Transcription
[Music] I've been a social justice advocate my entire life. A child welfare worker, a college professor teaching social work, a therapist, and a researcher. Throughout my career, domestic abuse and child abuse have been the focus.
Beginning at the age of 19, volunteering for a local umbrella agency. My passion because someone I loved was abused as a child. I remember thinking when I learned at the age of 11, how could such a horrible problem even exist? I naively had the lofty dreams of eradicating the abuse of our most vulnerable children.
But there was a problem in the field that still persists today. The belief that abuse is something physical that a victim experiences. That the violent incident model is the only way we determine abuse. No bruise, no abuse. Case closed. We couldn't be more wrong. I couldn't have been more wrong.
Abuse must be redefined such that it includes these features, too. Psychological tactics, idealization, devaluation, grooming with lovebombing, gaslighting, manipulation, intimidation, and isolation, sexual abuse, financial and legal abuse, and where there are children, use of them as weapons.
Most think that physical abuse is so much worse. Physical abuse is horrifying. What we now know is that non-physical abuse may cause just as much suffering and the aims of the perpetrator are the same: control. Whether it's a punch in the face or months or years of diminishing behaviors, a perpetrator's intent is to systematically erode a victim's autonomy, their sense of self, their agency.
What links together these forms of abuse, physical and non-physical, is the exertion of power and control over another: coercive control. My life's mission is to shift the paradigm, to change the way society views and responds to abuse, to recognize that coercive control is the underpinning of it all.
Coercive control is relatively new to our vernacular, but it's been around since the beginning of time. Individuals and groups of individuals will exert their power over others using their vulnerabilities against them. After interviewing victims of abuse, feminist psychologists in the early 70s described their experiences as that of hostages with the physical violence when it occurred not the worst part. The worst part was the mindbending of their reality and the fear of what would come next.
Susan Shear, a social worker, coined the term coercive control. She was the first to acknowledge the intersection between domestic abuse and child abuse. Dr. Evan Stark propelled the term. His life's work was to show us that abuse is about coercion and control, domination. It is not a one-off incident. It is a pattern of behavior. It crosses time and space. It occurs within the relationship and outside of the relationship, robbing a victim of their freedom. It is a liberty crime.
This powerful understanding broadens our view of abuse, describing the experiences of victims and beyond that the behaviors of perpetrators. The term coercion comes from Albert Bman's research during the Korean War and his creation of the chart of coercion, explaining the coercive tactics used to torture prisoners of war with the intent to elicit false confessions. Prisoners would be worn down and eventually acquiesce and even align with their oppressors. Research affirms the human condition can easily be manipulated with so much at stake.
Those of us working in the field see these cultlike grooming factors used all the time with adult and child victims. It's no wonder the chart of coercion has been applied to explain the coercive techniques used by perpetrators of abuse with experts calling it intimate terrorism. Abusers don't show up with signs saying I am an abuser. And abuse often goes starts off covertly. It can go on for years unnoticed behind the veneer of what looks like a normal relationship undeterred by the systems that see abuse exclusively through the violent incident model.
I know this is a challenging subject, but here's the deal. We all know someone suffering abuse like breast cancer. It impacts so many but women suffer at a greater rate and what the adult victim experiences, the children experience also. Children living in these situations are suffering unacknowledged child abuse. The perpetrator the only individual at fault due to the social and political constructs of our society inclusive of patriarchal norms. Women and children are the most defenseless against and susceptible to a perpetrator exerting power and control over them.
Did you know a woman is safer in an alley than in her own home? 35% of women suffer violence in their lifetime. It begs the question, how many are suffering abuse that is not perceived as violent? And how many children are living in these situations? It's all coercive control.
Abuse is the number one killer for African-American women ages 15 to 35 and girls and young women between the ages of 16 to 24 at the greatest risk, suffering abuse at almost triple the national average.
I'd like to frame this for you and share a story of a client I'll call Marie. A mom of two children, she had been married to her husband over 20 years. They were high school sweethearts. From the outside looking in, they appeared happy and the perfect family. But when Marie would occasionally make plans to go out with friends or even a simple run, her husband would often sabotage it, telling her he missed her, pleading with her not to go or berate and gaslight her, calling her selfish, saying that her friends didn't really want to spend time with her.
If Marie did choose to follow through with her plans, he'd often stonewall her, not talk with her for days. He would mock Marie, her career, or her music choices, and then tell her she was too sensitive when she expressed how it made her feel. Marie was made to feel at fault for everything wrong that happened in the relationship, frequently apologizing for no reason. She noticed her husband was not depositing his fair share into the family account, but whenever she brought it up, it created conflict. Or he'd tell her she was bad at math, she got the numbers wrong, and worse, exaggerate and tell the children she had accused him of stealing something they would never believe about their father, making the children resent Marie. This was his pattern of behavior: idealization, devaluation.
Marie was worn down. She learned that saying nothing was better. The behavior started well before the marriage. But Marie, like so many of us, was never taught the red flags of an abusive relationship. She was young and in love and now married with a family. She persisted. She went to therapy. She kept working on herself in hopes that the relationship would improve. Sometimes it did improve. They even went to therapy together, walking in, holding hands, and his time and again manipulating the therapist to have sympathy for him, denying any wrongdoing, attacking Marie, reversing victim and offender. A tactic used by many abusers known as Darvo. Even the therapist gaslit Marie, failing to see the pattern of abuse.
When Marie caught her husband having an affair, she filed for divorce. And this is when the coercive control intensified, as it very often does for victims, now identified as post-separation abuse. Abusers, having lost control, will tighten their grip. Marie's husband accused her of having an affair and told everyone, including their children, she was crazy, unhinged. The Darvo tactic used again, and as is typical, the perpetrator's accusation is their confession. In the meantime, Marie was receiving hundreds of emails a month. Most of them threatening her with all that she would lose, that she would be sorry, that he would expose her as the horrible mother and person that she was. And then a few here and there begging her to come back to the marriage, telling Marie she was his soulmate. This time, Marie did not go back to him. She had before.
Even the most astute of us will miss the signs. The delay in recognition is not uncommon. Victims will spend years questioning their reality, gaslit into believing they are the problem. No one wants to believe the person they love has malicious intent. Victims become blind to the betrayal. Abusers show up as charlatans, a wolf in sheep's clothing. And like a cult and battered prisoners of war, victims fall in line. Our brain has a neurological response. Oxytocin, the cuddle hormone, and other hormones, often fortifying a trauma bond. It's all a trap. Victims are perfect prey.
Eventually, Marie's husband locked her out of the family home. She learned he had been recording her. Eight cameras throughout the house, stalking her for years, her car tracked, her phone and computer hacked. The divorce in process. He cut off all contributions to the family household and used family court to wield legal abuse, failing to follow through on court orders and then eventually attempting to take custody for Marie, using her years of therapy against her. Abusers will do these things all because a victim attempts to escape.
Research affirms these characterologically disordered individuals, call them what you may, coercive controllers, narcissistic abusers, perpetrators are drawn towards conflict, hellbent on revenge. Sadly, professionals fail to recognize the coercive control by the perpetrator, calling it, as in this case, Marie's attorney did, high conflict, or worse, ignoring it. The systems are often complicit. It is institutional betrayal.
And then Marie's worst nightmare when she learned that her husband had been indoctrinating her children for years, grooming them and gaslighting them into believing that she was the cheater, that she was unstable, that she could not be trusted, that she did not love her children implicitly. His intent to maliciously fracture their attachment to their protective parent. The psychological trauma to the developing brain unfathomable. The grief immeasurable. Marie and her children were suffering abuse for years. They didn't have bruising or scars. They had never been to the hospital. Marie was not considered a victim. And certainly her children were not considered victims.
Marie's story is not an anomaly. It's a story for every one of my clients. Coercive control, an epidemic hiding in plain sight, is a long-standing pattern to dominate another. It can be overt, such as with physical or sexual violence, verbal assaults, blocking a person's leeway from a room, but always it is coupled with insidious, nuanced, covert abuse. If committed by a stranger, it would be a crime.
Studies demonstrate that a pattern of coercive controlling behaviors increases the likelihood of femicide and filicide, the murder of our children. Those of us in the field call it death by a thousand paper cuts. And I dare say these cultlike grooming tactics are the same used by child sexual predators. Dr. Evan Stark put it this way: Coercive control is like carpenter ants devouring the foundation of a house. You don't even know it's happening until it's too late. What if our neighbor's house collapsed due to carpenter ants? Would we would we ask them, why did you stay? Yet, we ask victims all the time, why didn't you leave?
There are now more than a handful of states that have codified coercive control as a form of domestic abuse, leaving many still using the violent incident model in determining victims' protections. Some countries, far more advanced, have criminalized coercive control. For children, protections have historically been minimal. But the Violence Against Women's Act with Cadence Law gives us hope that professionals will be trained to understand perpetrators' tactics. And beyond that, their responsibility in protecting children from these perpetrators.
My life's work, I never could have imagined it would happen to me. And like with Marie, it would take me years before I had a moment of clarity. I was lecturing on domestic abuse to my college social work students as I have for over 20 years. On this particular day, when I looked at the whiteboard depicting the power and control wheel and the post-separation abuse wheel all at once, everything clicked. I was living with an individual using telltale abuse tactics to control me. I had experienced virtually all of it except the physical violence. Yet, even after this date, it would take me years to escape.
It's like this for Marie everywhere. Moments of clarity, then intermittent reinforcement. Victims will hold on to the breadcrumbs in hopes that things will get better. And in knowing that in escape, things will get worse. Perpetrators know what matters most. The home created, the family, and of course, the children. It's why Marie stayed. It's why I stayed.
The struggle against coercive control requires a multifaceted approach. Coercive control is structurally endemic. It crosses all spheres. It does not just occur in intimate relationships. It is embedded in our policies and in the governments that implement these policies. Coercive control breeds in the very systems we all rely on for protection. Perpetrators of abuse, no matter its form, must be held accountable. And victims of abuse, no matter its form, must be protected. Beyond that, we need systemic reforms and societal shifts that hold these systems accountable. Protecting our most vulnerable from abuse, something this 11-year-old dreamed of doing.
Finally, we must teach our young people about the red flags or perhaps the green flags in a relationship. What are the signs a relationship is healthy? As Maya Angelou told us, there is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside of you. By sharing my experiences and those of all Marie, I hope to illuminate that coercive control can happen to anyone. And by giving voice to those who cannot speak out, strive to prevent others from suffering in silence. Victim stories are heartbreaking, but we can prevent the trauma so our children do not carry it to the next generation. Thank you.