"She's Not Innocent Either." Actually, Yes She Is Innocent.

Why we need to develop a better understanding of domestic violence and coercive control victims-survivors who fight back against their abusers

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.

For this post, I want to talk about an issue that is frequently discussed and often very misunderstood: domestic violence and coercive control victims-survivors who fight back against their abusers.

The public usually wildly misunderstands situations where victims-survivors fight back. You only need to take a glance at social media comments to see the common response: “she’s not innocent either.” The purpose of this post is to say: Actually, yes she IS innocent, and to explain why this is true.

This post is free to read, so please share it far and wide. Post it on social media and send it to people in your life to help improve everyone’s awareness of domestic violence and coercive control.

The ways victims-survivors fight back

Let’s imagine someone brings up a situation where a powerful male abuser was carrying out a campaign of control and abuse against a woman. (Coercive control is usually perpetrated by men.) Among the horrifying information about the man’s abuse, there is also information that the woman who he abused sometimes fought back.

Maybe she threw something at him to try to stop him charging at her to attack her. Perhaps she scratched at his arms and face while he was strangling her. She might have hit him to stop him attacking someone she loved, such as a child, a sibling, a friend or a pet.

Maybe during his severe psychological and emotional abuse of her she snapped and called him some insulting things. Maybe she slapped him. Maybe in moments of exasperation and despair she laughed at the absurdity of the things he was saying to her.

Perhaps after years of being brutalised and terrorised by him she learnt to predict when his next beating was coming. She found the fear and tension of the build up unbearable, so she started a fight first so that she could get the beating he was going to inflict on her over with. She couldn’t stop his beating because her abuser always did whatever he wanted and always overpowered her, but she could at least shorten the fear-inducing build-up.

How do the public respond in these cases?

When the public talks about the kinds of situations mentioned above, their response is usually simplistic. Stripping out the context, all they say is:

• ‘she hit him’

• ‘she injured him’

• ‘she insulted him’

• ‘she yelled at him’

• ‘she laughed at him’

• ‘she started fights’

These kinds of public reactions are usually given alongside claims that the victim-survivor “isn’t innocent” because “she could’ve left sooner”. The public often wrongly thinks that, by staying for as long as she did, the victim-survivor “made herself complicit” and even “became an abuser too”.

Context is vital

We cannot make assessments based on general rules, such as that “hitting someone is bad”. First we must look at context.

For example, take the statement “water is good”. Well, water is good if someone is in a normal situation and wants a glass of water. However, water isn’t good when you are a passenger on the Titanic and it’s sinking into the ocean. To pop up and say “water is good” to a passenger on the sinking Titanic would be ridiculous.

I argue that it is equally ridiculous to say things like “she hit him” or “she isn’t innocent either” when we are talking about a victim-survivor of domestic violence and coercive control. Just like someone on the Titanic, they are not in a normal situation.

Hitting people or doing some other aggressive act is bad in a normal situation. In a normal situation, a person who is being aggressive is not innocent. But fighting back against an abuser who is harming you is not a normal situation. You can fight back against someone causing you harm and still be innocent.

When a victim-survivor fights back, what is the context of entrapment the public is missing?

These sorts of claims avoid the context of the abuser’s very real entrapment of the victim-survivor, and the many barriers that were preventing her from leaving.

These are women who are entrapped with their abuser for many reasons, including:

• He’ll hunt her down and compel her to come back if she leaves;

• He’ll kill her if she leaves;

• He’ll kill himself or will carry out self-destructive behaviour that will result in his death if she leaves;

• He’ll hurt her children worse than he already does if she leaves (and he will likely get every opportunity to do so, because family courts frequently give abusive men lots of time with their children after parents break up);

• He’ll kill her children if she leaves;

• He’ll make sure she never sees her children again if she leaves;

• He’ll stalk her if she leaves;

• He’s made it so she doesn’t have the money, resources or support networks she’d need to leave;

• She will lose everything if she leaves;

• Her loved ones will lose a lot if she leaves;

• He’s made her think she’s to blame for the abuse and that she is a bad person who doesn’t deserve better;

• He’s made her think she’s responsible for looking after him;

• He’s made her think the abuse is just ‘relationship problems’ that she has to work on;

• He’s made her think that this is a once-in-a-lifetime love that she cannot walk away from;

• He’s made her think she can’t survive without him or that life wouldn’t be worth living without him;

• He makes false promises to change if she tries to leave in order to manipulate her into giving him more chances;

• Her religion, culture, family or community strongly disapprove of marriages ending.

This is not a comprehensive list. There can be other reasons why a victim is entrapped.

All of these barriers to leaving add up to make the victim-survivor entrapped with their abuser. This is exactly what the abuser wants. Abusers go to great lengths to entrap the people they want to abuse.

How should we respond to women who fight back?

So, how can a member of the public (or a professional such as a police officer, social worker or judge) respond in the right way to a female victim-survivor fighting back against an abuser?

Finding out who is the real victim

First of all, they need to find out who is the victim of long-term abuse.

How can we know if a woman who is being talked about as someone who has used violence is actually a victim-survivor of long-term domestic violence and coercive control fighting back against her abuser?

We have to look at what’s likely: Approximately 1 in 3 women experience violence from a male intimate partner. So if a woman says she was abused, it’s very likely she was. I repeat, it’s very likely she was.

What about false accusations? Research consistently shows these are rare. For example, there were about 275,000 (about a quarter of a million) offences of domestic abuse with female victims recorded by the Met Police in England between 2018 and 2021. Of these, 39 were flagged as false allegations. Yes, 39 possible false allegations out of about a quarter of a million recorded offenses.

Secondly, we need to look for signs that coercive control was present, because when coercive control is present, anything a victim-survivor does out of self-protection or self-perseveration should be met with compassion, not judgement or blame.

Understanding coercive control

The term “coercive control” describes a situation where one person in an intimate relationship wishes to dominate, exploit and harm the other person. Coercive controllers want to strip their partner of their human rights, and to scare, coerce and manipulate their partner into giving up everything that they care about.

Coercive controllers want their partner’s life to become dedicated to pleasing and serving them, as though their partner were like a wooden puppet on strings rather than a human being.

To try to achieve this highly abusive goal, coercive controllers use multiple tactics of abuse: psychological abuse, economic abuse, isolation, monitoring and stalking, threats and intimidating behaviours such as throwing objects around and overturning furniture. Many (though not all) coercive controllers also carry out physical and sexual violence in order to scare, dominate, control and exploit their partner.

In some countries and states, coercive control is a crime, or is in the process of becoming a crime. Countries are increasing recognising coercive control’s harmfulness and its links to the risk of severe outcomes such as strangulation, femicide, familicide and victim-survivor suicide.

Taking coercive control into account

Before anyone forms any opinions on a case where there has been an accusation of domestic violence or abusive behaviour from an intimate partner, they should consider if this is a situation where coercive control is present. When coercive control is present, these things will always be true:

• The abuse is entirely caused by the perpetrator. The perpetrator is driving the abuse.

• The victim-survivor just wanted a nice relationship.

• At first, the abuser would have been deliberately deceptive and made themselves appear like a desirable person to date. The abuser will have ramped up their abuse of the victim-survivor over time.

• What the perpetrator has done to the victim-survivor is a gross violation of their human rights. The perpetrator has caused the victim-survivor a huge amount of harm.

• The perpetrator has entrapped the victim-survivor, making it extremely difficult for them to break free.

How can we spot if coercive control was present in a case?

You might have heard about an incident of violence, because that is what usually comes to public attention. How can you know if that incident of violence was part of a broader pattern of coercive and controlling behavior?

Drawing on what is known about the case, ask yourself questions such as:

• Did the potential abuser think that they have the right to control how their partner dresses or how they appear in public?

• Did the potential abuser show a pattern of selfish, demanding and self-centred behaviour?

• Did the potential abuser speak to the victim-survivor or to other people as though they were inferior, sub-human or more like an appliance than a person?

• Did the potential victim have to over-explain or beg for permission to do ordinary things, like take up an employment opportunity, stay in their existing job, see a friend, spend money on typical daily expenses, or even to simply leave the house?

• Did the potential victim show signs that they were under a lot of strain, such as seeming to lose confidence, becoming more isolated, starting to excessively apologise, crying a lot, seeking help for relationship problems or taking new medications for their mental health?

• If the couple has separated, has the potential abuser continued to pursue and hound the potential victim in harmful ways, keeping himself in her life when she wanted to be free of him? This is known as post-separation abuse, and it is something that most coercive controllers do.

These are all common signs that coercive control is likely to be present, though not all signs will be present in every case. This is not a comprehensive list, other signs may be present too.

Assessing the power dynamics of the relationship

Another vital question for the public to ask is who had more power in the couple’s relationship? This question will help us identify who the perpetrator of coercive control was in the relationship and how they were able to dominate and entrap the victim-survivor.

A coercive controller will always ensure that they have more power than their target. To make an assessment of what the power dynamics were like between the couple, consider the following questions. Not all these questions will apply in every case, and we should also keep in mind what actually took place in the relationship.

• Who is willing to behave in an outrageous way, pushing the boundaries of normal socially acceptable behaviour in terms of violence, violent threats, violent ‘jokes’ and excessively pursuing someone who is unsure, reluctant or doesn’t want to be in contact with them. Being willing to resort to violence and not taking no for an answer increases a person’s power. The victim-survivor will be scared and compliant because they know their partner/ex-partner is capable of anything and won’t back down like a reasonable person would. An abuser being a heavy drinker or drug user can make this worse, because abusers often use being drunk or on drugs as a green light to behave in even more extreme and scary ways than they usually do.

• Who is living in an area where they are well connected and who is mostly a stranger to the area with few people nearby who care about them? Abusers quite often move a victim-survivor to a new area to make the victim-survivor more isolated there.

• Who is older and more experienced? One party being significantly older typically (though not always) means that they have more life experience, more understanding of how other people react to certain behaviours, and more money, assets and resources which they can use to get what they want. The same also applies to reputation. A perpetrator with a public reputation as an upstanding member of the community or high profile publicly has more power than a typical person.

• Who is stronger and can overpower the other person? This isn’t always a conclusive question because a perpetrator could be physically weaker but could dominate the victim in other ways. But, most of the time, the fact that they can physically overpower their partner is a powerful tool in a perpetrator’s arsenal. The knowledge that their partner can and will overpower them whenever they choose to creates a feeling of terror in the victim-survivor.

• Who owns the property that the couple lived in, who had more money, who was in control of what was spent? Most abusers will prefer to be financially better off than the victim-survivor because of the extra power this provides. For example, if the perpetrator is richer than the victim-survivor, he will have the ability to drag her through the courts for years if she leaves him. Some abusers will encourage the victim-survivor to become economically dependent on him to make her more vulnerable and trapped. Sometimes a perpetrator will prefer to give up work and demand that the victim-survivor meets his financial needs. In these cases, a non-working perpetrator will still be able to spend pretty much whatever he wants to, because he will have access to bank accounts and credit cards that he makes sure the victim-survivor supplies to him out of her own income. By contrast, a non-working victim-survivor will be unlikely to have access to money and will probably be dependent on asking the perpetrator for money.

• Who has sexism on their side? According to research by the UN, across the globe, 9 out of 10 people – men and women – hold biases that favour men. A few extremely common ways that male abusers benefit from sexist thinking in societies include: people valuing men more highly; people respecting a man’s right to get angry if he’s upset about something while expecting women to be nice, smiling and accommodating most of the time; 25% of people believing it is justified for a man to beat his wife; people believing men are more truthful and straightforward and believing women are more likely to lie and manipulate; people believing that being in a long-term relationship with a man is vitally important to the “success” of a woman’s life; people believing men have rights and needs to frequent sex in relationships that women should fulfil; and people praising fathers for caring for their children while taking it for granted that mothers generally do the vast majority of work in raising the children. Male domestic abusers also specifically benefit from insulting sexist stereotypes such as “the nag”, “the henpecked husband” and the woman who “wears the trousers” or has “pussy-whipped” a man. These stereotypes present women having power in an intimate relationship in a negative light.

Recognising the difference between what the victim-survivor wants and what the abuser wants

This brings us back to context.

We need to think through the very different meanings and impacts of what appear to be similar actions, depending on who’s doing them.

When a perpetrator and a victim-survivor carry out similar actions, it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking they are both behaving in harmful ways. But that isn’t true. Because of the nature of coercive control, and because perpetrators ensure that they have a lot more power than the victim-survivor, the actions of a perpetrator and of a victim-survivor have very different meanings and impacts.

Remember, the perpetrator wants to turn the victim-survivor into a puppet on a string-like figure. They want to break down a human being until she becomes a shadow of her former self, a shadow that they can fully possess and exploit. The victim just wants the abuse to stop and to be in a nice, healthy relationship. These are diametrically opposed motivations.

Here are some examples to illustrate this point:

---

When a perpetrator throws something at a victim-survivor, they are doing it with the intention of intimidating them into compliance. They want the victim-survivor to be fearful so they will fall into line with the abuser’s exploitation of them.

When a victim-survivor throws something at a perpetrator, they may be doing it in self-defence or as an act of resistance against the perpetrator’s long-term abusive behaviour towards them.

-

When a perpetrator calls a victim-survivor a nasty name, they are doing it as part of a long-term plan to make the victim-survivor feel degraded, worthless and useless (because people who are made to feel that way are easier to exploit and control).

When a victim-survivor calls a perpetrator a nasty name, they may be doing it out of despair, upset and hurt at the perpetrator’s long-term abusive behaviour towards them. They don’t want their abuser to feel worthless, they just want their abusive behaviour to stop.

-

When a perpetrator engages in an argument with a victim-survivor, they are doing it with the intention of wearing them down, exhausting them, dominating them, imposing some new unfair rule or restriction on them, or for some other sinister purpose.

When a victim-survivor engages in an argument with a perpetrator, they are doing it for reasons such as to resist being dominated, to protest unfair and inhumane treatment, to highlight that previous promises have been broken, or to dispute lies or unfair accusations that the perpetrator is using against them.

-

When a perpetrator refuses to speak to a victim-survivor, they are trying to create a sense of dread, helplessness and panic in the victim-survivor.

When a victim-survivor refuses to speak to a perpetrator, it’s because they are trying to disengage from them to protect themselves from more harmful behaviour.

-

When a perpetrator creates records of a victim-survivor, it is because they are trying to control them by tracking their every movement, creating material they can humiliate them with, or trying to produce fake “evidence” of their behaviour to harm them with.

When a victim-survivor creates records of a perpetrator, it is because they are either trying to disprove the perpetrator’s gaslighting, lies or denials about what is going on, or because they are gathering evidence that they will later need to keep themselves and their children safe.

Understanding fighting back in context

If a victim-survivor of coercive control fights back, then this should be seen in the same way as we see people’s attempts to defend themselves in other contexts where someone is trying to harm them, such as hostage taking or armed robbery. We tend to see fighting back in these circumstances as justifiable, and we should see it as justifiable in circumstances of coercive control and domestic violence too.

Fighting back, physically or verbally, might be a way for the victim-survivor to express that she hates the way her partner is abusing her. It may allow the victim-survivor to desperately try to assert herself and her rights in a situation where her selfhood is being crushed and her rights taken away from her.

It is important for victims-survivors to be able to express their hatred of the situation in any way they can, because the abuser will be pretending the situation is perfectly normal. The abuser will claim that the victim-survivor is “making a fuss about nothing”, being “dramatic” or being “selfish” if she objects to his actions. This is crazy-making behaviour from the abuser. Resisting by fighting back may therefore be helpful to the victim’s-survivor’s psychological health and sense of sanity. It allows her to reject the wrapped perspectives and untrue claims that he is trying to impose on her.

Victims-survivors might find their abuser’s cruel psychological abuse unbearable, and might violently lash out at the abuser in a moment of despair and distress. Of course, the abuser will manipulate such incidents as much as they can, claiming the victim-survivor is the violent, aggressive, abusive party in the relationship. In doing so, the abuser hopes that no one will notice that they are one who has been abusing the victim-survivor relentlessly for years, and that they are the one with more power.

Sometimes, a victim-survivor who fights back is literally saving her own life or someone else’s life (e.g. her child’s life). We often can’t know this for sure because a fatal outcome was averted, but we should always keep this possibility in mind.

Fighting back is often out-of-character behaviour for the victim-survivor, but being abused everyday for months and years unsurprisingly makes people behave in out-of-character ways! It is unreasonable to expect a victim-survivor who has been severely harmed to be nice as pie all the time and to do everything by the book.

Not all victims-survivors fight back. It depends on the context. It also depends on the way that the victim-survivor instinctively responds to danger. How a person responds to danger in a traumatic situation is involuntary, automatic and is not within the victim’s-survivor’s control.

There are five common responses that humans have in dangerous situations: fight, flight, freeze, flop or fawn:

• Fight: an aggressive response in the face of danger.

• Flight: running away from danger (or mentally tuning out of a dangerous situation if physical escape isn’t possible).

• Freeze: keeping still and quiet.

• Flop: passing out or collapsing.

• Fawn: trying to appeal to the source of danger and begging them for mercy in the hopes that they won’t hurt you.

Human beings have a lack of control over how they react when they are in danger. A lot of people think they would give any man who tried to rob them in the streets a swift kick in the groin then run away — but actually, in that situation, they freeze up and hand over their handbag, or beg the robber not to hurt them.

Fighting back or not fighting back is not an issue of morality. No matter what we intend to do, our instinctive brain takes over in that situation and does whatever it thinks will be most helpful for our survival. There should never be any shame attached to that.

Fighting back or not fighting back is not an issue of morality. Human beings have a lack of control over how they react when they are in danger.

Sometimes, victims-survivors who froze or fawned in instinctive response to the danger posed by their abuser have a hard time identifying with victims-survivors whose instinctive response was to fight. They can’t easily imagine how any victim-survivor could fight back either verbally or physically.

It’s really important to remember that there are many totally legitimate and plausible responses to danger, and that although all abusers are dangerous, not all are dangerous in exactly the same ways. It isn’t a ‘one size fits all’ situation. People can react differently than we expect them to and still be a victim-survivor.

Fighting back against an abuser doesn’t say anything about the victim’s-survivor’s worthiness or their general character. It doesn’t make them a “toxic”, “abusive” or “psycho” person. They are ordinary and often very kind people who had the misfortune to meet an abuser who decided to deceive and harm them.

Compassion for victims-survivors

A victim-survivor fighting back should be treated with great compassion, understanding and leniency. They should be offered the supports they wish for, rather than being judged harshly or punished.

It’s vital to remember that the victim-survivor would have nothing to fight back against if the abuser stopped abusing them. It’s the abuser who is making the choice, every day, every hour, to keep their campaign of coercive control going against the victim-survivor.

The abuser is the one with the power in the situation. The victim-survivor is trying to survive in a situation in which the abuser has them entrapped; a situation that they never wanted to be in.

Conclusion

This post began by expressing concern at how often the public (including people who work with abusers and victims-survivors such as the police, social workers or judges) misunderstand what is happening when a victim-survivor of coercive control and domestic violence fights back.

During this post we’ve explored how vital it is to look at behaviors in context. We’ve seen that the perpetrator’s actions are motivated by their harmful intentions. By contrast, the victim’s-survivor’s actions are motivated by their desire for the abuser to stop endangering, harming and abusing them. We’ve seen that perpetrators intentionally entrap victims-survivors, putting many barriers in the way of the victim-survivor being able to escape from them.

This post urges the public to take a different approach. Rather than saying “she’s not innocent either”, “she’s toxic too”, or “they are both abusive”, we need to take the following steps:

• Remind ourselves how common domestic violence against women is, and remind ourselves that women are far more likely to be making true accusations than false ones;

• Ask ourselves some questions about whether it seems likely that coercive control was present and who was likely to have had more power in the relationship and after the relationship;

• Take a deep breath and let go of any thoughts of “but she also did XYZ”, “why did she stay?”, “she doesn’t seem like a nice person”, or “she’s abusive too” that come into our minds. We’ve been culturally conditioned to think these kinds of thoughts, and we need to resist this;

• Remind ourselves that the reason why the victim-survivor did what she did was because her abuser was putting her in an extreme situation and she was trying to survive. She was entrapped at the time. Her abuser had entrapped her deliberately;

• Remind ourselves that nothing can be read into the victim’s-survivor’s usual personality by looking at her behaviour while she was being severely abused. Don’t judge the victim-survivor negatively based on times in their life when they were being abused. Instead, consider what their personality has been like at times when they were not being subjected to abuse and look for positive aspects of their personalities that were visible even during the abuse;

• Give the victim-survivor your support, and turn your condemnation and disapproval towards the abuser.

I hope you have found this post useful. Here is another post from my archive that you might also be interested in reading.