Dr Emma Katz is widely regarded as one of 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
Welcome again to Decoding Coercive Control with Dr Emma Katz.
Across the globe, we are only just beginning to grasp how coercive control affects children and young people. World-leading researchers such as myself are at the forefront of this emerging knowledge.
When I talk about children and domestic abuse, I always start from the basic but crucial fact that every tactic of coercive control that a perpetrator uses will also be harming any children or young people in the family.
Also, I emphasize the importance of the impacts that occur in the post-separation phase, beyond the period when the perpetrator parent had the victim-survivor parent trapped in a relationship with them. For more on this, see my earlier post ‘All Domestically Abusive Men’s Coercive Control Tactics Harm Children Too’.
What I do in today’s post that I haven’t done before is focus on how children are emotionally and behaviorally affected by perpetrators’ actions in very similar ways to adults, and what we can do to help children in these circumstances.
I believe this is necessary knowledge for policy and professional practice, as well as for victims-survivors themselves, because if the impacts are mostly the same for adults and children, then the possibilities for recovery and healing are likely to be similar too.
Importantly, this post shows:
How children are affected by coercive control in similar ways to adults in terms of their emotions and behaviors;
How protective mothers can aim to create an anti-coercive control regime to counter the coercive control regime of the perpetrator;
What practical DIY steps mothers can take to support their children’s wellbeing and recovery in the face of coercive control — i.e. what mothers can do themselves, even if they cannot find any professionals to help them.