10 Reasons Why a Coercively Controlling Man is an Unfit Father

Men who perpetrate domestic abuse against a child's mother are, in fact, grossly inadequate, unfit fathers

Dr Emma Katz is widely regarded as the world’s foremost academic expert in her area of study — how coercive control impacts on children and young people.

Emma specializes in the harms caused by father-perpetrated coercive control, as well as children’s and mothers’ resistance and recovery. Read more in her book Coercive Control in Mothers’ and Children’s Lives, published by Oxford University Press.

Welcome

Thank you for reading this post — and for your support for Decoding Coercive Control with Dr Emma Katz.

The reason I write is always to provide you with high-quality, research-based information on coercive control in an accessible form — and this post aims to counter some of the key mistaken beliefs about men who perpetrate coercive control-based domestic violence and abuse.

What are these mistaken beliefs? They center around the myth that a coercively controlling man who perpetrates domestic violence and abuse might actually be a fit father.

This myth is put forward in various ways, including:

“His treatment of his wife is irrelevant to his role as a father”

“The domestic abuse is historic, it has no relevance to his contact with his children today”

“Men can be bad partners but good fathers”

“He’s not mistreating the children, that’s just his parenting style”

Sound familiar?

Sadly, domestic abuse victim-survivor mothers who are trying to protect their children from harm report that they are told this, or variations of this, over and over again.

As I discussed in my previous post Why Abusive Men Don’t Love Their Children, there is huge resistance in our societies to recognising that men who perpetrate domestic abuse against a child’s mother are, in fact, grossly inadequate, unfit fathers.

So, in this post, I spell out the 10 reasons why a coercively controlling man is an unfit father.

Aren’t there domestically abusive mothers too?

Given that my research focuses on the harms caused by male domestic abusers, I am sometimes asked “what about male victims?” or told “women can be abusive too”.

It’s actually a mistake to think my research doesn’t cover male victims — it does. My research highlights the experiences of the sons of abusive fathers, just as much as it does the daughters of these fathers.

But when people say “what about men”, they usually mean adult men who’ve experienced abuse from intimate partners. Adult male victims are important, and when genuine male victims contact me in good faith, I give them the same supportive responses that I give to adult female victims. I also support men and women who were abused by their mothers in childhood.

However, adult female victims and their children are my focus as a researcher and as an expert in my field. They are my area of specialism.

It makes sense for me to focus on adult female and child victims-survivors and adult male perpetrators, because male perpetrated coercive control is by far the most common kind of coercive control in families.

Take, for example, data on post-separation coercive control in the United States, collected by Johnson and colleagues. They found that around one in five women in their dataset experienced coercive controlling violence from ex-husbands, while only around one in twenty men in their dataset experienced coercive controlling violence from ex-wives.

In the UK, conviction statistics on coercive control reveal that around 97% of those convicted for this crime are men.

In Australia, research into cases where a parent killed their child or children in contexts of domestic violence found that, in 97% of the cases, the primary perpetrator of intimate partner violence was male.

I therefore make no apologies for focusing on abusive fathers.

10 reasons why a coercively controlling man is an unfit father

Here are 10 reasons why a coercively controlling man is an unfit father:

1. Having power and control over his family means far more to him than the children’s welfare.

   Being coercively controlling is a core feature of his personality and character. He didn’t suddenly become coercively controlling the day he met his partner or ex-partner. His need to dominate, control, exert pressure and exploit is a core part of him. His belief that he is entitled to always get what he wants is firmly fixed in his mind, and will stay fixed in his mind even if he and his children’s mother separated years ago. This is why post-separation domestic abuse is so commonly carried out for years by these fathers.

   All this makes him unfit as a parent: His primary goal will always be to control his partner/ex-partner and family and to punish them for perceived disobedience, not to advance the well-being of his family.

2. He attacks one of the most vitally important things in the children’s lives: their mother.

   He has spent a huge amount of energy over a long period of time harming his children’s mother. This shows that he doesn’t care about the best interests of his children.

   Mothers are vitally important to their children’s well-being. By attacking his child’s mother in multiple ways – including psychologically attacking her, weakening her economic position, socially isolating her, and seriously undermining her health – he is wilfully harming a person who is crucial to his child’s welfare, development and happiness.

3. The “good times” are manipulation or a means to an end.

   In order to effectively use coercive control, he has to include some “good times” of “fun” and “affection”. “Good times” give false hope that things are not so bad, and thereby reduce his victims’ motivation to escape. “Good times” give the false impression that he is a good guy, when nothing could be further from the truth.

   “Good times” can be used as a reward for compliance. For instance, he may reward a child with treats and better treatment if they are willing to hurt other members of the family emotionally or physically.

   He may also use “good times” as a means to manipulate. For example, he may treat a child with hostility or pay no attention to them most of the time, but then occasionally give them a burst of seemingly positive attention. This often makes the child crave these “good times” and feel desperate for the next “good time” to come around, making the child terribly easy for him to manipulate.

   “Good times” are therefore often not what they seem.

4. He is teaching the children appalling lessons in life.

   He is teaching them that the person who is willing to throw his weight around most, to act scary, to be ruthless, and to bully and intimidate others is the person who “wins” and holds power. He is teaching them to always try to get on the good side of people who are behaving badly, rather than standing up to them or walking away from them. He is teaching them to ignore their instincts and push down their sense of fear or unease.

   He is teaching them that their mothers’ needs and their own needs are irrelevant and that neither they nor their mother should ever put themselves first. He is teaching them, through his terrible treatment of their mother, that their mother is bad and that she deserves hatred, blame and contempt.

   What kind of lives are children at risk of having after being taught these lessons by their father? There is no limit to the destruction that his lessons could potentially have on the children.

5. He doesn’t show any genuine remorse for times when he has traumatized the children, upset them, broken his promises to them and let them down.

   If he was genuinely remorseful about any of this, he wouldn’t have done it over and and over again.

   When his children show signs of fear and dislike towards him, such as crying when they have to see him and hating having to spend time with him, he continues to impose his presence on the children regardless. He doesn’t respect the children’s feelings or wishes.

   When the children walk on eggshells around him, anxiously trying to judge what mood he’s in so they can stay on his “good side”, he does nothing to take the pressure off them and allow them to relax.

   On the contrary, the fact that children are anxiously walking on eggshells constantly trying to cater to his needs probably makes him really happy.

6. His parenting comes from a place of selfishness and self-centredness.

   Any feelings or behaviors that he shows that seem like love for the children will be highly conditional. He may enjoy spending time with his children, but only when they remind him of himself or do his bidding without question. He may want to turn his children into the kind of people he thinks they should be, rather than supporting them to develop into the kind of person who they really are.

   He may seem proud of them when they win, such as in sports, but he may be incapable of teaching them how to cope with losing in a constructive way. He may make a big show of being proud of them in public to develop his image as a “good father” but be a nightmare for the children to live with at home.

   He may get mad at his children when they struggle with things that it’s really common for children of their ages to struggle with. He may deny his children’s medical needs or their neurodivergence because he sees these things as inconvenient or embarrassing for him.

   The children soon get the message that their whole self – messy, growing, mistake-making, fragile, brave, spontaneous, curious, angry, hopeful, in need of nurturing – is unwelcome to him. Instead, they have to perform a distorted version of themselves to be safe around him.

7. He divides the family from each other, weakening their bonds to increase his own power.

   A coercively controlling father wants to be the only one with power in the family. Loving relationships between other family members are powerful things, and he sees them as a threat. He will therefore encourage the children to dislike their mother and encourage the siblings to dislike each other.

   He’ll do this by stirring up resentment and jealousy between family members. Among his children, he will often single one sibling out for better treatment, creating huge tensions between the siblings.

   He might target his children’s mother-child relationships by giving the children tons of treats and allowing them to do anything they want (such as no bedtime, eating junk all day, don’t bother with homework etc.). This behavior makes the children mad at their mother for the attempts she makes to keep them in a safe, healthy routine.

   With all these actions, he is once again attacking and destroying one of the most vital things in a child’s life: loving, secure family relationships.

8. He can’t meet the children’s developmental needs.

   There are many things that children need from their parents that he cannot provide them with.

   As they grow up, children need to be able to safely challenge their parents and assert some independence from them: he won’t let them do that because he can’t cope with being challenged by those he thinks he’s entitled to control.

   Children need their parents to model healthy conflict resolution so they can learn how to do this themselves: he can’t model this for them because “winning” a conflict is more important to him than anything.

   Children need parents to model healthy boundary setting so they can learn how to set and enforce their own boundaries: he can’t offer them this because he sees it as his right to push and steamroller over peoples’ boundaries.

   Children need to feel a growing sense of control over their lives: he can’t offer them that. Instead, he frequently makes them feel helpless, powerless and unheard.

   Finally, children need to learn about responsibility and accountability. They need support from their parents to figure out when they are responsible for something and when it’s someone else who is responsible: He can’t help them with this, because his own ideas about responsibility and accountability are so badly warped. He frequently blames other people for things that he is actually responsible for, and places burdens of responsibility on people that aren’t theirs to bear. As a 14-year-old girl who I interviewed for a domestic violence research study once said to me: “He [my father] blamed us [my mum, my sister and me] for everything that went wrong in his life…He told me he was on antidepressants because I wasn’t seeing him often enough...I felt very small and bad”.

9. He impoverishes the children by impoverishing their mother.

   Coercively controlling men usually cause vast amounts of economic damage to their current and ex-partners. By doing this, they are depriving their children of a great deal of economic security and, quite possibly, condemning their children to poverty.

   It would be impossible to list all the economic harms these fathers tend to cause for their children’s mothers, as there are so many of them, but some very common harmful acts include: He stops her from working, damaging the development of her career; he gives her a tiny allowance which she has to feed and clothe the children with; he expects her to pay for everything so she never gets the opportunity to build up her savings; he damages her credit rating; he drains her financial resources by taking her to court over and over again; he drags out their divorce; he forces her to become homeless, he ruins or steals her property; he tangles up her finances by preventing her from selling property or assets that are in both their names; he refuses to pay loan repayments that are in both their names; he fails to pay child support.

   There is no way that he can carry out these kinds of acts of economic abuse against his child’s mother without harming his children. By draining that money away from his children’s mother, he is preventing her from being able to use that money to support their children and invest in their children’s futures.

10. He creates instability in the children’s lives.

    It is his abusive behavior which causes the mother to have to try to escape him several times, and which ultimately may lead to permanent separation or divorce. This causes upheaval in the children’s lives that he is responsible for.

    If the mother has to flee to a refuge or shelter and take the children with her, then the children suddenly lose all their familiar surroundings and routines and have to cope in a new, challenging environment.

    If the mother and children have to keep moving towns to escape him stalking them, then the children have to live like fugitives, always looking over their shoulders. They have to keep losing their friends and changing schools to try to stay safe from him.

    If the children are happily and safely living with their mother, but he forces them into regular contact with him, then their peace is torn to shreds and a significant part of their lives becomes taken up with trying to survive being in his presence.

Plus, one extra reason

Here is one extra reason, looking at this from a slightly different point of view:

• He is a liar and a manipulator, and this often prevents his children from getting the help they need.

  By lying about and denying his abuse, and by lying about the character and actions of his partner/ex-partner, he interferes with the ability of professionals to properly assess the situation. If he were truthful, professionals might properly safeguard his children and promote the children’s real best interests, but his lies and manipulations often stop this from happening.

  Furthermore, his lies and manipulations in his community (painting himself as the good guy and his partner/ex-partner as a bad person) often prevent people such as the children’s neighbors or teachers from understanding the real situation that the children are stuck in.

  This cuts off vital supports that the children and mother might otherwise receive from community members.

Reflecting back on the starting statements

Having explored the reasons why coercively controlling men are unfit fathers, let us again reflect on the statements we began the article with. These statements are commonly said to coercive control victim-survivor mothers:

“His treatment of his wife is irrelevant to his role as a father”

“The domestic abuse is historic, it has no relevance to his contact with his children today”

“Men can be bad partners but good fathers”

“He’s not mistreating the children, that’s just his parenting style”

I hope it’s very clear now why these statements are incorrect when it comes to coercive control.

You might have noticed that my 10 reasons didn’t directly cover the harms that coercively controlling fathers cause when they physically attack or sexually assault the children’s mother, or when they physically or sexually abuse the children directly.

Many coercively controlling fathers carry out one or more of these despicable crimes.

However, this article, I wanted to demonstrate the many ways that a coercively controlling father is an unfit father even if he doesn’t commit these crimes.

Who’s fault is it? The fault belongs to the abusive father

The children of coercively controlling fathers don’t deserve any of this. None of this is their fault. They are victims and survivors in their own right.

Nor is any of this the fault of their victim-survivor mother, because she had far, far less power than their abusive father did. He could have chosen to stop the harms he was causing at any time — the power was in his hands to make that choice.

By contrast, the father had pushed the mother into a position of powerlessness and severely limited options. The mother had to calculate every decision she made from this extremely tough, restricted position.

The abusive father never saw, and cannot see, the children clearly for who they really are. His way of seeing things is too distorted by his overblown sense of entitlement and his thirst for power, control and domination. The same applies to the mother — he never saw her clearly. He was never right about who she was.

What the children and the victim-survivor mother deserve

What the children deserve (whether they are young or are grown up), and what the victim-survivor mother deserves, is:

• safety,

• peace,

• freedom,

• relaxation,

• security,

• healthy relationships,

• good options open to them.

Goodbye for now

Thank you for your continued support for Decoding Coercive Control with Dr Emma Katz. I look forward to writing my next post on this site very soon.

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