Coercive Control, Family Court and Systemic and Family Therapy: A Match Made in Hell

Why some therapies cause harm in contexts of domestic violence and abuse

Dr Emma Katz is widely regarded as one the world’s foremost academic experts in her area of research — 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

Family courts may expect victims-survivors of abuse to engage in therapy with the aim of creating friendlier relationships with their abuser. This article provides an explanation of why this happens and the harms it can cause, focusing on a number of key points:

• How common domestic violence, coercive control and child abuse are, and why this means that every professional will be frequently working with perpetrators and victims-survivors whether they realize it or not.

• How professionals who are working in sectors that are vital to victim-survivor safety are typically under-trained on abuse. This includes professionals working in the mental health field, in social work and in family courts. Victims-survivors may therefore find themselves surrounded by professionals who are not equipped to recognize the danger they are in or the tactics that their abuser is using.

• Why systemic and family therapy is inappropriate and likely to be very harmful in situations where one party is a coercive control perpetrator.

• The key characteristics and behaviors of coercive control perpetrators.

• The damage that can be caused when family courts want adult and child victims-survivors to have therapy to “move on” from the abuse they’re experiencing and to create “friendlier” family relationships with their abuser.

• Why family courts, and therapists working with people who are in family court, need to be able to recognize and respond effectively when abuse perpetrators are carrying out post-separation abuse and are still causing harm. Practical resources to assist with this are included at the end of this article.

This article includes a detailed real life example of a teenage girl, “Sophie”. It will explain how:

• Sophie was made to live with her abusive father by the family court against her wishes after her parents separated.

• At the court’s direction, psychologists and psychiatrists attempted to get Sophie and her mother “Katherine” to “move on” from Sophie’s father’s abuse and accept him playing a major role in their lives.

• Sophie was not allowed to live at her mother’s house at all unless she and her mother could convince the therapists that they no longer had negative feelings about the father’s violence and ongoing abuse.

This article is free to read and written for everyone, so please share it far and wide. Post it on social media and consider sending it to people in your life to help improve everyone’s awareness of these issues.

While writing this, I consulted with Dr Saira Khan, an HCPC registered chartered counselling psychologist who is licensed in the U.K. Her feedback and insights were very helpful as I drafted this article. I also thank Dr Elizabeth Dalgarno for her feedback on this article while it was being drafted.

How many couples and families does domestic violence, coercive control and child abuse affect?

Most people think positively about relationships and families. We tend to see crime as something that happens outside of the family, not within it. Abuse and violence within families is typically seen as an unusual occurrence, not a frequent one. But the facts don’t back this up.

1 in 4 women and 1 in 7 men in the United States experience physical violence from a partner. 1 in 5 men in the U.S. admit to attacking their spouse or partner. Almost 1 in 3 male university students say they would have sexual intercourse with a woman against her will if they wouldn’t have to face any consequences and no one would find out. Many men translate this willingness to rape into action in their intimate relationships: 1 in 10 women in the U.S. have been raped by an intimate partner.

81% of women and 35% of men in the U.S. who experience rape, stalking or physical violence from an intimate partner reported significant short-term or long-term impacts, such as injuries or symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

1 in 5 children in the UK live with an adult perpetrating domestic abuse. 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 13 boys in the U.S. experience child abuse during their childhood. Where there is child abuse in a family, domestic violence is likely to also be happening. Research suggests that the two may have a co-occurrence rate of between 30–60%.

1 in 9 girls and 1 in 20 boys in the U.S. experience child sexual abuse or assault during their childhood. Research indicates that one third (34%) of the perpetrators of child sexual abuse are the child’s own family members and almost all child sexual abuse perpetrators are people that the child knows, not strangers. In 88% of the sexual abuse claims that CPS substantiates or finds supporting evidence for, the perpetrator is male. Step-fathers and fathers are therefore among some of the most frequent perpetrators of child sexual abuse.

Australian research found that around 1 in 10 men has sexually offended against children. The same research found that, compared to men with no sexual feelings for or offending against children, men with sexual feelings about children and previous offending against children were more likely to:

• work with children

• be married

• have higher levels of social support

• earn higher incomes

In other words, a financially successful and well-liked husband is more likely to sexually offend against children (quite possibly his own children) than a lower income single man with few friends.

When it comes to coercive control, the grim picture continues. Analysis of the annual Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) by Myhill found that, out of those who had been in one abusive relationship since the age of 16, a quarter of them (24%) could be classified as having been a victim of coercive control. The CSEW, which is completed by a representative sample of population of England and Wales, found that 1 in 5 adults had experienced domestic abuse since age 16. It is therefore possible that around 1 in 20 adults in the general population have experienced coercive control.

When this CSEW finding was broken down into male/female categories, the differences were stark: 30% of the women but only 6% of the men were classified as having been a victim of coercive control. In order to be classified as having been a victim of coercive control, survey respondents needed to have reported to the survey that their partner had done both of the following: “Repeatedly belittled you to the extent that you felt worthless” and “frightened you, by threatening to hurt you or someone close to you.” Myhill (2015, p. 362) concluded from this that “respondents must have experienced abuse that was ongoing, denigrating, perceived as threatening, and had caused a degree of fear.”

Reflections on how commonly abuse happens in couples and families

The family is therefore the place where a considerable amount of child sexual abuse perpetration happens, as well as child abuse, domestic violence, coercive control and intimate partner rape. What is more, there is a vast number of perpetrators. In the United States alone, 1 in 5 men admitting to physically attacking their spouse or partner. This adds up to approximately 26 million adult men admitting to domestic violence perpetration in the U.S.

Domestic violence, rape perpetrated by a partner, coercive control and child abuse should not be seen as issues that only happen to an unfortunate few. Rather, we are all meeting victims-survivors and perpetrators all the time as we go about our work and our lives. If you know 5 men, chances are one of them has attacked his female partner or will do so in future. That’s the statistical reality.

People sometimes suggest that a victim-survivor may be partly responsible for somehow bringing the perpetrator’s actions on themselves. This is inaccurate and offensive. Only the perpetrator is responsible for their abusive, criminal actions and the problems that these actions cause. Adult and child victims-survivors are simply trying their best to survive in a situation that they never consented to be in; a situation where they are being chronically physically, sexually and/or emotionally attacked.

Lack of adequate training among professionals

Given the above, you would think that all professions who are very likely to come into contact with abuse victims needing help would be highly trained to understand abuse and be able to offer effective aid. For example, you would think that medical doctors, social workers, teachers, police officers, providers of psychological and psychiatric support, and those who work in criminal and family courts, would all be devoting significant resources to identifying perpetrators and supporting victims-survivors to be safe and free.

Yet we know that this isn’t the case.

Social work

A BBC investigation found more than a third of accredited university social work courses in England are not giving specific training on coercive control. As for those who said they did offer training, it could be for as little as one hour.

One social worker speaking to the investigation said that: ‘“I remember having a one-hour lecture on domestic abuse, I had pretty much no mention of coercive control during my training. It didn’t prepare us for what was coming. You feel like you're thrown into the deep end.” The investigation noted that: “After five years in the job, [this social worker] estimates about 90% of her caseload is linked to psychological and controlling abuse, yet her university course barely mentioned it.”’

Family courts

Parents may turn to private family law when they have separated and there are obstacles to being able to informally organize contact with the children. In the UK, research found that 62% of family court cases featured allegations of domestic abuse, with women about 3 times more likely than men to be the victims. In the U.S., domestic violence allegations may be present in 75% of contested custody cases.

You might be thinking “An allegation is just an allegation. What if it’s false? What if the real number of cases featuring domestic abuse is actually way lower than 62%?” Fortunately, there is information that can help us work this out. Canadian research found that intentionally false allegations of child abuse in custody cases occurred at a rate of 12%. In other words, the great majority of allegations – 88% – were found to be true. False allegations were more often made by the noncustodial parent (most often the father). Custodial parents (most often mothers) and children were least likely to make false allegations.

There is therefore a good basis for assuming that the majority of family court cases do involve families where there has been domestic abuse by one of the parents that has negatively impacted children. In the majority of cases, the perpetrator of abuse will be the father.

So are family courts effectively keeping children and victim-survivor parents safe from domestic abuse? No, they are not.

In fact, in the UK, the Domestic Abuse Commissioner has commented on the critical Ministry of Justice report Assessing Risk of Harm to Children and Parents in Private Law Children Cases, and affirmed that it

“made clear that … systemic failings [… are] undermining the ability of the courts to properly assess risk to victims, survivors and children from domestic abuse.”

Similarly, the UK-based campaign group Right to Equality has identified key failings in judges’ knowledge:

“Unfortunately, many judges lack proper training on how to handle cases involving domestic abuse and trauma. … they may not know how to assess whether a perpetrator poses an ongoing risk or danger to their victim or other family members.”

UK-based researchers have also identified failings. Walsh highlights that:

“Recent research on safeguarding in contact centres has highlighted that only 11% of staff had received specialist domestic abuse training in the past 12 months, despite contact centres being increasingly utilized as a key protective measure in high-risk domestic abuse cases.”

Meanwhile, it was found in UK research by Dalgarno and colleagues that of the 45 family court cases containing domestic abuse allegations (10 of which also included child sexual abuse allegations), 43/45 cases resulted in direct contact between the children and their alleged abuser.

Internationally, the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls has identified major concerns about the ways that abuse victims are treated in family courts. You can read the report here. It was presented to the 53rd session of the Human Rights Council in 2023.

Psychologists

The situation appears similar for those providing psychological services. I consulted with Dr Saira Khan, an HCPC registered chartered counselling psychologist who is licenced in the UK while writing this article. She completed a Doctorate in Psychology in the last few years. She confirmed to me that there was nothing about domestic abuse or coercive control in her curriculum and that this is not embedded in training programmes for counselling or clinical psychologists in the UK.

Therefore most psychologists source their own learning on the subject, which may not be of the highest standards, or they learn “on the job”. This leads to a lack of consensus and the absence of a unified approach when working with individuals and families. Also, interventions could be implemented that may not be supported by victims-survivors and may unfairly place the responsibility on the victim-survivor. In reality, this means that when people impacted by domestic violence and coercive control reach out for psychological support, professionals may not have the understanding that is needed to work with them effectively.

Reflections on the lack of professional training

As we have seen, domestic violence and abuse, child abuse (including child sexual abuse), intimate partner rape and coercive control are all very common. In a room of 30 people (especially if these people are women and girls), there will be several victims-survivors. Yet the professionals most likely to be working in areas vital to victim safety are chronically under-trained and may be lacking the knowledge they need to work effectively with victims. I’m not suggesting that better training would be a magic solution to all issues relating to how professionals engage with victims-survivors, but it is one important piece of the puzzle.

The incompatibility between the dynamics created by coercive control and the approaches used in systemic and family therapy

I now want to turn my attention to the issue raised in the title of this article. There are two common circumstances where an abuse victim-survivor might end up in systemic or family therapy with their abuser.

The first circumstance is when the victim-survivor privately seeks out therapy. Perhaps the victim-survivor wants the family to go to therapy in the hope that it will be a solution to their partner’s abusive behavior and the impacts that this is having on them all. This is concerning, because as will be discussed in more detail below, being in therapy with an abuser who seeks control and domination over you is risky at best and very harmful at worst.

The second circumstance is even more concerning. This is when family court puts adult and child victims in positions where they have to go to therapy with their abuser in order to satisfy their family court judge.

This is where psychological and psychiatric professionals and the family court can come together in particularly harmful ways. Families who are in therapy due to family court may be required to take part in systemic or family therapy.

• Systemic therapy focuses on the interactions and relationships between groups to help them address any problems and to move on. These groups can be couples, families or other kinds of groups, such as groups of work colleagues or groups of friends. The principle of systemic therapy is that if part of the system is broken, then the whole system is broken.

• Family therapy is one type of systemic therapy. The idea is to help families solve their problems. Family therapy views the family as a system, meaning that changes in one member can affect the whole family, so everyone needs to be involved. Each family member is expected to take responsibility for their own actions and work towards improving their interactions with the others. The goal is ultimately for better relationships to develop between family members.

So, is systemic or family therapy useful? It may work very well for certain families. These include families where:

• All family members are contributing to the difficulties faced by the family;

• Family members are repeating patterns of harmful behavior unintentionally and without malice;

• All family members recognize the human rights and personhood of the other family members;

• All family members who are undergoing therapy are willing to be held accountable for any hurt they are causing and have a genuine willingness to change and grow.

Why systemic and family therapy is NOT appropriate in families where there has been coercive control

Are such therapies useful when someone in the family is a coercive controller?

No — because coercively controlling abusers are known for:

• Malicious pursuit of domination and control (including after their partner has separated from them);

• Belief that their abusive behavior is justified;

• Behavior patterns that are dangerous and destructive, which can include rape, strangulation, making death threats, persistently intimidating behavior that creates an environment of fear, severe emotional/psychological abuse and economic abuse;

• Use of manipulation tactics, including manipulating the professionals involved with their case;

• Tendency to harmfully involve their children in their abuse (including continuing to harm their children after their partner has separated from them); and

• Strong resistance to change.

Spotlight on perpetrators’ resistance to change

Perpetrators’ resistance to change and their insistence on continuing their abuse after the victim-survivor separates from them are important to bear in mind. They mean that, in many cases, even direct inventions to try to stop the abuse have inadequate results.

Research into men who had completed a high-quality domestic violence perpetrator program in the UK found that the program made almost no difference to perpetrators’ use of economic abuse: Perpetrators continued to use economic abuse as a tactic of coercive control after completing the program.

At the end of the program, half of the men were still monitoring and stalking their partners/ex-partners and insulting their partners/ex-partners and making them feel bad about themselves.

The men’s abusive tactic of involving their children in the monitoring and stalking of their mother mostly continued (see also this research). The men’s blaming of the mother for the children’s behavior and criticizing her mothering had also seen only a modest reduction by the end of the program.

Lack of recognition of human rights and personhood

Perpetrators also typically lack the willingness to recognize or respect the personhood of the rest of their family. With their actions, they deliberately and continually violate the basic human rights of family members. Research studies report perpetrators’ inability to recognize their child as a person in their own right:

“Partner-abusive fathers often show limited ability to take the child’s perspective and may use their awareness of their children’s vulnerable emotions to punish or intimidate them” (Mohaupt et al, 2020, p. 863).

“[Domestically abusive fathers] are dismissive of children’s fear of them — perceiving it to be an idea placed in the child’s head by their mother, for whom they feel intense resentment. …Domestically abusive fathers are dismissive of the idea of their children being individuals in their own right, capable of formulating and expressing their own view, or indeed dismissive of the idea that a child’s views are relevant to the issue of contact” (Mackay, 2018, p. 148).

Adult and child victims-survivors continuing to engage with perpetrators by engaging in therapy with them therefore carries a very high risk of harm.

So, why would a family court judge ever recommend an adult or a child victim-survivor go into systemic or family therapy with such a harmful kind of abuser?

Why do family courts want victims-survivors to have systemic/family therapy with perpetrators?

To understand why family courts want this, we have to understand the ways that family courts have worked over the last several decades, as well as the reasons behind the thinking of therapists who do court-ordered work.

Family courts want to determine where a child lives and when a child spends time with each parent. There is a presumption in favor of contact. The presumption may be formally stated in law and/or might be informally embedded in family court culture. In other words, family courts expect and want there to be contact with both parents.

The way that family courts currently approach the management of child custody was decided at a time where protecting children from child abuse or from domestic violence was not one of main functions of private family law. And sadly protecting victims of domestic violence and abuse is STILL NOT SEEN as a key goal of private family law now — despite research showing that domestic violence and abuse is present in more than half of families going through family court.

When victim-survivor parents (most often mothers) raise the other parent’s long standing abusive behavior patterns with family courts, there is no guarantee that they will be believed. Research by Meier and colleagues in the U.S. found that mothers’ reports of domestic violence are only credited by family courts in 45% of cases. Yet even if the abuse is credited, that doesn’t mean it will be seen as an important factor in custody arrangements. Ignoring how common post-separation abuse is, family courts often label domestic violence and abuse as “historic” and “irrelevant” to child contact.

In practice, family courts may dismiss domestic violence and abuse as an issue between the parents and state that it has nothing to do with the children — ignoring that children are profoundly harmed by domestic violence and abuse and ignoring the high co-occurrence rate with child abuse. How can this happen? Well as we saw earlier in this article, those working in family courts may receive very inadequate levels of training on domestic violence and abuse and coercive control.

Preference for the so-called “friendly parent”

Furthermore, family courts in many countries have a formal or informal preference for the “friendly parent” — that is, the parent who says they are happy to share their child with the other parent, and who promotes the idea of the child having a positive relationship with both parents.

Clearly, being the “friendly parent” may not be an option for the mother. The adult victim-survivor of coercive control (usually the mother) may know that it is too dangerous and destructive for their children to have post-separation contact with their perpetrator parent (usually the father), putting her at a disadvantage in family courts.

However, for the abusive father, being seen as the friendly parent is easy: All he needs to do is lie and say that he’s happy to promote the children having a positive relationship with their mother (even though he may have always actively undermined the children’s relationship with their mother).

The abusive father can play the admirable dad in family court. He knows that, when he fails to follow through after the court proceedings have finished, the mother is likely to be too short of money, too fearful of his reprisals and too traumatized to take him back to court.

Why perpetrators’ agendas and family courts’ agendas are similar

The perpetrator is also advantaged in family courts by the fact that what he wants and what they want are similar. Family courts want fathers to have continued access to, and authority over, their children. The perpetrator may want continued access to the children as a means to carry out post-separation abuse.

Research by Clements and colleagues with U.S. victim-survivor mothers who were separated from perpetrators found that:

“88% reported that their abusers had used their children as a tactic to control, harm or monitor them within the prior six months. Abusers used the women’s children to stay in their lives (76%), intimidate them (72%), keep track of them (72%), harass them (71%), or frighten them (69%). Many also tried to turn the children against them (62%).”

Coercively controlling fathers do not want to be cut off from contact with their children, as that would mean losing these very effective avenues for continuing their abuse of their ex-partner.

Victims-survivors are expected to become friendlier towards their abuser

Meanwhile, victim-survivor mothers who express concern to family courts about the safety of their child having contact with the other parent are often labelled in court as “high conflict”, “alienating” or other similar terms. These terms misleadingly make the protective, coercive control-victim mother seem like a difficult, argumentative, misguided, or harmful person. (Child victims-survivors who don’t want contact with their abusive parent are also likely to be viewed by family courts in a negative light.)

Labelled by family courts as “high conflict”, “alienating”, “unfriendly” or as refusing contact without justification, adult and/or child victims-survivors may feel compelled to sit in therapy sessions with the abuser. Victims-survivors may agree to do what perpetrators or family courts want regarding therapy and contact, but it is highly questionable that they are doing so out of their own free will. This is because refusal to comply can prompt family courts to take more drastic steps, such as putting the child in the custody of the abusive parent.

Meier and colleagues’ research indicates the severe losses mothers may face if they are seen by family courts as being opposed to their child’s relationship with their father. The research showed that in U.S. cases where family courts found the father was a domestic violence perpetrator but also found the mother to be “alienating”, mothers lost custody to fathers at a rate of 29%. This rose to 60% in cases where the mother’s domestic violence claim was not credited in court but the father’s alienation claim was.

The unwritten goal of court-ordered therapy is often for victims-survivors to change their attitudes towards the perpetrator. Their fear is frequently seen in this process as something that they need to “overcome” now that the abuse is “over”. (Post-separation abuse is not considered.) The overriding aim in family courts is that the father can maintain his relationships with the children:

“the unrelenting influence of deeply embedded beliefs regarding the preservation or promotion of relationships with fathers continues to have the effect of marginalising issues of safeguarding, including children’s voiced experiences of violence, in all but the most exceptional of cases. Safeguarding concerns in respect of domestic violence and child abuse were persistently overshadowed by a dominant presumption of the overall benefits of contact with fathers.” (Macdonald, 2017)

“despite evidence of domestic violence and child welfare concerns, contact with fathers was viewed as desirable and inevitable in the vast majority of cases.” (Macdonald, 2016)

Court-ordered therapy is not aimed at helping adult and child victims-survivors to be free from the perpetrator parent and their abuse. Instead, it is typically about them becoming friendlier towards him.

Let’s remember though how far away perpetrating fathers are from being safe fathers. As is emphasized by those whose research focuses on perpetrators and the risks they pose (e.g., Humphreys and colleagues, 2019; Kelly and Westmarland, 2015; Harne, 2011), these are fathers who:

• Very likely psychologically, emotionally and verbally abuse the family;

• Very likely terrorize the family by smashing things, punching and kicking walls and furniture, making threats to kill, and pushing and slapping family members while expecting their continual obedience;

• May keep the family short of money and assets in order to control them;

• May rape, sexually abuse, beat up and strangle family members; and

• May ultimately murder them in the context of separation, divorce and family court proceedings.

Example: Katherine and Sophie

Content warning: upsetting material. Feel free to skip ahead to the subheading ‘What needs to change?’

This is what happened to one mother, Katherine, and her daughter Sophie. (Names have been changed.) The account of their experiences appears in research by Mercer and Drew (see chapter 4). Sophie was 10 when her mother Katherine ended her marriage to Sophie’s father, who Katherine says was coercively controlling, economically abusive, physically violent and had subjected her (Katherine) to rape. Katherine also reported that he subjected their daughter Sophie to physical abuse. He used post-separation abuse after Katherine left him. Sophie was clear that she wanted to live with her mother and did not want to see her father.

Katherine raised her ex’s abuse in family court and was met with the counterclaim that she was “alienating” her daughter. Court hearings dragged on. Now in her early teens, Sophie was told to undergo “flooding” therapy. Sophie was removed from Katherine for ten days and placed with her father with the aim of making her “love her father a bit more and her mother a bit less”. Sophie returned to her mother stating that she never wanted to see her father again.

A few months later, Sophie was removed from Katherine’s care and placed with her father in order to try to combat Katherine’s so called “parental alienation”. The social worker who removed Sophie told Katherine that he had seen evidence that she, Katherine, had been committing “child abuse” — the supposed “evidence” being that Sophie had asked the social worker to leave her toy bunny on Katherine’s bed as a gesture of love and care. The social worker explained that this amounted to child abuse as “no child should have to worry about their parents”. Katherine was permitted to see her daughter in a supervised capacity only, and it was determined that the contact would be stopped if she showed any signs of emotion. (The contact supervisor reported back to the court on this.)

After more family court hearings, a children’s mental health center was commissioned to “treat” the family, at a cost of £20,000, so that a shared care arrangement could be re-established. Katherine was advised by her legal representative to embrace this treatment at the mental health center, as the professionals there would recognize that her and her daughter were domestic violence and coercive control victims.

What happened at the mental health center?

Rather than recognizing the domestic violence and coercive control, the mental health center therapists – a psychologist and a psychiatrist – persistently minimized it as “mistakes” that the father had made in “the past”. The therapists made it clear to Katherine that if she didn’t agree to Sophie living with her father half the time (i.e. 50/50 contact), she wouldn’t be permitted to see her daughter unsupervised until she was 16. Sophie was also told that supervised contact between herself and her mother would be suspended unless she stopped saying that she wanted to live with her mother.

On one occasion, during a joint session where both parents were present, Katherine’s ex-husband told the psychiatrist that he was unhappy that Katherine was not making eye contact with him. He said that he felt this was alienating behavior, and if this wasn’t corrected then he felt Sophie could not return to her mother’s care. The center immediately agreed with the father and did not try to understand why Katherine felt intimidated.

Katherine recorded her sessions at the center and made a legal request (a Subject Access Request) to access the notes that the center had made about the sessions. Extracts from Katherine’s recordings and notes appear in Mercer and Drew’s book, as do some of the center’s summaries of sessions. I will share some highlights from this material below. The full material is available in chapter 4 of Mercer and Drew’s book.

Content warning: the transcripts and descriptions of sessions below may be particularly upsetting. Feel free to skip ahead to the subheading ‘What needs to change?’

Session 1

Description of session 1 based on Katherine’s notes: “The first session at the centre consisted of the psychiatrist, psychologist, and Katherine. After the session, Katherine was distressed and on returning home made some quick notes about her experience. Katherine remembers that questions were fired at her by the psychiatrist and before she was able to answer fully, another question was asked. The psychiatrist’s main focus was on Katherine not being able to say anything positive about her ex-husband. He focused on Katherine being unable to normalize the abusive behavior that Sophie had witnessed and personally encountered. Katherine remembers trying to describe some of the coercive and controlling behavior, but the therapists told her that it did not matter what had happened in the past as the judge had ordered the centre to try to find a shared care solution. Katherine was told that she was at risk of only ever seeing Sophie in supervised contact if she did not change her opinion of her ex-husband. Katherine was told that she needed to take responsibility for the alienation of Sophie and was told that even crying, as a response to the abuse, was emotionally abusive to Sophie. Katherine describes feeling like the session was a game of cat and mouse and she was being hunted by the psychiatrist, it felt psychologically unsafe, and she felt extremely vulnerable and frightened.”

Summary of session 1 by the therapist:

“Katherine was very tearful throughout the session and said that she feels that she was never heard and listened to. She feels a victim in the situation and said that her ex-husband has manipulated the whole situation to get Sophie away from her. Even though the psychiatrist and I asked her to think about maybe one positive thing she may be able to say about her ex-husband, she could not think of anything positive to say about him. She kept on talking about how controlling he is and the fact that Sophie doesn’t like him not because of her but because of the things he has done to her. She was not able to take any responsibility whatsoever for her own actions and ways in which she may have influenced Sophie.”

Session 2

Transcript of Katherine’s recording:

THERAPIST: So we have to work with what the judge has said. Now we know that things have happened in the past, I’m not denying that, and Sophie did say yesterday that “My dad twisted my ankle and has also slapped me.

KATHERINE: Yes, he’d held her down on the bed and held her round her neck. I mean the findings against him, the physical and…

THERAPIST: Yes, absolutely but there is a sense of you either hold onto that and have her be very angry about that and be punitive about that which is not going to be helpful for Sophie or you can help Sophie to kind of move on and say, “Look…” What I was saying to Sophie is “I hear what you’re saying, what I’m hearing is also that your father is regretting having done that and he understands that that’s not right and he won’t do that again”. I think that’s the message that needs to be given to Sophie now.

KATHERINE: So on Friday she said to me I don’t want to see my daddy, I know I have to but daddy hurts me.

THERAPIST: The answer to that is, if you want to help move on is to say, “Daddy has hurt you in the past, but he won’t do it anymore and he hasn’t done it for a while.” … Even physical hurting I would say, “Look, he lost control, I’m really sorry, he’s really sorry, give him a chance to apologise and repair”, and that was months ago, you know, and the fact that you’re holding on to that isn’t allowing Sophie to move on either.

In the sessions that followed, the therapist told Katherine that she was “making mountains out of little things” and that she had too much “animosity” towards her former husband. The therapist implied that one example of her inappropriate animosity was that she had called the police to seek help. The therapist told Katherine that the fact that both Katherine and Sophie used the same word - “controlling” - to describe Sophie’s father indicated that Katherine had carried out parental alienation and brainwashing on Sophie. The therapist also said that “maybe he wasn’t a good husband” but he is a “good dad” and a “lovely dad”.

Session 9

Transcript of Katherine’s recording:

THERAPIST: Well, I think what’s sad is the fact that you can’t see your responsibility for [Sophie’s] sadness. I find that very concerning. You can’t see any responsibility for her situation, because this is down to you. Her situation is down to you, Katherine, and I’m sorry. It’s not down to me. It’s not down to the judge. It’s not down to the social worker. It’s not down to [your ex-husband]. It’s down to how you presented the father to her. [Your ex-husband] has made certain mistakes and he’s apologised for them, but the rest is you.

KATHERINE: He hasn’t apologised for them. I’m sorry but he hasn’t. I’m being honest with you now, he hasn’t apologised to me, not me.

THERAPIST: He said he had indeed because I asked him. He said that he had apologised to you.

KATHERINE: He never apologised.

THERAPIST: Well, maybe that’s something he should do, but I do think that this is a situation where she [Sophie] is adamant that she doesn’t want to stay with her father, and that whole situation when she was taken away from you, was caused by you. It wasn’t caused by anyone else.

At the time of Katherine participating in the research, her daughter Sophie was close to 16 years old, still living with her father, and continuing to say that she wanted to live with Katherine.

Reflections on the example

As we can see from this disturbing example, the therapists’ goal appeared to be to transform Katherine and Sophie’s feelings about the abuse they had suffered from Sophie’s father. This abuse included the father holding the Sophie round the neck, holding her down on a bed, slapping her and twisting her ankle, as well as his rape and violence towards Katherine.

Both mother and child were expected to “move on” from the abuse and to be happy for Sophie to live with her father 50% of the time. Katherine was told by the therapist to ignore her daughter saying in the present “he hurts me”, as the court and the therapist had decided that the abuse was in the past. Katherine was blamed for “brainwashing” and “alienating” Sophie into an ongoing dislike of her father, and was persistently told to take responsibility for Sophie’s dislike of her father and all the events that followed.

What was happening here was that classic principles and techniques of systemic and family therapy were applied to Katherine and Sophie. The court’s and the therapist’s priorities were to “help” Katherine and Sophie to “move on” from “the past”, and to create more harmonious relationships between family members. The father was already assumed to have “moved on”, and now the mother and daughter were expected to do so as well.

Notice how the assumption that the father’s abuse had stopped and that he wouldn’t be abusive again was out of line with the father’s actual present day behavior. The father was holding his teenage daughter at his house against her stated wishes: a clear indication that being in control was still more important to him than sparing his daughter psychological distress. The high sense of entitlement that drives domestic violence and abuse was also evident in the father’s requirement that the mother make eye contact with him in therapy despite his violent abuse of her.

Notice also that the father’s physical violence was minimized as a loss of control by the therapist — “he lost control”. Research into coercive control tells us, on the contrary, that coercive controllers don’t lose control; they take control. They use violence or threats of violence strategically to scare people into complying with them.

Extreme double standards were applied to the mother and father in the example. The father could still be called a “lovely dad” after he had physically attacked and raped the child’s mother, physically abused the child, and made the child live with him against her will. Meanwhile the mother was seen as an abusive mother who brought all her troubles on herself because she had cried after being abused, called the police for help, didn’t want to make eye contact with her abuser, didn’t have nice things to say about her abuser, and wanted to respect her daughter’s wishes about not seeing her father. Furthermore, the father was not viewed as having abused Sophie in any way that was relevant to contact when he had slapped her, held her down on the bed and held her round her neck and twisted her ankle. Meanwhile the mother was viewed as having abused Sophie in a way that was highly relevant to contact because Sophie had asked to leave her toy bunny on mother’s bed as a gesture of care during hard times and “no child should have to worry about their parents”.

Katherine and Sophie could not change their feelings via the therapy sessions. Sophie was therefore not allowed to return to her mother’s home, where she had always wanted to live. Only by “aging out” of the family court system after several years could she leave her father’s house.

What needs to change?

• Victim-survivors should receive front-loaded assessments/screening for domestic violence, coercive control and other forms of abuse. If it is found by professionals with expertise in these areas that there is abuse, systemic or family therapy with a perpetrator should be deemed unsafe and not recommended as this may be coercive, traumatizing, and may prevent healing.

• All therapists should have a unified approach based on victim-survivor-informed and evidence-based research when working with victims-survivors of domestic violence and coercive control. This should be built into therapeutic training. This approach should not be based on the assumption of neutrality, as neutrality is not appropriate in situations of abuse.

• All experts who work with victims should be regulated by law as recommended by the WHO, with clear pathways for complaints for victims-survivors to seek redress should anything go wrong.

Reflections for therapists

Therapists who carry out family court work will often believe themselves to be “neutral peacemakers” and will see their “neutrality” and emphasis on “peace” in a positive light. However, as Archbishop Desmond Tutu famously said:

“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.” - Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Or, to use a metaphor more suited to this topic, you cannot hope to broker “peace” and “cooperation” between a tiger and a deer.

Practical resources for therapists

Therapists reading this may want to screen their clients more rigorously for coercive control-based domestic violence and abuse. Here are some tools that might help with this that therapists could use at their own discretion:

Check if your client is a coercive control victim-survivor: Use the Checklist of Controlling Behaviors (CCB) by Lehmann and colleagues. The checklist is at the end of this article.

Check if your client is a victim of legal abuse: Legal abuse is a type of coercive control that involves the perpetrator using the legal system against the victims-survivors. Use the Legal Abuse Scale (LAS) by Gutowski and Goodman here. The scale is available in both English and Spanish.

Check if a perpetrator has actually stopped their abusive behavior, or is still continuing: You can ask the victim-survivor the survey questions that were used in this research to get information about whether the abuse is continuing.

Learn more about the impacts of coercive control on children and about how children tend to feel and respond in these situations: Read this briefing from Research in Practice. Also consider reading any or all of these three books:

1. Children’s Perspectives on Domestic Violence

2. Children of Coercive Control

3. Coercive Control in Children’s and Mothers’ Lives

Victims-survivors might want to share some of these resources with their therapists, if their therapists seem open to learning. A caveat: that there is no guarantee that doing so would have a positive impact.

Reflections for victims-survivors

I hope this article has been useful and validating for victims-survivors and those who care about them. This article has covered upsetting content, so if you feel affected by it please be kind to yourself. If you can and if you think it would be helpful, consider taking some time out for self care and support.

The counselling psychologist Dr Saira Khan who I consulted with when writing this article wanted to leave this message for readers: “If you have a choice when working with a therapist or psychologist, before hiring them ask them for their work experience and training, and/or their views and experience on working with domestic violence and coercive control. A qualified and caring professional will be happy to answer these questions and never make someone feel their questions are unreasonable.”

Finally, I want to restate for all readers: abuse is never the abuse victim’s-survivor’s fault. Victims-survivors deserve to be treated with respect.

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.

If you liked this post, you might also like

By clicking the ❤️ button below, you help more people to discover Decoding Coercive Control with Dr Emma Katz on Substack