How Abusive Men Use Coercive Control to Attack Mother–Child Relationships

[UNPAYWALLED] Attacking the mother-child relationship has EVERYTHING to do with domestic violence

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.

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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 – human connections are 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

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.

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.

Factor 1: The father’s behavior towards the children

Overall, mother–child relationships tended to be closer when the perpetrating father treated the children in an obviously bad (hostile or indifferent) way, providing a clear contrast with the kindness of the mother. When the perpetrating father’s treatment of the children was sometimes indulgent, mother–child relationships usually struggled more.

When fathers seemed hostile or indifferent

When fathers were consistently hostile or indifferent towards children, they gave the children nothing to like about them. Indeed, in many cases, they gave their children many reasons to hate them. In these cases, children tended to feel closer to their mothers.

This is what one mother and son from my research said about this kind of behavior from fathers (names have been changed):

“He was continually belittling [our son] John. Saying how stupid and thick he was. How fat and lazy he was.” (Eloise, mother)

“I love Mum with all my heart and soul, and I did back then. I just hated that man and worried what he’d do to her.” (John, age 20, Eloise’s son)

Another son in a different family put it like this:

“He used to hit us a lot. … I didn’t like him and I didn’t talk to him that much. I wanted to stay with my mum, because my mum is much nicer.” (Vince, age 13)

For children such as John and Vince, the vast difference between their father who hit and belittled them and their loving mother who was nice to them was very obvious.

When fathers sometimes seemed “nice”

Things got more complicated when abusive fathers sometimes gave the impression of being “nice”. Some fathers regularly switched between being hostile/indifferent and indulgent. These kinds of fathers dangled the promise of the “good times” – the times of indulgence – in front of their children to keep them feeling hopeful and desperate for the father’s apparent “love”.

Indulgence could take the form of fun time with the father, money/gifts, or something else. Indulgence was combined with times when the father was very mean to the children or ignored them. When fathers behaved like this, children could end up very confused about their relationships with their father, and also about their relationship with their mother:

ISOBEL: “When he wanted to, he could be Superdad. He’d promise them the world, say we’d go out somewhere, then he’d ring me up from the pub [to cancel the plans]. … [My son] Bob was always trying to please his dad.”

EMMA: “What different kinds of feelings do you think the children had toward you back then?”

ISOBEL: “Confusion I think. He was a ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ character. I don’t think they understood why he could be nice one minute and not the next. I suppose they loved me and that, but it was just a confusing time for them.”

There is a key line in the extract above — “Bob was always trying to please his dad.” Coercive control perpetrators love making their victims feel desperate to please them. When you can manipulate someone into feeling a strong need to please you, you have a great deal of power over them. Perpetrators thrive on that kind of power.

That is why the perpetrator will meanwhile be exerting the same kind of power over the mother. Many abusers alternate between open hostility, neglect, and “nice times” towards the mother, just as they do with the children. The “nice times” are a deliberate tactic, used by the abuser to give false hope to the mother that the abuse could end. By making the relationship seem better than it is, the “nice times” therefore play a deliberate role in keeping mothers entrapped.

Factor 2: The nature of the domestic violence and coercive control

Overall, the nature of the coercive control – the exact form it took in the family – made a difference to outcomes for mother-child relationships.

Mother–child relationships tended to be closer if the father didn’t severely micromanage the mother’s time. For example, in the case of Alison below, her abuser micromanaged her time relatively little, leaving her with a lot of autonomy over her day-to-day behavior. She therefore had a high degree of freedom to build quality time and stability into her relationships with her children:

“I spent a lot of time in their bedroom playing with them and teaching them things; colouring, reading, baking. I also took them out a lot and kept them busy. I had a very consistent night-time routine with them, and I tried to keep life as normal as possible for them. [My daughter] Jane and I were very close.” (Alison, mother)

Alison’s abuser’s coercive control was mostly financial. His intention was to bleed her dry of money, and so he had relatively little interest in how she spent her days and evenings.

On the other hand, some perpetrating fathers severely micromanaged the mother’s time and dominated her existence to the point where she couldn’t find a moment to think about what was happening to herself and her children. All Charlie could do was to try to keep meeting the father’s rules; for example by having a “spotless house”:

“Basically, I didn’t have time to think about how it was affecting me and the kids, because I was constantly working in the house. I did long shifts at work, had to come home, bathe the kids and stuff, because he didn’t do it. I wasn’t allowed to be on my own. He would always take me to work, pick me back up. … I had to have a spotless house. … It was a nightmare.” (Charlie, mother)

Mothers in suffocating situations such as Charlie’s were disadvantaged compared to mothers in situations like Alison’s in terms of how the coercive control impacted their relationship with their children.

It also made a difference if the father was physically violent in front of or within the hearing of the children. For a child, physical violence is usually the most obvious and shocking form of abuse. Children who know that physical violence is happening may be clearer in their own minds that their father sometimes harms their mother, and that this is scary and wrong. This can potentially lead to the children feeling closer to their mother. (Notice I say “may” and “potentially” here. This doesn’t happen in every family.)

On the other hand, when the abuse is more subtle – such the mother having to “walk on eggshells” around the father – children may not understand that their father is abusing their mother:

“He wasn’t that physically violent throughout the relationship. It kicked off more when I tried to leave. It was control, anger. I walked on eggshells around him. Financially, I’m on benefits now and I’ve got more money now than I’ve ever had, he kept us short of money and he was sexually abusive [toward me] as well. So, in terms of physical violence, the kids didn’t see much because there wasn’t that much really.” (Marie, mother)

When children did not understand the true nature of the situation, their relationship with their mother tended to be more strained. Bad things were happening at home, but it wasn’t always clear to them exactly what was happening or who was in the wrong.

It was also true that, in cases where mothers had separated from perpetrators when children were very young, children may have seen or heard the father’s violence when they were infants and toddlers, but now forgotten it.

This could cause strains in mother–child relationships as children grew up. From the child’s perspective, it could be harder to make sense of their mother trying to protect them from dangers and harms that lay beyond their personal recall — and it was therefore less obvious to the child that the mother was doing something good.

Factor 3: The father’s undermining of the mother-child relationship

For some fathers, attacking the mother–child relationship was a direct priority in what they did, as opposed to a byproduct of other actions. This was significant as a way of cutting mother and child off from each other’s affection, making both more alone and more vulnerable to the father’s abuse.

Here are some examples from my research of perpetrators disrupting the mother–child relationship by cutting off affectionate time between mothers and children:

“I think he was jealous of me and my mum’s relationship. I know he was jealous of me because if I was ever with my mum he would come into the room because he was jealous … and say I’d be cuddling up to my mum and then he would come and then I’d walk off because I didn’t want to cuddle up near him.” (Katie, age 12)

“When Mum was giving me attention he’d tell her to go over to him, so she’d have to leave me to play by myself.” (Shannon, age 10)

Things got even worse when abusive fathers actively encouraged the children to see their mother through his own warped, inaccurate lens as “dirt”, a “slut’, and as “fat”, making them see her as unworthy of respect:

“His attitude toward me with the children was demeaning. He’d say to the kids, ‘your mum’s an f ’ing fat whatever,’ there was no respect there whatsoever, he’d just totally belittle me to the kids, and treated me like a second-class citizen. … If I gave a rule to the children, he’d purposely come in and override it. I felt like I was constantly just talking, but the kids didn’t listen to anything I said, so it was just horrendous really. … It got to the point where the kids were talking to me like dirt, and ignoring everything I said, because that’s all they saw from their dad. It was so stressful.” (Bella, mother)

“He’d call me a [slut] or something, and [my son] Bob would say: ‘my mum’s not one of them,’ and [the perpetrator father] would say: ‘well you don’t know about your mum’.” (Isobel, mother)

As Bella described, abusive fathers could put strain on the mother–child relationship by damaging children’s day-to-day behavior toward the mother. This wasn’t the children’s fault of course. They were being manipulated and affected by the father’s abuse just as the mother was.

Fathers’ attacks on mother–child relationships could reach a truly devastating level of severity. Some fathers micro-controlled, threatened and psychologically abused mothers and children to such an extent that mothers and children who lived together had never even been able to build a relationship with each other.

One mother and daughter, Marie and Leah, described how they had been forced to live like strangers with each other:

“He wouldn’t allow me and the kids to build a relationship. He wanted me to just do the basic caring for the children – clean them, put them to bed – but there was no fun, no playtime allowed.” (Marie, mother)

“The only time [Mum and I] were together was when we were clearing up and that. We didn’t talk or anything. We didn’t, like, talk to our mum, sit on the settee [couch], watch a film or anything, and we didn’t go to the shops together, except in the summer holidays. … It was like Mum wasn’t there. … It felt like she wasn’t there, because I didn’t spend time with her or anything.” (Marie’s child Leah, age 11)

What 11-year-old Leah describes here is not being able to have any closeness at all with her mother while family life was dominated by the abusive father. Her mother was physically present, but Leah didn’t have the opportunity to have any meaningful experiences with her or to get to know her as a person.

The way that abusers such as Leah’s father keep children divided from their mother is of course totally different from the actions of mothers who, for example, ask family courts not to allow an abusive father direct contact with a child. Whereas those motives are good ones – to protect a child from abuse – abusers such as Marie’s ex are motivated by an all-consuming drive for power and control.

Factor 4: Mothers’ ability to emotionally connect to children

Some mothers are affected by coercive control in ways that cause them to emotionally shut down. The perpetrator’s abuse forces them to live on “auto-pilot” with emotions largely switched off and unable to feel connected to their children.

Mothers in my research described this as having to focus on practicalities (to “get by”) and ending up emotionally “gone”. Wanting a close bond with their child, they were instead “ground down” by the father to the point that they lacked the “energy to enjoy the relationship”:

“I was on auto-pilot as a mum. I was looking after them, but with no energy to enjoy the relationship — you’re just completely gone. It’s like you’re outside your own body, just looking at someone else’s life, just doing what you can to get by. It’s like being on auto-pilot: You’re just functioning because you have to.” (Lucy, mother)

“I didn’t feel close to [my son] Jack back then. I felt like I was his protector, but not like I could enjoy him. … It’s hard to play [with your child] when you’re feeling sad and anxious all the time. … I was so ground down by it all.” (Sybil, mother)

What these testimonies reveal is a devastating yet little-talked-about aspect of coercive coercive control: Abusive fathers often target a mother’s ability to play with, have fun with, and feel close to her children.

This is never the mother’s fault. Instead it should be seen as an injury that the abusive father has inflicted on the mother. And it is an injury that often heals if the mother is freed from the injurious situation.

Many of the mothers in my research described how this kind of situation had turned around some time after the mother had been able to escape the abusive father. Once they were freed from the father’s presence in the home, many mothers had managed to teach themselves to play and have fun with their kids, bringing newfound closeness to their mother–child relationships:

“Now I’m able to show him how fun and interesting he is. … We play lots of games together now. I’ve taught myself to play with him. … [He said] “you’re a great mum”. He didn’t say that before.’ (Sybil, mother)

Not all of the mothers in my research had experienced this particular kind of harm. Some had continued to feel emotionally close and connected to their children despite the father’s regime of coercive control:

“[My daughter] Shannon and I used to play, usually upstairs. The upstairs was sort of our area and the downstairs was his area. … I made this wonderful fairy-tale world for her upstairs in her bedroom, and just all upstairs really, and we spent most of the time together up there.” (Ellie, mother)

“The children and I, we’ve always had a laugh together, so on those days when we were alone we would snuggle up on the sofa and watch films together, and we always emotionally supported each other then.” (Ruby, mother)

As Ruby and Ellie’s words suggest, having time and space that belonged exclusively to the mother and child enabled these times of play, fun and emotional support where the father was absent or could be kept at a distance.

Where mothers were in a position to be able to maintain a strong emotional connection to their children, this helped to fortify the mother–child relationship. Where this was not possible, it was not the mother’s fault. It was a product of an abusive father deliberately targeting and weakening this aspect of their lives.

Factor 5: The children’s views of both parents

The fifth and final factor identified in my research was how the children came to view both of their parents. As we’ve seen, children tended to hold more positive views of their mothers – which strengthened the mother–child relationship – in situations where they had:

1. A father who nearly always behaved in a hostile or disinterested way toward them.

2. Awareness of their father’s physical violence toward their mother (making it easier for the children to realize that he was an abuser), or a father who was less micromanaging of the mother’s time and allowed their mother more freedom to spend time with them (enabling mother–child closeness).

3. A father who was less interested in undermining their relationship with their mother.

4. A mother who was able to be more emotionally connected to them.

On the other hand, children tended to hold more negative views of their mothers – weakening the mother–child relationship – in situations where they had:

1. A father who alternated between indulgent, hostile, and disinterested behaviors toward them.

2. A father who hid his physical violence from them so they were not aware of it, and/or perpetrated little or no physical violence (making it harder for them to realize that he was an abuser), and/or who imposed a strict regime of coercive control on their mother that prevented her from spending time with them (so mothers and children had insufficient opportunities to maintain closeness).

3. A father who was determined to undermine their mother–child relationship.

4. A mother who was less able to emotionally connect with them because of how the father’s coercive control was harming her mentally and physically.

You might be asking — what about the children who were experiencing a mixture of these circumstances? For example, those who were emotionally connected with their mother but whose abusive father alternated between indulgent, hostile, and disinterested behaviors toward them?

In these circumstances, my research suggested that mother-child relationships were somewhat damaged but still maintained some closeness:

“We were always close, it’s never been a case of, you know, not being [close, but …] our relationship probably broke down a little bit.’ (Lucy, mother)

Understanding changes in these factors over time

It’s important to note that the factors influencing mother–child relationships could change, for better or worse — especially post-separation. Here are examples of things getting better or worse:

Scenario A: Things worsen post-separation

The perpetrating father shows little interest in directly undermining the mother–child relationships while he has the mother entrapped. However, once she breaks free, he starts telling the children damaging lies about their mother while showering them with expensive gifts. His aim is to attack her relationships with her children as a means of punishing her and continuing to exercise control over her.

Scenario B: Things improve post-separation

Once the mother has some time and space to heal and fear isn’t a permanent feature of her everyday life, she and her children get closer.

This scenario applies to one of the mothers I interviewed. Ria explained how she had “struggled” in being affectionate with her daughter in the past, but had gradually found this easier.

Ria had been targeted by the perpetrator when she was a teenager. He had got her pregnant and severely abused her during the pregnancy and postpartum period, causing her trauma.

For the first couple of years of motherhood, Ria had felt very disconnected from her daughter. However, after escaping the father when the daughter was a toddler, she had been more able to connect with her daughter and express love for her.

“I’ve struggled with giving her affection; I’ve struggled showing her love; I’ve struggled just cuddling her. It’s been a gradual thing that I’ve started doing. At first, the only time we would cuddle is at bedtime. I would tell her I loved her, but now I’ll just grab her and be like: ‘God, I love you’, and you can see the [positive] difference it’s had on her.” (Ria, mother)

Conclusion

What this post has shown is that, in contexts of domestic violence, a coercively controlling father’s ultimate goal is to undermine and “hollow out” the mother by attacking the things she cares most about — including her relationships with her children. This means that attacking the mother-child relationship has EVERYTHING to do with domestic violence.

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