How Abusive Men Use Coercive Control to Attack Mother–Child Relationships
Attacking the mother-child relationship has EVERYTHING to do with domestic violence
Coercive control: A brief definition
Coercive control is a devastating form of abuse. It involves one person subjecting another person to persistently controlling behavior and repeatedly punishing them anytime they resist being controlled.
Coercive control perpetrators may be current or former intimate partners or family members, and they are more likely to be male than female. Approximately 97% of perpetrators convicted for coercive and controlling behavior in England and Wales are male.
Coercive control is at the heart of severe cases of domestic violence and abuse. The domestic violence and abuse committed by a coercive control perpetrator isn’t just “fights”, “a slap” or “swearing at your girlfriend”. It is a sustained attack on another human life.
A coercive control perpetrator’s long-term goal is to hollow out their target. Making it clear to their target that standing up for themselves will carry negative consequences, they seek to turn their target from a human being who has their own goals, dreams, needs and preferences into a hollowed-out puppet on a string.
The perpetrator wants to fully own, exploit and possess this puppet-on-a-string like person as though they were his property — an object that exists only to please and serve him.
The link between coercive control and the mother-child relationship
This is where harming the mother–child relationship becomes relevant.
The majority of coercive control perpetrators realize that they cannot sufficiently hollow out the victim-survivor if she still has strong, warm, loving, connected, healthy relationships with her children.
This is because – as has long been recognized by people who have researched domestic violence and abuse – healthy family relationships can be protective for victims-survivors:
“As long as the victim maintains any other human connection, the perpetrator’s power is limited.”
- Judith Herman, 1992, Trauma and Recovery, p.79
“Some batterers appear to be aware that their access to power and control is threatened if … solidarity exists within the family. … In cases where mothers and children succeed in remaining unified against a batterer … he can lose much of his ability to control and manipulate family members.”
- Lundy Bancroft and Jay Silverman, 2002, The Batterer as Parent, p.77
Attacking mother–child relationships is therefore a “smart move” by perpetrators. It helps them to stay in control and gain more power over everyone in the family.
Therefore, unsurprisingly, some perpetrators put considerable effort into attacking these relationships. Perpetrators are aware that the more they can turn mother–child relationships into sources of distress, fear and despair for the mother, the more they can hollow the mother out.
In a chilling research finding by Susan Heward-Belle, who interviewed domestic violence perpetrators, one perpetrator spelled out why he had chosen to attack his partner’s relationships with their children:
Scott: “Why her mothering? It was just to assert power over her. … It’s attacking something that probably means the most to her, her identity, being and sense of worth.”
This quote illustrates how perpetrators characteristically know exactly what they’re doing. By attacking mother–child relationships, they know they are striking blows against their partner’s identity, sense of worth and sense of herself as a human being.
Perpetrators are aware that the more they can turn mother–child relationships into sources of distress, fear and despair for the mother, the more they can hollow the mother out.
Why some mother-child relationships stay strong and others don’t
In research and practice, we see significant variation in what happens to mother–child relationships when a father is a coercive control perpetrator.
We see that some children stick closely to their victim-survivor mother and have very negative views of their perpetrating father (which is entirely reasonable given how their perpetrating father has behaved).
We see other children who are distant and upset with both parents.
We even see some children who seem to greatly prefer their abuse-perpetrating father over their non-abusive mother. This is a particularly concerning outcome, as the perpetrating father is an abuser and quite possibly an active criminal.
In my own research, I made what I think is the first attempt in the history of domestic violence research to try to understand these variations.
This is research that really matters. When mother–child relationships become strained and distant, mothers can blame themselves, thinking that they did something wrong and failed as a mother. It’s important that they get answers about why their mother-child relationships got so strained so that self-blame doesn’t take over.
It’s also important for professionals to get a sense of what factors in these contexts influence how children feel about their parents. Professionals – who usually engage with such situations at a relatively late stage – can notice children being either very close with the victim-survivor mother or very distant with her, and may not fully grasp why the children have come to feel this way.
This lack of background understanding can lead to professionals responding in unhelpful ways — for example by mistakenly encouraging a child to feel more positive about their abusive father, or not realizing that the mother and children need help to heal damage the father has caused to their relationship.
Through my research interviews with victim-survivor mothers and their children who had separated from perpetrators, I found five factors that played a key role in the level of damage sustained by mother–child relationships in contexts where the father was a coercive controller.
What are these factors? It’s now time to explain each in turn, using evidence from my research interviews to demonstrate each factor.