Dr Emma Katz is widely regarded as one 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.
Mothers who were subjected to domestic abuse by their children’s father or father figure shouldn’t feel guilty or blameworthy for their children having lived in a home where domestic abuse was happening.
There, I said it.
It’s the perpetrators who deserve the guilt and the blame.
In societies like ours, mother-blaming is rampant and mothers are (unfairly) seen as far more accountable than fathers are for their children’s well-being.
Because of this, mother-blaming comes so naturally and automatically to many people that they don’t stop to think about it. For most people, because they live in mother-blaming societies, it takes conscious effort and mental exertion to even think about why it might not actually be fair to blame a mother in certain circumstances, and to begin to work out where the blame should actually lie.
I believe it’s really important that we try to combat this. Abuse victims-survivors have more than enough to deal without the additional burden of feeling bad for things that weren’t their fault.
To boldly tell a mother that she doesn’t deserve to feel guilty for something that adversely affected her children is therefore a controversial statement, to say the least. But I’m standing up and saying it, and in this post I’m going to explain why this is true in cases of coercive control-based domestic abuse.
A Disclaimer
There are some people who have survived father or father-figure perpetrated domestic abuse in their childhood who have also had a mother who was abusive in her own right towards her children, independent of the father’s influence.
I’m talking here about mothers who would have still been abusive towards their children even if the children’s father had been 100% non-abusive.
In these cases, although the mother is not responsible for the father’s domestic abuse, she is responsible for any harm she caused that was truly independent of the abusive actions of the perpetrating father and the consequences of those actions.
I will explain this point later in the post, using a detailed example to do so.
In order to understand why survivor mothers don’t deserve to be blamed because their children lived in a home where abuse was happening, we need to delve deeply into the real nature of domestic abuse.
We’re going to draw on the findings of relevant scientific research studies as we go.
And as we’ll see, understanding coercive control – which is at the center of domestic abuse – is key.
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