Dr Emma Katz is widely regarded as one of 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.
Welcome again to Decoding Coercive Control with Dr Emma Katz.
In this post, I wanted to share information about an issue that comes up time and again when I speak to victims-survivors.
I communicate a lot with victims-survivors who are highly intelligent, very well educated people. Because of their professional or academic status, they often feel confused, embarrassed and ashamed that they have been domestic abuse and coercive control victims-survivors.
I wrote this post to say that this is not a burden they should be bearing.
One thing that sometimes happens when I speak to these victims-survivors is that they feel a need to explain to me that they are actually smart people, despite their having experienced abuse. I think this shows that many people feel there is a high likelihood that they will be judged as unintelligent if they reveal their true experiences.
Victims-survivors should NOT have to feel this way.
So, to contribute to pushing back against this horrible shaming of smart survivors, I’ve deep-dived into the 5 key reasons why domestic abuse has nothing to do with victims’-survivors’ intelligence levels.
By the end of this post, we will have exploded the myth that being a victim-survivor says anything negative about a person’s intelligence. We will also have identified what it really is that causes people to get caught in perpetrators’ webs of abuse.
I want to start off with a personal example. As a writer, I don’t tend to share a lot about my personal life. That’s my preference as an author. But I will share this.
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