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.

Coercive Control :4

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.

Some of the rights batterers deny to women are already protected in the public sphere, such as the rights to physical integrity and property. In these instances, law is challenged to extend protections to personal life. But most of the harms involved in coercive control are gender-specific infringements of adult autonomy that have no counterpart in public life and are currently invisible to the law. The combination of these big and little indignities best explains why women suffer and respond as they do in abusive relationships, including why so many women become entrapped, why some battered women kill their partners, why they themselves may be killed, or why they are prone to develop a range of psychosocial problems and exhibit behaviors or commit a range of acts that are contrary to their nature or to basic common sense or decency.

Coercive Control by Evan Stark [Word Document] HTML

Any Christian community which does not teach personal autonomy of wives is enabling coercive control, the infringement of basic human rights and the subordination of women. It is extremely difficult and humiliating for anyone to describe what it is like to be a victim of coercive control. However, it is evident in the readings of women on the internet that they are experiencing it. One women speaks of how difficult it is for her to kill her attitude of entitlement to make her own decisions about such things as cleaning the house and running errands.

What is amazing is that her story is posted for everyone to read as if it were a noble thing instead of an infringement of basic human dignity. Could a man imagine submitting every action of his day within his own home to someone else for approval?

Coercive Control: 3

My goal in posting from Evan Stark's work is to show that any Christian community which encourages authority of male over female is directly feeding incidents of coercive control. Some may think that domination is a neutral and amoral action. However, Stark shows how domination deprives women of basic human rights through being controlled.

It is not enough to combat the physical violence that is a concrete indication of control in some cases. It is the control itself that so deeply marks, deprives, and dehumanizes.

I will post from this paper [HTML] by Evan Stark for a few days.

Coercive control is a model of abuse that attempts to encompass the range of strategies employed to dominate individual women in personal life. Alternately referred to as coerced persuasion; conjugal, patriarchal or intimate terrorism; emotional or psychological abuse; indirect abuse; or emotional torture, it describes an ongoing pattern of sexual mastery by which abusive partners, almost exclusively males, interweave repeated physical abuse with three equally important tactics: intimidation, isolation, and control.

The easiest way to understand coercive control is to contrast it to the widespread equation of partner abuse with “domestic violence.” Domestic violence laws and most research in the field take an incident-specific focus and weigh the severity of abuse by the level of force used or injury inflicted what I call a “calculus of harms.” In marked contrast, the coercive control model relies on evidence that most battered women who seek help experience coercion as “ongoing” rather than as merely “repeated” and that the main marker of these assaults is their frequency or even their “routine” nature rather than their severity, a fact that gives abuse a “cumulative” effect found in no other assault crime. Physical harm and psychological trauma remain important in the coercive control model. But its theory of harms replaces the violation of physical integrity with an emphasis on violations of “liberty” that entail the deprivation of rights and resources essential to personhood and citizenship. In this view, the psychological language of victimization and dependence is replaced by the political language of domination, resistance, and subordination. . In the coercive control model, what men do to women is less important than what they prevent women from doing for themselves. In the forensic context where I work, women’s right to use whatever means are available to liberate themselves from coercive control derives from the right afforded to all persons to free themselves from tyranny not from the proximate physical or psychological means used to do this

The domestic violence model emphasizes the familial, cultural, interpersonal and psychological roots of abusive behavior. The coercive control model views the dynamics in abusive relationships from the vantage of the historical struggle for women’s liberation and men’s efforts to preserve their traditional privileges in personal life in the face of this struggle. The incredible strides women have made towards full equality, particularly since the l960’s, have been widely documented. These gains make it increasingly difficult for men to ensure women’s obedience and dependence through violence alone. In the face of this reality, millions of men have expanded their oppressive repertoire to include a range of constraints on women’s autonomy formerly imposed by law, religion, and women’s exclusion from the economic, cultural and political mainstream, in essence trying to construct a “patriarchy in miniature” in each individual relationship, the course of malevolent conduct known as coercive control. Although the aim of this conspicuous form of subjugation is to quash, offset or coopt women’s social gains (taking the money they earn, for instance), this strategy relies for success on the persistent inequalities based on sex that remain, including the huge gap in job opportunities and earnings that continues to advantage men.

Coercive Control by Evan Stark