Coercively Controlling Fathers: What Scientific Research Tells Us
Perpetration of child abuse, post-separation abuse, and impacts on children and mothers
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
What do scientific research studies tell us about the fathering of domestically abusive and coercively controlling men, both before and after women separate from them?
Research studies can be incredibly helpful: they can help us to separate hunches and feelings from reality, and can show us if our experiences are unusual and rare, or are common and shared with many other people.
Members of the public don’t have easy access to the world of scientific research. However, the good thing is that, through this Substack, not only can you be informed on what research finds about the fathering of coercive control perpetrators, I’ve used my skills as an academic to do the hard work of summarizing it all for you.
Below, I bring you the key findings from more than 20 scientific studies, presented in an easy-to-read way.
I hope this post will be useful to you. If you think it might be helpful, at your own discretion you could consider showing this post to people in your life who don’t have a lot of knowledge about how coercive control affects children. It could help them to understand more, if they are open to learning.
Please keep in mind as you read that abuse is never the victim’s fault. Perpetrators deliberately put victims in situations where they have no good choices and every option comes with a lot of risks. It is perpetrators, not victims, who we must hold accountable.
Furthermore, nobody “chooses” to have a child with an abuser. Abusers are deceptive about who they really are and what they really want. Victim-survivor mothers should never be blamed because their child’s father is abusive. Abusers choose to abuse and the guilt for that sits with them only.
Rather than blaming victims-survivors, societies need to start putting real, effective roadblocks in the way of abusers, cutting off their opportunities to continue getting away with their abuse year after year.
Public lack of awareness about domestically abusive men as fathers
Listening to the way that the media and professionals often talk about coercively controlling, domestically abusive fathers, you’d think they were great fathers who added something precious and valuable to children’s lives. (I’m talking about coercively controlling fathers here because “almost all those convicted for controlling or coercive behaviour in England and Wales in the year ending March 2023 were male: 97.7%”).
In the awful but all too frequent cases where domestically abusive men have killed their children, media reports tend to include quotes from the man’s community saying what a loving father and nice guy he was.
The idea that the killer father’s “good” public persona was a deceptive mask that he used to get away with the years of abuse that led up his murders doesn’t seem to compute with most people.
The stubborn myth continues that domestically abusive men are good fathers — and it can also be seen in family court outcomes.
Meier and colleagues’ (2020) research found that U.S. family courts were giving custody of children to abusive fathers in a disturbing number of cases, as though these fathers were capable of raising children well.
A key fact established by Meier and colleagues was that even if the family court “credited” (believed) a mother’s allegation that a father has been domestically violent, custody was still given to the father in 14% of those cases. That’s about 1 in 7 cases examined in this research study where the court shockingly decided: “let’s take custody from the victim-survivor mother and give it to the domestically violent father, that’s the best outcome”.
Court outcomes tended to get worse when the mother said that the father had committed both domestic violence and child abuse, and even worse if the father claimed to the court that the mother was engaging in “parental alienation”. When this happened, family courts appeared to view the mother’s reports of the father’s abusiveness with even greater hostility and suspicion. Around 60% of mothers in these circumstances were losing custody of their children to fathers.
You can read the full findings of Meier and colleagues’ research for yourself here.
The idea that the perpetrator’s “good” public persona was a deceptive mask doesn’t seem to compute with most people. … Meier’s research found that even if the family court “credits” (believes) a mother’s allegation that a father has been domestically violent, custody was still given to the father in 14% of cases.
Clearly, violent and abusive fathers are sometimes seen as worthy of custody of children. Some professionals obviously believe that they are good enough fathers even though they perpetrate domestic violence.
On the other hand, court outcomes also show that many professionals think it is more likely that a mother is fabricating allegations of child abuse than that a father has abused both his children and his partner. What are they basing this on? Is it rare, or is it common, for a man to perpetrate both domestic abuse and child abuse?
We will see that domestic abuse perpetration overlaps strongly with child abuse. We will also see that coercive control is especially harmful to children, over and above physical violence.
(We are about to dive into the research. Below, I’ve linked to the studies so you can find them yourselves, if you want to read them in full. In most cases there is a PDF open to the public. In the few cases where this is not the case, you could try emailing the author as most authors are happy to forward a copy of their work to interested readers.)
The attitudes of domestically abusive fathers in co-parenting relationships
First of all, research suggests that domestically abusive and coercively controlling fathers have different attitudes and behaviors as ex-partners and as parents compared to non-abusive fathers.