xi), dismissing the notion that controlling men abuse due to frustration or anger.

As a type of intimate partner violence, coercive control is understood as “intimate terrorism”, identified as such by Johnson (2008) who presented a typology of intimate partner violences. Within Johnson’s model, coercive control can be distinguished from situational couple violence, sometimes referred to as the incident of violence model, in which a partner is not seeking to exert control over their partner. Johnson also presented the concept of “violent resistance” adding nuance to the perspective that some couples engage in mutual violence, noting that when observed through the lens of power dynamics, one partner is reacting to the violence of the other.

With growing awareness of the coercive control paradigm that reframes domestic violence as a human rights violation and crime against resources rather than just causing injury, countries worldwide, such as England, Wales, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, New South Wales, Australia, France, and six states of the United States have developed public policy to combat coercive control (Gil, 2020). In 2021, the European Court of Human Rights also instructed member nations to revise domestic violence legislation to include “manifestations of coercive and controlling behaviour” (Stark & Gruev-Vintilla, 2024). As with the majority of research conducted regarding intimate partner violence, the focus has been on male violence perpetrated against women. According to Stark (2007, 2012), in this gendered context, as much as 80% of victimized women have experienced coercive control.

Understood to be driven, aided and abetted by systemic gender oppression that disadvantages women in societies worldwide, coercive control has been principally conceptualized, investigated and understood as a crime typically perpetrated by cisgendered, heterosexual men against women (Fontes, 2015; Stark, 2007, 2023a, 2023b; Stark & Hester, 2019). Despite the absence of structural oppression of cis-heterosexual men, some studies have identified that cis-heterosexual men are also victimized through the perpetration of coercive control by a female partner (Hester et al, 2017). A growing body of evidence both in Brasil and worldwide, demonstrates that a significant number of LGBTI+ people, including people of GBTI+ masculinities are victims of intimate partner violence, including coercive control (Allen, 2015; Donovan & Hester, 2015; Donovan & Barnes, 2018; Finneran et al, 2012; Fontes, 2015; Frankland & Brown, 2013; Gillis, 2006; Luz & Goncalves, 2014; Messinger, 2017; Messinger & Guadalupe-Diaz, 2020; Raghavan et al, 2019; Reeves et al, 2023; Rolle et al, 2018; Souza, 2023; Souza et al, 2022; Stephenson & Finneran, 2017; Stark & Hester, 2019).

Context of Coercive Control

Theoretical frameworks for identifying domestic violence as a social problem, as opposed to a private matter, have predominantly been cis-normative, heteronormative, and feminist social-structural analyses (Donovan & Barnes, 2019). As with all domestic violence types, coercive control is largely understood to result from structural inequalities and gender-based oppression that disadvantage women and privilege men (Donovan & Barnes, 2019; Donovan & Hester, 2015; Stark, 2007; Stark & Hester, 2019). The coercive control of women is an overdetermined phenomenon as both coercion and control of women is deeply embedded in centuries old perspectives that view women as inferior to men; as property whether as wife, daughter, or as enslaved person; and as subservient to their husbands.

This cis-heteronormative framing of domestic violence, unfortunately, has further obscured the presence of the domestic violence in LGBT+ same-gender relationships and where visible, has led to more individualistic explanations for domestic violence victimization of LGBT+ people (Donovan & Barnes, 2019). Individual explanations for domestic violence of LGBT+ people have been developed and include the role of Minority Stress theory (Meyer, 2003), internalized homophobia, and alcohol and substance use problems (Badenes-Ribera et al, 2019; Donovan & Barnes, 2019; Klostermann et al, 2011; Stephenson & Finneran, 2017).

When examining power dynamics and tactics of abuse an intersectional analysis that includes the impact of structural discrimination and oppression of LGBT+ people must be considered (Stark & Hester, 2019). This wider ecological framing of domestic violence of LGBT+ people, Donovan and Barnes (2019) propose, justifies this type of violence in LGBT+ relationships as a social problem warranting state action and not simply an individual problem.

In framing coercive control, as a social problem resultant from structural factors, Donovan and Hester (2014) propose that patriarchal norms, the social context of heterosexual-headed family systems, and heteronormative gender norms and values impact and inform LGBT+ relationships and the perpetration of intimate partner violence (Stark & Hester, 2019). Recognizing the need for ongoing theory building, Donovan & Hester (2014), Donovan & Barnes (2019) and Stark & Hester (2019) have raised the need for further sociological, theoretical development that considers the impact of the structural and social embeddedness of cis-heteronormativity and homo-bi-transphobia at all levels of society on LGBT+ domestic violence, as well as  the help-seeking mechanisms for LGBT+ victims in the role of understanding LGBT+ coercive control.

Theory of Coercive Control: Progressive Entrapment & Coercive Demand

Our understanding of coercive control has it’s roots in the investigative research of U.S. Air Force social scientist, Albert Biderman, who in the 1950s interviewed hundreds of returning U.S. prisoners of war who had been coerced into making false confessions, some of whose peers defected to Communist China and North Korea (Hill, 2019). Biderman established that three elements were essential to implement coercion: induced dependency, debility, and dread (Biderman, 1957; Hill, 2019). To create these conditions, the captors used eight techniques: isolation, monopolization of perception, induced debility or exhaustion, cultivation of anxiety and despair, alternation of punishment and reward, demonstrations of omnipotence, degradation, and the enforcement of trivial demands (Biderman, 1957; Hill, 2019).

Biderman’s “Chart of Coercion” when viewed as a whole illuminates the interconnectedness of these varied tactics (Hill, 2019). While physical violence was not identified in this chart, the threat of violence played a role in inducing compliance of these captives. Domestic violence investigative journalist and author of See What You Made Me Do, Jess Hill (2019) opines that the Chinese captors did not want to “brutalize their prisoners, they wanted to control their hearts and minds” (p. 27).

These coercive tactics, which Amnesty International has identified as the universal tactics of torture in 1973, had been used on prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay until 2005 following a ban by the United States Congress (Hill, 2019). In the 1970s as women began pouring into the newly created shelter system of the United States, service providers began to hear similar sounding stories of tactics that echoed those found in Biderman’s Chart of Coercion. The methods identified by Amnesty International as the universal tactics of torture are the same tactics that are employed by cult leaders, pimps, human traffickers, hostage takers, and perpetrators of coercive control, essentially anyone “who trades in captivity” (Hill, 2019, p. 28).

Where the captives of the Chinese Communists were inherently entrapped and knew their captor as the enemy, victims of IPV coercive control are not typically initially entrapped (although some may be), nor do they have the advantage of knowing their love interest is the enemy (Herman, 1992; Hill, 2019). Towards this end, Harvard psychiatrist and trauma expert, Judith Herman (1992), would note, that the victim of coercive control is “taken prisoner gradually, by courtship” (p. 121).  While she may feel trapped by isolation, fear, control, and restricted resources, it is an abuse-induced feeling of love that will first bind her to her aggressor.

The objective of the perpetration of IPV coercive control is the progressive restriction of volition of the targeted victim, to deprive her of autonomy, independence, of liberty. The perpetrator seeks to supplant the victim’s will with his own, for the victim to exist in service of meeting his needs, not her own. The range of choices will, in time, be reduced to those to be found in the space between a rock and a hard place. To achieve this, a perpetrator of coercive control will employ controlling, coercive and entrapping behavioral tactics (Donovan & Hester, 2014; Dutton & Goodman, 2005; Fontes, 2015; Hamberger et al, 2017; Katz, 2022; Stark, 2007).

Essential components of coercive control in intimate partner violence include: 1) the establishment of an affective bond and of trust via grooming (Dutton & Goodman, 2005; Monckton-Smith, 2021; Wiener, 2017); 2) the perpetrator’s use of coercive behaviors deemed painful, extremely distressing, or frightening by the victim (Dutton & Goodman, 2005; Fontes, 2015; Katz, 2022; Monckton-Smith, 2021; Stark, 2007; Wiener, 2017); and 3) the establishment of credible threat (Dutton & Goodman, 2005; Fontes, 2015; Katz, 2022; Monckton-Smith, 2021; Stark, 2007; Wiener, 2017).   Supporting these observations, an analysis of the theoretical literature conducted by Hamberger et al (2017) concluded that despite different perspectives amongst theorists there appeared to be consensus for three defining components of coercive control. The essential elements found in their analysis included: “1) intentionality and motivation within the perpetrator to obtain control over the target, 2) perception of the behavior as negative by the target, and 3) the ability of the perpetrator to make a credible threat” (Hamberger et al, 2017, p.10).

In sequenced actions or ‘setting the stage’, there are four sets of perpetrator behaviors that contribute to the effectiveness of the coercion of a targeted victim: 1) facilitating attachment; 2) identifying, creating and exploiting the victim’s vulnerabilities; 3) wearing down a target’s resistance; and 4) creating the expectancy of negative consequences (Dutton & Goodman, 2005). These behaviors are paired with a credible threat which is something the victim finds extremely distressing, painful, or frightening (Dutton & Goodman, 2005; Katz, 2022; Stark, 2007). That punishment does not need to be delivered to have the desired impact, often the mere threat will suffice (Dutton & Goodman, 2005).  Furthermore, “a single threat may serve to control a target’s behavior for years” as long as they imagine it is ongoing (Dutton & Goodman, 2005, p. 751).

The combined and cumulative effect of progressive entrapment, being controlled, and living under the cloud of an ever present credible threat will, in time, produce the conditions for victims of coercive control that were identified by Albert Biderman in the U.S. prisoners of war: dependency, debility, and dread.

Tactics of Coercive Control

Perpetrators of coercive control employ multi-pronged strategies utilizing several tactics to control, coerce and entrap their victims. The ongoing, persistent nature of coercive control is often described as a campaign of violence, standing in contrast with the cycle of violence model first proposed by Lenore Walker in 1979. Rather than acute episodes of tension, coercive control victim-survivors describe ongoing, chronic tension (Stark, 2007, 2023a). Many of the tactics of coercive control are identified in the Duluth Power and Control Wheel, which has also been modified to address tactics used against LGBTI+ victims (Donovan & Hester, 2014; Stark, 2007)

The concept of coercive control is often erroneously conflated with psychological violence. The perpetrator of coercive control, rather, relies on an arsenal of tactics and strategies.  Tactics include those identified in the Lei Maria da Penha conceptualization of domestic violence: psychological, sexual, patrimonial, moral, and physical tactics of violence (Brasil, 2006; Katz, 2022; Stark, 2007, 2023b). Physical violence may not be always present and sometimes may be introduced later in the campaign of abuse (Hogan, 2022; Katz, 2022). Victim-survivors who successfully escape are likely to be further victimized with post-separation abuse tactics that include legal abuse, the weaponization of children, litigation abuse, stalking, and femicide (Fontes, 2015; Katz, 2022; Monckton-Smith, 2020, 2021; Stark, 2007, 2023a, 2023b).

Controlling tactics are regarded as a range of behaviors implemented with the intent to cause isolation, to induce dependency, to make subordinate, to regulate and manage everyday behavior, to restrict their access to resources, to exploit their resources often for personal gain, and restrict their capacity for autonomy and independence, monitoring and surveillance (Donovan & Hester, 2014; Katz, 2022; Stark, 2007, 2023a). Coercive behaviors are behaviors or patterns of behaviors that harm, punish, threaten, or frighten the victim and can include physical violence, the threat of physical violence, humiliation, denigration, insults, emotional and verbal abuse, the use of the silent treatment and other psychological violences (Donovan & Hester, 2014;Dutton & Goodman, 2005;  Katz, 2022;  Stark, 2007, 2023a).

Entrapping tactics are often subsumed under the concept of control but identified here in a separate category to highlight their specific role in entrapping victims in their own lives.  Love-like tactics serve to bond and bind victims (Pittman, 2017). These tactics include grooming (whirlwind romance, love-bombing), intermittent kindness, the strategic use of good times, and deceptive offers to change or improve upon something the victim finds disagreeable (Fontes, 2015; Katz, 2022; Wiener, 2017). Intermittent kindnesses are essential to reinforcing a trauma bond (Dutton & Painter, 1981). Love-bombing was added to the list of known tactics in the United Kingdom’s Coercive Control Law, S.76, in April, 2023 (Crown Prosecuting Service, 2023). Other entrapping tactics include reproductive coercion, career sabotage, relocation, amongst others.

Some tactics are stealthy in nature and may not be fully recognized as violence at the time, such as is the case with gaslighting (Petric, 2022). Gaslighting is a tactic of psychological violence meant to cause psychological erosion and make a victim doubt their own perception of reality and sanity (Petric, 2022). Extensive gaslighting is reported to lead to anxiety, depression, even psychosis (Petric, 2022). The silent treatment is understood as hostile emotional withdrawal and is the tactic most associated with inducing suicidal ideation in victims, according to research findings (Wolford-Clevenger et al, 2017).

Perpetrators identify, create and exploit personal and structural vulnerabilities (Donovan & Hester, 2014). LGBTI+ perpetrators will employ tactics utilized by heterosexual counterparts, in addition some are specific to LGBTI+ victimization (Donovan & Hester, 2014). Some perpetrators will make verbal attacks related to their target’s gender or sexual identity. Some may threaten to reveal their victim’s sexual orientation or HIV status to a third party.

In sum, perpetrators make use of a wide range of tactics, often tailored to the unique profile of the victim, their own skill set, and the demands of the task at hand. Perpetrators will identify, create and exploit both personal and structural vulnerabilities. When their control is threatened they are likely to escalate tactics of violence in an effort to reestablish dominance.