Coercive Control : 5

Despite these inroads, coercive control remains marginal to mainstream thinking. It is rarely acknowledged in policy circles, has had almost no impact on domestic violence policing or criminal law, and commands no special funding. Although providers and advocates may ask about elements of coercive control, I know of no programs or interventions that address it. Everyone acknowledges that domestic violence is about power and control. But we have yet to incorporate this truism into our understanding of abuse or our response.

The major source for the model of coercive control are the victims and perpetrators of abuse with whom I and others have worked. The women in my practice have repeatedly made clear that the most serious harms they have suffered involve how their partners have kept them from fulfilling their life projects by appropriating their resources; undermining their social support; subverting their rights to privacy, self-respect, and autonomy; and depriving them of substantive equality. This is the evidence on which I base my claim that coercive control is a liberty crime. Preventing a substantial group of women from freely applying their agency in economic and political life obstructs overall social development .

The new model is rooted in the same tenets that gave birth to the battered women’s movement—that the abuse of women in personal life is inextricably bound up with their standing in the larger society and therefore that women’s entrapment in their personal lives can be significantly reduced only if sexual discrimination is addressed simultaneously. In the early shelters, the interrelatedness of these tenets was grounded in the practice of empowerment, whereby the suffering of individual victims was mollified by mobilizing their collective power to help one another and change the institutional structures that caused and perpetuated women’s second-class status, an example of women doing for themselves. Our challenge is to resurrect this collective practice and broaden its political focus to the sources of coercive control.

Coercive Control by Evan Stark [Word Document] HTML

This paper helps to differentiate between physical violence and coercive control. A relationship can be violent due to alcohol and substance abuse and other reasons without coercive control. A relationship can be coercive without violence. In some relationships, coercion is accompanied by violence.

Coercive control is typically control by the male partner over the female. Very few men are in a situation where they can only leave the house with the permission of their wives. However, patriarchy puts women in this situation all the time. The wife is there to meet the husbands needs and must submit to his choices for her.

For example, if she wants to join an exercise program, it must not interfere with his preferred meal time, it must not be in a facility where men attend, it must not be too expensive, it must not promote dance and rock music, and so on. Each activity is controlled by the husband's sense of what is right, although he does not have to actually set up the activity himself. He simply dictates what is appropriate and if nothing meets his requirements the activity is suspended.

I have a hard time understanding how patriarchy does not contribute to this kind of mess. Patriarchy is not necessarily going to correlate with greater violence, but we do know it does not correlate with less violence. However, it correlates with denial of decision-making power for the woman.

Stark writes,

What is taken from the women whose stories I hear almost daily—and what some victims use violence to restore—is the capacity for independent decision making in the areas by which we distinguish adults from children and free citizens from indentured servants. Coercive control entails a malevolent course of conduct that subordinates women to an alien will by violating their physical integrity (domestic violence), denying them respect and autonomy (intimidation), depriving them of social connectedness (isolation), and appropriating or denying them access to the resources required for personhood and citizenship (control). Nothing men experience in the normal course of their everyday lives resembles this conspicuous form of subjugation.

I don't know if it is possible to ever get someone who has not experienced this to imagine it. Do some think that women have a completely different constitution and will find fulfillment in subordination? Teaching the subordination of women ensures that some women will suffer this total deprivation of human dignity. It will ensure this. When a preacher preaches subordination some will be subordinated.

I would like to see a law which makes it illegal to put "obey" in the marriage ceremony, and a law which forbids teaching the "subordination of women" in the pulpit. The suffering is vastly greater than having someone steal a concrete physical belonging from you. Having someone rob you of your dignity is a crime more heinous than having your wallet stolen, your home ravaged and your body bruised.

The subordination of women should be criminalized.