An Interview with Dr Emma Katz

In-depth insight into Dr Emma Katz's life and perspectives

Welcome

It’s great to be able to write to you again.

Thank you to all of you for your support. Since the last post, the number of subscribers has surged past 6,000. I am so grateful and excited to be able to reach out to such a large number of you compared to when we started.

I’m also delighted to be able to say something that I haven’t yet mentioned, which is that my Oxford University Press book Coercive Control in Children’s and Mother’s Lives is now available as an audiobook.

It’s available from Audible, and it’s just 1 credit for Audible subscribers.

The main focus of this post is to share a bit more about myself and my journey. I was fortunate in March last year to be able to do an interview for the U.K. coercive control online magazine CCChat. CCChat is the only online magazine available that specializes on coercive control and it’s free to read, so check it out!

I’m not sure how many people read my interview there, but it may not have been the number that now subscribe to this Substack — so I wanted to re-tell my journey for you, as a way of sharing a bit more about myself.

This isn’t a direct republication of that interview. It has been very much re-edited for conciseness and flow. I’ve also added a few new bits to the interview.

So here we go! Here is the new version of the interview.

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Can you tell me a bit about your early life?

I was born in London in the late 1980s. At the age of 2, I moved around 100 miles north to Bingham, a large village in Nottinghamshire, where I stayed until 2013. Nottinghamshire is in the middle of England, and it’s where my maternal family is from.

I grew up in a lot of poverty, especially in my teenage years. Job-wise, my father sold fresh flowers on a market stall, and my mother worked in a florist’s shop part time. So income was very limited. If household things broke, like the washing machine, there would be no money to repair them or replace them for a long time so we would just be without them.

The house itself was full of mold, with moisture running down the walls of my bedroom and black mold on many of the walls. It was freezing cold because we could barely afford to put the heating on. It was really hard.

What was your journey into education and into becoming Dr Emma Katz?

I had a non-standard journey into education because I’m a person who loves learning but hated schools.

Schools were not working for me as a child at all. I was not happy, not comfortable in schools. My attendance was always patchy and by the time I was 11, I got to the point where I did not want to be in school anymore, and I increasingly stopped going.

By the age of 12 I refused to go to school totally and educated myself at home. I’d always enjoyed history (as a little girl I’d watched the BBC’s famous 1995 serialization of Pride and Prejudice starring Colin Firth when it first aired); and so, for instance, at age 13 one thing I did was I bought a 700-page book on Queen Elizabeth the 1st and read it all the way through more than once. I learnt about politics and history and science through TV documentaries and period dramas and news shows; definitely not the typical programmes young teenagers were watching!

When I got to the age of 14, and I was still legally enrolled at my school, they were trying to think of what to do with me. They suggested I go to a Further Education college that offered GCSEs. [For people unfamiliar with these U.K. terms, GCSEs were the standard exams done in the summer when you are 16. FE colleges offer sub-degree level courses for 16–19 year olds along with some mature students.] I had almost completely missed school between the ages of 11 and 14, so I did very well to even start GCSEs, having missed all of that. I was probably the youngest learner at the college, as they only let under 16s study there in rare circumstances.

It wasn’t a very highly-regarded FE college to say the least; the buildings were about as run down as my house was, with stained carpets and holes in ceilings. And in terms of being in formal education again, I was still not exactly comfortable. But I found the environment a lot less constrained and restricted than the school environment and I could just about cope.

By the time I was 16 I had 5 GCSEs at the college, and then I stayed on and did A Levels which I did very well in. (Again, for those outside the U.K., A Levels were the standard academic qualifications you can take when you’re 18.) I’m not from an academic family: Neither of my parents were educated beyond the age of 15 or 16. However, I had a brilliant Sociology teacher called Nina who was very supportive of me. You know how they say there is often one person who believes in you and supports you and makes a big difference when you’re a young person? She did a lot of that for me.

I was very passionate about Sociology, and after my A Levels I was accepted to study BA Sociology at the University of Nottingham. I was one of their “widening participation” students. I didn’t go away to live on the University campus; I was still at home, 10 miles and two bus journeys away in Bingham. Nottingham is in the U.K.’s more elite band of universities, has a privileged intake, and a U.S.-style parkland campus with a boating lake, so it represented a contrast from my previous educational and home life.

…And despite the challenges, you clearly managed to cope in the end with this type of environment. How come you went forward in your studies — and what did it mean to you to be able to do so?

I enjoyed the degree, especially because, in most of the courses, there was an option I liked in the course essay choices, usually a feminist one! Thanks to this I was able to develop a particular package of knowledge relevant to me personally and to my own interests.

As I was coming to the end of my degree, I didn't feel ready to leave university, so I stayed at the University of Nottingham, and I did a Masters in Sociological Research Methods with an eye to then going on to do a PhD.

I was very grateful to get national funding for my PhD, through the Economic and Social Research Council (which is the U.K.’s public body for funding social research), not least because it was a step out of poverty. One of the very first things I did with the money was to buy a fridge for my home, which is not the usual thing that people do with PhD funding! We’d been fridge-less for over a year: The fridge was one of those things that had broken down and we just could not replace. I was still living in Bingham throughout the PhD, which of course was on the topic of domestic violence and abuse.

As I was coming to the end of the PhD in 2013 (full-time PhD study is only 3/4 years in the U.K.), I got my first academic job. That was when I left Bingham and moved away to a different city, and that was the start of my academic career.

That brings us nicely to the present. So, now that your academic career is in full flow, what would you say is at the heart of your research?

Well in recent years I’ve been focusing on coercive control, particularly how it affects children and their mothers, and children’s relationships with their mothers. My PhD, called “Surviving Together; Domestic Violence and Mother-Child Relationships”, was submitted to the University of Nottingham in 2014.

This 100,000 word document, which was based on interviews I did with mothers and children, then eventually became the basis of my book Coercive Control in Children’s and Mothers’ Lives which was taken up by Oxford University Press and published in 2022.

What was it like to get your first book out?

The book took years to write. It was far from simply a cut-and-paste from my PhD — I used lots of data from my interviews that had not been in the PhD, and the analysis I weaved around it was new too. Most of the chapters are set out differently in the book.

The way a book has to be written is completely different to a PhD, so it was a lot of work — but it was worth it in the end. Most importantly, many survivors have found the book useful. One survivor even did a lovely social media post of her copy of my book covered in highlighter pen!

Was there a particular idea or thought that inspires you to do what you do as a researcher?

A lot of research is about gap-spotting – i.e. spotting an aspect of something that nobody has studied before – which is fine. However, I have always been interested in shifting the whole way that domestic abuse is understood, because there were elements of existing understandings which I found unsatisfactory.

One of the first things I noticed and found incomplete was the way that children were portrayed in relation to domestic abuse. At the moment, people usually think that domestic abuse doesn’t affect the children at all, or that children are really only affected by the witnessing of the violence; or perhaps they might even think that children have been harmed by a divorce or a separation.

Furthermore, I noticed that there was a particular common question in domestic violence research which went “did the children witness or were the children exposed to the violence?” For about 30 years that was pretty much the only question that we were asking in relation to children and domestic abuse: “Were they witnessing or being exposed to the violence?”

Trying to go beyond that question – part of which was questioning what “violence” refers to, i.e. rejecting the tendency to just think of physical acts of hitting etc. – was key to me being a domestic abuse researcher. I wanted not just to add new knowledge but also to help improve the whole way that domestic abuse was approached and understood. Making the knowledge better gives us more power to comprehend what is happening and why it is harmful and wrong.

So it was the question of how children were not just “witnessing” or “being exposed to” domestic violence that was at the heart of your journey?

Yes, what I realized was that children were being affected by every aspect of the coercive control, not just violence. If the father was isolating their mother then the children were very isolated too, living in the same isolated and lonely world as their mother. If the mother couldn’t take them here or couldn’t take them there because of the backlash from the abusive father, then the children probably weren’t going here or there.

The children couldn’t see their friends because the mother would be accused of having an affair with the friend’s father or the children couldn’t have their friends come over to visit their home because the father might behave very badly while the friends were there, so the children would end up hardly seeing their friends.

When the abuser was micro-controlling the mother’s time and movement – where she could go or what she could do – then she wasn’t able to spend the time she wanted to spend with the children. Abusers very often micro-control the parenting of the victim-survivor parent, telling them how to parent the children, not letting them parent in the loving, affectionate, boundaried, appropriate ways that they want to.

So the way that abusive men mess with parenting boundaries is a major issue for you?

Again, yes very much so. One strategy that is common among some domestic violence perpetrators is encouraging a home environment where “anything goes” with the children: They are the “fun Dad”, so that the children see the reasonable mother as a killjoy by contrast. Some abusers also, on the other hand, coerce the victim-survivor mother to be much too harsh and punishing with the children. The abuser will rarely allow the victim-survivor mother to parent in the appropriate, boundaried or loving way that she wants to, and certainly not to the extent that she wants to.

What about financial control of mothers — surely that’s another closely-related part of how abusers ruin children’s lives as a by-product of abusing mothers?

Absolutely. If the mother is being kept terribly short of money either pre- or post- separation, and this is a big issue, then of course that is massively affecting the children. They are growing up in poverty because of the abuser’s choice to keep the other parent massively short of money.

It can take many forms, whether that’s through taking their wages and then giving them a small allowance, or coercing the victim-survivor into being the one who pays for everything, or getting them into debt, or whether it’s through financially draining them through years and years of post-separation abuse, forcing them to pay for lawyers over and over and over again, or making them respond as a litigant in person to court case after court case so that they can’t even hold down a full-time job or perhaps even a part-time job because of the time demands of responding to the legal cases.

You shine a light on post-separation abuse too, don’t you?

That’s right. I really want to help change the conversation around post-separation abuse as well, because I think so often we’ve had the misconceived idea that if you “just leave”, then that will be the end of the abuse. People have the idea that the abuse is caused by the relationship and so when the relationship is over, then the abuse will be over.

We hear this when we talk about toxic relationships, turbulent relationships, a bad dynamic between a couple, marriage problems, but actually the abuse isn’t being caused by the relationship; it’s being caused by the perpetrator’s attitudes, beliefs, mindset, and their belief that they are entitled to abuse, that they are entitled to control, that they are entitled to punish people for not constantly obeying them. 

That is the driver of the perpetrator’s abuse and, of course, that is not going to magically disappear on the day that someone leaves them. It’s going to remain within the perpetrator, so they’re going to keep trying to abuse post-separation and there are hundreds of different ways they can do that. Our society makes it all too easy for them to do that because we put very few meaningful barriers in their way and without meaningful barriers, they’ll carry on abusing.

They might possibly start abusing another person and largely stop abusing their former victim, although some perpetrators never completely give that up. They often still devote efforts to abusing an ex-partner even if they’ve largely moved on to abusing someone else in a new relationship.

I was wondering… If you could name for me one other type of behavioral violation that you emphasize as being at the heart of domestic violence – perhaps ones that people do not automatically connect to the issue – what would it be?

Stalking is a big one. Whenever we hear about stalking, we usually think it’s a stranger or perhaps it’s a work colleague but at least half of all stalkers are current or former partners. Stalking is often massively connected to domestic abuse, but when have you ever heard of anyone asking, “how did your mother being stalked affect you as a child?” We never have those conversations, I very rarely see it.

Yet when parents are being stalked, the child is being stalked as well because they’re living with the stalked parent so, again, this is another thing we haven’t been exploring. If the perpetrator/father is stalking the mother, pre- or post-separation, he is also stalking the children. The children are severely impacted by that. So, there’s so many different ways that the abuser’s coercive control is affecting the children.

What about those that say that separation itself is the problem — that, in their view, families are better off sticking together, especially as they are stuck on the idea that “kids need fathers”?

Well, children thrive with happy boundaried carers, whether there is one of them, two of them, or whatever number. But they do not thrive in a situation where one parent is controlling and abusing the other. So, if divorce and separation lead to the outcome of the child having one happy, boundaried, safe parent, then that would be a really good thing for children.

Coming towards the end of this interview, we have discussed so much about your research, let’s have a quick word about what you’re doing on places such as Substack. Today, it has to be said you’re one of that rare breed of academics with an influencer-level of social media presence across multiple platforms. What are the values and principles that shape how you interact with others?

I aim for my virtual world to be a little oasis of calm in a stormy sea, which people find reassuring and validating. That’s on purpose. I try to not to get into arguments with people if I disagree with them, I usually prefer to say nothing than to say something, because people ultimately want to say what they want to say in that space, and they don’t always welcome having an exchange with you and I’m not sure how productive or helpful that is.

So, I try to just stick to what I want to say rather than being perturbed about what anyone else is saying and if people come into my space and start being rude in it, I usually just block them straight away. If I see people being rude anywhere I block them immediately, so they don’t get the opportunity to come over and be rude in my space! I’m quite a fan of the block function because I want to maintain a calm and safe space for myself and for the people who are interacting in that space, many, many of whom are survivors. I think this works well.

A strength of mine is that I know what I think and I’m just happy to share that. I’m not too perturbed about what other people are thinking or what other people are saying. For example, if people are having a little bit of a dig at me, I’m not terribly perturbed by it because I feel quite strong in my position and I know that if I’m taking a position, it’s for a good reason. 

I feel that it’s really important to be a responsible, trauma informed person, both online and offline. When I interact with anyone, I try to be very trauma-informed and try to be very supportive, very empathetic, and non-judgmental.

It’s really important to people who have a conversation with you to leave that conversation not feeling in any way diminished or dismissed or unheard, but instead feeling heard and valued and understood.

Do you have a final message? What would you say to mainstream policy-makers and the media for whom DV is just one issue among many?

Domestic violence is not a hurricane or force of nature that’s difficult for countries to do anything about. It’s people’s choices to abuse, so we can put meaningful barriers in their way, to hinder abusers from making those choices. Why aren’t we doing that?

Fundamentally, we need to start talking about domestic abusers rather than domestic abuse. It is these abusers who are costing the taxpayers – you and me – tons of money with their actions. It’s not “domestic abuse” that is costing billions every year to the taxpayer, it is domestic abusers. It’s the actual people carrying out the abuse and this is one reason why it’s everyone’s business, why it’s the community’s business, why it’s the neighbors’ business, the employers’ business. It is the business of everyone in society to tell the abusers “we demand that you stop”. So often, we’re focused on telling the victims and survivors to do something to change the situation; “let’s tell you to leave” etc.

That’s certainly highly significant — obviously it’s vitally important that survivors get the support they need to be free of abusers, and at the moment societies usually fail in this area. Much more needs to be done here. However, the primary long-term problem is societies are not preventing people from becoming abusers in the first place, and we are doing very little to stop them once they start abusing.

Much more work needs to be done in preventing people actually developing the attitudes, mindsets and beliefs that lead to people abusing, and then we’re doing almost nothing to put meaningful barriers and consequences in the way of the existing abusers. Ultimately, we really need to focus more efforts around that.

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Goodbye for now

In the next post, we will return to the family courts with the second post in my current series, which will focus on how mothers were falsely described in the family courts as “alienators”.

In the meantime, I hope that you have enjoyed reading this interview, and learning a bit more about my life and perspectives.

Thank you so much for your support.

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