Lecture 11a: Coercive control

What are 5 dominant understandings of intimate partner and family violence?

• occasional eruptions of physical violence

• some women choose to live with violent men

• disconnected from social relations or power and control

• unrelated to social inequities and social hierarchy

• children are either used as mechanisms to heams their mothers, or harmed with “exposure” to abuse of their mother

What 3 requirements are necessary for understanding coercive control?

• see interpersonal violence as a problem produced and sustained by social inequity rather than by a few “bad” individuals

• create new ways of thinking about family violence as nuanced and normalized vs. as discrete acts of severe physical violence

• appreciate coercion and controlling behaviour as serious and dangerous forms of violence, more dangerous than incidents of physical violence

What decade did coercive control come to fruition?

1970s

Who offered the first conceptualization of corercive control?

Dobash & Dobash

Describe the conceptual origins of coercive control.

• raising awareness that women were suffering from an epidemic of abuse at the hands of their partners

• opening of women’s shelters allowed the recognition of eerily familiar stores

What did Stark emphasize about coercive control?

• used women’s testimonies tod escribe everyday life and the micro-regulation that occurs to assert control

• gendered roles underpin techniques of control and normalise them/hide them within view

• emphasizes the particularity of individualized abuse based on privileged access to information about a partner’s vulnerability

Name 10 different patterns & techniques used in coercive control.

1. Establish trust/love (love-bombing)

2. Isolate/erode social resources

3. Restriction or sabotage of activities including work

4. Enforce trivial demands slowly eroding boundaries, escalating with compliance including from false confessions to criminal acts

5. Demonstrate omnipotence - surveillance using technology; stalking; stanguation

6. Monopolize/alter perception

7. Humiliate or degrade - using secrets share in

8. Threaten to humiliate, hurt or kill children, family, friends, or pets

9. Abuse physically, emotionally, financially and/or sexually, or abuse those they care about

10. Ongoing - rarely ends with the relationship, abuser uses any avenue of contact to continue (litigation abuse)

How is coercive control a crime of liberty?

• A crime of liberty → coercive control is the subordination and domination of one human being to another

  • characterized by fear with or without physical abuse

  • erodes a sense of self and social, emotional, and financial resources

  • provides a sense of “entrapment” that:

    • removes a person from full participation in social life

    • restricts a person’s access to resources

What is the primary harm in coercive control?

political → deprivation of rights, resources, and power that are critical to personhood and citizenship

Common myths of coercive control?

• women who fall for this must be weak

• no one is immune - it is the ‘worst form’ of torture

In what ways can the “weak woman” stereotype be debunked in coercive control?

• there is no victim ‘type’

• women who are marginalized are over-represented → related to social positioning and resources

• same-sex relations with power inequities can follow the same pattern

• women can use CC on men, but it’s relatively rare and much less likely to lead to serious harm,

In what ways is coercive control underpinned by patriarchy?

• ideologies of masculinity

  • entitlement to control

  • role as protector

• dominant social understandings of “live”, passion, romance, and care, are conflated with jealousy

• control within intimate relationships is an unrealistic and unattainable illusion of patriarchy

• power and violence operate as opposing dualism; as power wanes, violence will rise

What are 4 ways that family courts processes entrench inequitable power relations by?

• constituting mothers as “uncooperative” or “dysregulated”

• subjecting mothers and children to hostile interrogations that retraumatize and penalize fear

• perpetuating “widespread misperception” or “persistent stereotype” that women make vengeful false allegations of abuse

• relying on debunked theories such as “parental alienation”

How does coercive control apply to children?

• intimate partner violence has only recently been understood as a form of child maltreatment

• children are constituted as “witnesses of” or “exposed to” intimate partner violence rather than subjects of the violence

• recent shift within popular media, academic discourses, and legislation has demonstrated appreciation of the dangers children face as a mechanism for manipulation in the context of the CC directed toward their mothers leading to significant legal reforms

List 5 harmful impacts of living with coercive control.

• control of time, movement, and activities within the home

• narrowed space for action

• isolation from sources of support

• resistance of these impacts was also described

• children’s feelings of being responsible for the violence; preserve a sense of agency

Research objectives into coercive control?

• to explore how children are considered in relation to coercive control within family violence and child protection legislation reforms in Ontario, Canada

• to better understand how social and legal structures interrupt or stabilize the impacts of coercive control on children

What are the 9 different kinds of conduct that constitutes family violence when directly or indirectly exposed to a child?

1. Physical abuse (including forced confinement but excluding the use of reasonable force to protect themselves or another person)

2. Sexual abuse

3. Threats to kill or cause bodily harm to any person

4. Harrassment, including stalking

5. The failure to provide the necessaries of life

6. Psychological abuse

7. Financial abuse

8. Threats to kill or harm an animal or damage property

9. The killing or harming of an animal or the damaging of property

What are the 5 instances in which a child is in need of protection?

1. Suffered physical harm

2. there is a risk that the child is likely to suffer physical harm

3. the child has been sexually abused

4. there is a risk that the child is sexually abused

5. the child has suffered emotional harm

Why is the term “best interests” potentially problematic?

• agency and capacity are constituted as a characteristic of the child, rather than produced by the social context

• “best interests” foster paternalism in ways that solicit but refuse children’s agency qnd views

• encourages a discourse of risk/safety that privileges the perspectives of adults in decision-making about children’s lives

• constituted as a rights holder but not the agent who determines those rights

What is retributive justice?

• operates on the ideology that those who commit wrongful acts should suffer proportionate punishment

• retribution often means further challenges for the child to have their basic needs met

• retributive justice ir mired in individualization → operating to ignore deeper systemic issues that set the conditions for violations