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.
Thank you as always for reading these posts.
What I want to do in this post is address the specific area of how children are affected by coercive control-based domestic abuse.
There is a lot in current perceptions around this issue that needs shifting.
To begin with, a lot of people don’t actually see how domestic abuse affects children. They think that domestic abuse is purely an issue between adults; or, if it does affect children, they see it as a relatively trivial and short lived harm that children could soon forget about.
Even where people do recognize how domestic abuse might harm children, the awareness is often incomplete.
Mainstream thinking tends to be that if children are going to be harmed by anything in relation to domestic abuse, it is seeing or hearing incidents of physical violence, or getting hurt themselves during such incidents. People often don’t think about abuse based on coercive control, and would struggle to see just how dangerous and harmful a coercive control-perpetrating father could be to children.
(I say father for a reason here. Of course, a coercively controlling mother is harmful too. However, 97% of those convicted for coercive control are men, so in the vast majority of cases it is the father who is the coercive control perpetrator in the family.)
In reality, coercive control is not just an “extra” thing that might be done by a domestic abuser. It is incredibly serious in its own right, and can be happening even when there is no accompanying physical violence that leaves bruises and injuries that an onlooker might see.
We can see this misconception in common statements that are said to victims-survivors, which usually are horribly inaccurate:
“He may have been violent with you, ma’am, but that doesn’t mean he’s not a good father to the children.”
“Yes he hit you, but he never hurt the children; he’s no danger to them.’
“The domestic violence is in the past — you need to stop dwelling on it, move on, and focus on co-parenting in the present.”
“You are the problem for talking about domestic violence. You are standing in the way of the children having a healthy relationship with their father.”
If you tried to convince most people – people like members of your community, the staff at your children’s school, a police officer or a judge – that you knew that a child was living under an ongoing, daily regime of coercive control and that this was an urgent, deeply harmful situation that needed to be addressed, you’d run the risk of being seen as over-anxious or exaggerating.
But, with the years of experience I have as an academic researcher, I can reassure you that you wouldn’t be exaggerating at all. I’d see it as an urgent and severe situation too.
What this post will show is that coercive control does harm children. Every coercive control tactic that a perpetrator is using will also be harming any children or young people in the family.
It’s my hope that readers might be able to show what I am writing here to someone in their life who doesn’t quite understand coercive control yet. I hope it might be eye-opening for people who previously haven’t read much around this subject but who are open to learning about it now.
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