Can Anything Persuade Abusive Men to Give Up Coercive Control?
The reality everyone needs to know about abusive men and promises to change
Dr Emma Katz is widely regarded as one the world’s foremost academic experts 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 detailed insights into coercive control, written in the most accessible way possible — and like all posts you receive from me, this post aims to expand our current thinking, taking you the reader to new levels of awareness.
This post will be especially useful to you if you’ve ever dealt with an abusive man who made promises to change. This could be something you’ve experienced professionally or personally. After you have finished this post, you will have a new way of thinking about what real change would actually look like in abusive men, why abusive men say they will change, and how we would be able to judge if change is really happening.
There are two kinds of change that an abusive man might engage with.
There is real change, and then there is the false, self-serving kind of change that is designed to get them out of trouble and let them carry on with their abuse.
1. The false, self-serving kind of change
We see this first kind of “change” when they snarl at and bully victims-survivors one minute, then turn on the charm for outsiders such as friends and neighbors the next minute. This can make victims-survivors feel as though they must be the problem, because their abusive partner is nice to everyone but them. But what is really happening is that the abuser is fake with everyone but them. The victim-survivor is the only one seeing the abuser’s real self.
We also see this first kind of self-serving change when the abusive man goes into “nice” mode for a while as a tactic of manipulation. This often happens after a period of particularly severe abuse that is so over the line that it causes the victim-survivor to start thinking about escaping the abuser by leaving the relationship.
The abusive man knows that a switch into “niceness” and making some promises of change will stall the victim’s-survivor’s momentum towards escape and keep her entrapped with him. His change into niceness doesn’t last a minute longer than he thinks is necessary. As soon as he is confident that he has the victim-survivor entrapped again, the period of “niceness” ends.
2. Real change
The second kind of change is real change that comes from a deep transformation in the way the abuser sees himself and others, and his permanent adoption of a totally different way of behaving.
Real change is rare. It is very hard to achieve. Most abusers never achieve this. Some are incapable of achieving it.
It’s necessary to ask, then, what makes abusive men’s promises of change false and what it would take for abusive men to make real change?