Decoding Coercive Control: New Year Reflections

Reflections at the end of the old year and the beginning of a new one

Welcome

As we end one year and begin a new one, I felt it would be appropriate to write a brief note to say how grateful I am to communicate with such a large number of people about such an important topic.

From just a few hundred readers at the beginning just over a year ago, “Decoding Coercive Control with Dr Emma Katz” now goes out to close to 6,000 subscribers. I hope it will grow more in the years to come.

Recently, I haven’t been in very good health. Apologies to any readers who’ve contacted me by email or social media that I haven’t been able to respond to.

I’m glad to have written a number of articles this year that I think have had particularly good responses. These include a trio (here, here and here) on “Explaining Coercive Control to People Who Don’t Quite Get It”, and also a number of articles I’ve written on abusive men, including on:

• how male abusers describe the advantages they get

• how they exploit what it means to be a good mother

• how they are dangerous during pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding

and, most recently,

• the reasons why abuse is functional and practical for the male abuser of women and children

What about male victims?

Given the focus on male abusers, I am sometimes asked “what about male victims?”. This is something I considered in my book, and now is another good time to return to the theme.

Why do I focus much of my attention specifically on abusive men? Partly, like all researchers I have a specific focus, and my focus is on adult female victims and children.

There is also the point, mentioned in my book, about the difference in scale.

The starting point is the data, which indicate that coercive control-based domestic violence is mainly perpetrated by males.

For coercive control, there is much evidence to suggest that females constitute only a small percentage of perpetrators. I provide this evidence in my book, but one small example is 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.

The difference is partly due to cultural and structural gender inequalities in societies that tend to make it much easier for men to entrap women in coercively controlling relationships than the reverse. There are a number of factors that come together to create “conducive” (or, easy) contexts (a term coined by Professor Liz Kelly) for men to coercively control female partners, and create hostile contexts that make it difficult for women to coercively control male partners.

To give a brief account of one set of factors, women undertake the majority of housework, childcare, and care for disabled or elderly family members, and more frequently work part-time, have less secure jobs, and receive lower pay compared to men. UK data released in 2021 found that in many couples women rely on their partner to get by financially, even if they work full-time themselves. Almost a third of women with a partner are somewhat financially dependent on him, whereas the reverse only applies to around one in ten men.

These factors make it more difficult for the average woman, compared to the average man, to leave an abusive partner and live independently. This is a particular point to illustrate the broader theme that, structurally, women are often at a disadvantage — and so they are more vulnerable to a potentially abusive man than vice versa.

Of course, beyond this there are numerous patriarchal social norms and values that support abusive men that I have outlined at length here — both in my mailout articles and also in my Substack Notes.

Starting the New Year with support for survivors

Finally, I felt it was appropriate to mark the occasion of the new year with a positive and affirming message for survivors of domestic violence and abuse.

Societies have a tendency to massively downplay domestic violence and abuse. They often misunderstand the enormity of what victims and survivors have suffered and endured.

As we know, domestic violence and abuse includes a wide range of abusive conduct. It can include various forms of physical violence, sexual abuse and even murder. It can also be neglect and abusive or coercive or excessively controlling behavior that aims to isolate, humiliate, intimidate or subordinate a person.

However, it is often mis-described (and often trivialized) as fights, tiffs, disagreements, arguments, conflicts, relationship problems, a bad marriage, a dispute with an ex, a jilted lover and so on. It is often associated with physical violence and with ongoing “partnerships” (though partnership is not the right word for interpersonal abuse). But, as we know, it can also occur without physical violence and can continue post-separation.

Societies and communities often make victims and survivors feel bad about what happened — as though it was somehow their fault, that they made the wrong choices, and that they did something to cause the abuse. However, there is nothing wrong with survivors. Therefore it is important to remember that:

Perpetrators look for all kinds of people to target with their harmful criminal behavior.

Some perpetrators look for someone who they think is really strong and successful. (They enjoy the challenge of harming people who they see as strong.) Other perpetrators look for someone who is at a very vulnerable point in their life. Some perpetrators seek someone who had a happy childhood; other perpetrators seek those who were mistreated as children.

This means that the victim’s personality or life circumstances are not the key factor here at all. The key factor is simply the perpetrator’s desire to abuse.

Rejecting the blame and judgment of “Why didn’t you spot the abuse?”

So much blame and judgment is created by the way of thinking that centers on: “Why didn’t you spot the abuse?” — And quite frankly that whole way of thinking, along with all that blame and judgment, needs to be tossed out of the window.

Abusers are incredibly good at offering (or rather seeming as though they are offering) all of the ordinary things that the victim-survivor wants and needs at the time they meet them.

Some people can see through abusers, sometimes. However, it’s quite rare. It’s even rarer for someone to be able to do it consistently over time, correctly identifying multiple different abusers in different contexts.

Even trained professionals often can’t spot abusers who are right in front of them.

Victim-survivor mothers are often unsung heroes in their children’s lives.

Many victim-survivor mothers do their best to support their children through the terror and distress of the post-separation abuse, as well as supporting them to deal with the impacts of all that the abuser did pre-separation. These actions are heroic.

I know a lot of mothers who’ve been through family court nightmares that were soul-crushing, traumatizing and financially devastating. 

They are probably permanently running on more adrenalin and navigating more complex emotions than most people can imagine.

Some of these mothers are among the kindest, most caring, most thoughtful people you could ever hope to meet. They are shining examples of human beings.

To be this kind of good person when you’ve experienced, and are still experiencing, such prolonged suffering is utterly amazing. Really, truly amazing. They should be given medals, awards, and national recognition.

Like veterans of “official” wars between nations, victims of domestic violence and abuse should get national recognition. They should get medals and parades. Political leaders should lay wreaths for them.

They should be publicly celebrated for the fight they put up for their own lives and the lives of their children (if they have children) against a hostile enemy who wanted to destroy them.

Of course, what victims and survivors usually want most of all is simply to get the safety, support, and justice they need, whatever that may look like in each individual case. And they want this for other victims and survivors too. They don’t want anyone else to go through what they’ve been through. They are right. They deserve all this and so much more.

Goodbye for now

Thank you for reading this post. As always, I hope you have found this post illuminating and validating. Feel free to share this post far and wide so more victims and survivors and those who work with them can read it.

I will be back soon with another post, as we begin the second full year of Decoding Coercive Control with Emma Katz.

Thank you for your support.

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