Why Domestically Violent Men Use Emotional Abuse
Emotional abuse is an underestimated aspect of coercive control. Here's what to do about it.
Welcome
Thank you as always for your support for Decoding Coercive Control with Dr Emma Katz.
In this post, I would like to address emotional abuse, and offer my analysis of how it fits into coercive control.
Why you should read this post
This post begins from a point of view that public and professional responses to domestic abuse could be better. — Way better. In particular, this post suggests that responses are often marked by a deep misunderstanding of:
what the perpetrator is really trying to do; and
how all of the perpetrator’s actions – including their use of emotional abuse – are contributing to their bigger, and extremely harmful, agenda.
This post will help to get us beyond these misunderstandings, particularly when it comes to the purposes and impacts of emotional abuse.
Towards a deeper, more joined-up analysis
Here’s a question: How, in practice, do societies currently generally understand the various tactics of domestic abuse perpetrators?
The answer? At the moment, they tend to be viewed in isolation.
A nasty name-calling here, an unauthorized use of the victim-survivor’s credit card there;
a failure to contribute to household expenses here, a sexual coercion of the victim-survivor there;
A push, shove or throw here; an explosion of “bad temper” there;
a tracker device in a car here, a loitering outside the victim-survivor’s workplace there.
We need to move beyond seeing each tactic in isolation —
This is because sadly, if each is seen in isolation, it is easy for professionals such as police, social workers and judges to look at a given tactic and say:
“this does not add up to an actual crime or serious endangerment of the victim;
… and in any case the victim was always free to leave the relationship if what their partner was doing became too severe.”
It is by looking at these tactics together, in a joined-up way, that we see that these actions by the abuser actually come together to entrap the victim-survivor in a web of coercive control.
Entrapment as the perpetrator’s overall mission
Entrapment is the perpetrator’s ultimate goal. Their bigger agenda.
The perpetrator is aiming for a comprehensive and thorough entrapment of the victim-survivor.
The perpetrator’s aim of entrapment:
is what makes it so hard for victims-survivors to escape the perpetrator;
… and is why escaping often doesn’t end the abuse.
Perpetrators are highly willed and highly skilled in finding ways of entrapping victims-survivors, both during the relationship and post-separation.
Entrapment: the emotional dimension
In order to attain a true understanding of the perpetrator’s entrapment, we cannot afford to ignore or underestimate the emotional dimension.
The emotional dimension helps us to see all of the things the perpetrator is doing – all of the tactics of abuse – as part of a much more sinister pattern of behaviors.
With any tactic of coercive control, we should be sure to ask the following question:
How did/does this tactic make the victim-survivor feel?
Emotional abuse as a tool of entrapment
Moving on to emotional abuse in itself, what is emotional abuse?
Usually we tend to use the term as a surface-level description of acts such as name-calling.
But emotional abuse isn’t just incidents of nasty name calling, it’s about entrapment.
Notice here that our approach to definitions is changing. We’re moving from asking “What is emotional abuse” to asking “What is emotional abuse ABOUT?”
But this is just the beginning.
Identifying that emotional abuse has a bigger agenda of entrapment is a gateway to a fresh set of questions.
Here are the series of linked questions that this post will now explore:
What is entrapment for?
What does the perpetrator really want out of it?
How does the perpetrator use emotional abuse in this agenda of entrapment?