Coercive Control

Charlotte Barlow, Sandra Walklate

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032228006
• eBook ISBN: 9781000555080
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book offers a critical appreciation of the nature and impact of coercive control in interpersonal relationships. It examines what this concept means, who is impacted by the behaviours it captures, and how academics, policymakers, and policy advocates have responded to the increasing recognition of the deleterious effects that coercive control has on especially women's lives.

The book discusses the historical emergence of this concept, who its main proponents have been, and how its effects have been understood. It considers the role of coercive control in making sense of women's pathway into crime as well as their experiences of it as victims. Coercive control has been presented predominantly as a gendered process, and consideration is given in this book to the efficacy of this assumption as well as the extent to which the concept makes sense for a wide constituency of marginalized women. In recent years, much energy has been given to efforts to criminalize coercive control, and the concerns that these efforts generate are discussed in detail, alongside what the limitations to such initiatives might be. In conclusion, the book situates the rising pre-occupation with coercive control within the broader concerns with policy transfer, ways of taking account of victim-survivor voices, alongside the importance of working towards more holistic policy responses to violence(s) against women.

The book will be of particular interest to academics, policymakers, and practitioners working in criminal justice who wish to understand both the nature and extent of coercive control and the importance of appreciating the role of nuance in translating that understanding into practice.

1What is ‘coercive control’?

DOI: 10.4324/9781003019114-1

Introduction

Coercive control has been recognized as a feature of intimate partner relationships since the early 1980s. The term was first used by Schechter (1982) and has been differently emphasized in the work of Johnson (1995) and Stark (2007) among others since. More recently, the invidious effects of its presence in intimate partner relationships has been documented in relation to children (Callaghan et al., 2018), on mothering practices (Heward-Belle, 2017), on what Elizabeth (2017) has called ‘custody stalking’, as well as in the digital world (Harris and Woodlock, 2019). The purpose of this introduction is to document the history and development of this concept, paying particular attention to its diverse and contested usage. This overview will set the scene for the chapters that follow, each of which will pick up on and examine the utility of this concept as a way of understanding criminal behaviour, experiences of victimization, and the kinds of policy responses that have been developed in light of this knowledge. However, first a brief consideration of what is meant by coercive control.

Coercive control: a definition

ANROWS (2021: 1) states:

Coercive control is a course of conduct aimed at dominating and controlling another (usually an intimate partner, but can be other family members) and is almost exclusively perpetrated by men against women.

The key element in this definition, and one that runs through all definitions of coercive control, is the emphasis on a course of conduct: a repeated pattern of behaviour designed to undermine the autonomy of another individual. It is in essence the invidious assertion of male power, not necessarily by force and/or physical violence, but by strategies of psychological, emotional, and financial abuse. It is the way in which these strategies impact upon a woman’s sense of herself that leads Stark (2007) to talk of coercive control as a liberty crime. However, as understandings of coercive control have increasingly made their presence felt in the policy domain, the question of who does what to whom and how effectively policy and practice can capture that dynamic have come under ever closer scrutiny. That scrutiny challenges the gendered assumptions outlined in the ANROWS definition above (with many men’s groups arguing that they too are subjected to coercive control); the ability of practitioners to recognize who the victim and who the perpetrator might be when responding to coercive control (resulting in the problem of misrecognition, i.e., identifying the defensive strategies of a woman as constituting perpetration), and the capacity of the criminal law (recently labelled by Goodmark (2018) as the criminalization thesis) to respond to relationships characterized by coercive control. In what follows, we discuss each of these issues in turn, but first a brief overview of the historical and contextual development of this concept will set the scene for understanding its contestation.

Coercive control: a brief conceptual history

There are two features to the ongoing debate about coercive control that remain unreconciled; the extent to which it is gendered (that is something that men engage in over their female partners) and the extent to which physical violence is, or is not, a constituent element of such controlling behaviour. In some respects, these features echo the wider debate over the gendered nature and the extent of domestic abuse. This is often characterized as a methodological issue between those who favour the Conflicts Tactics Scale as their preferred measuring instrument for such abuse and those who favour more feminist informed approaches (as an example of this debate, consider the differences between the work of Straus (1979) and Dobash and Dobash (1992)). Frequently referred to as the gender-symmetrical versus the gender-asymmetrical debate, Stark (2007) observed that this was a somewhat sterile distinction to make when viewed from the position of women seeking help during the 1990s. He suggests that for them, the recourse to the criminal justice process, because of their experiences of violence, was their only route to call their abusers to account. This did not mean that this kind of physical abuse was the only kind they had been subjected to. His work, among that of many others, documents a wide range of abusive behaviours endemic in problematic relationships, from emotional abuse to psychological abuse to financial abuse, all designed to control female partners. Enter the concept of coercive control.

Schechter (1982) was one of the first scholars to name domestic abuse as a form of coercive and controlling behaviour. She conceptualized such abuse as gendered, in which predominantly men sought to gain control over women. Schechter (1982: 216) suggested that abusers used physical, sexual, emotional, financial abuse, and threats to dominate female intimate partners, and these strategies facilitated a pattern of coercive control. This work published just after Straus’ (1979) introduction of the Conflicts Tactics Scale, resulted in over a decade of work, concerned to establish the extent to which such abuse was or was not gendered.

The work of Johnson (1995; 2008) in many ways sits between that of Schechter and Straus. He suggested that different types of domestic abuse existed and created a typology comprising four types of such abuse. The first type in this typology he called coercive controlling violence. He suggested that this comprised a pattern of emotionally abusive intimidation, coercion, and control coupled with physical violence against partners. In his early work, Johnson used the term intimate terrorism to capture this form of abuse. In many ways, his articulation of coercive controlling violence is similar to the patterned abuse presented in the Duluth Power and Control Wheel (Pence and Paymar, 1993). This wheel features various forms of abuse, such as intimidation, emotional abuse, isolation, minimizing, denying, asserting male privilege, economic abuse, coercion, and threats (Pence and Paymar, 1993). Johnson (2008) suggests that because such nonviolent control tactics are often just as effective in exerting power and control without the use of physical violence, coercive controlling violence does not necessarily manifest itself in high levels of violence. In his work, coercive controlling violence is perpetrated primarily by men. Moreover, while Johnson (2008) recognizes the ways in which patriarchy and gender inequality contribute to this kind of gender asymmetry, he does not develop this understanding to the same extent and in the same way as Stark (2007) has done.

Johnson (2008) goes on to make further distinctions between coercive controlling violence and other forms of violence that occur within intimate relationships. He suggests that situational couple violence is the most common type of physical aggression and has causes and consequences different from those of coercive controlling violence. This form of violence results from situations or arguments between partners that escalate on occasion to physical violence. Johnson’s (2008) also discusses what he calls violent resistance, described elsewhere as self-defence. This attempts to capture when, predominantly women (victims), act violently towards their coercive and controlling partner to stop the violence they experience in their relationship. Finally, Johnson (2008) suggests the category of separation instigated violence. This is the kind of violence that occurs in a relationship at the point of separation. In all of this work, the gendered nature of the abusive behaviour features in different ways, as does the emphasis on the presence or absence of physical violence. However, in offering this level of nuance to understanding the complexity of abuse in interpersonal relationships, Johnson has faced criticism for minimizing the overall gendered nature of domestic abuse. Conversely, this is the key emphasis in Stark’s (2007) work.

Stark’s (2007) concept of coercive control has gained significant currency across the world since the publication of his book. He defines coercive control as ‘calculated, malevolent conduct deployed almost exclusively by men to dominate individual women by intervening repeated physical abuse with three equally important tactics, namely intimidation, isolation and control’ (Stark 2007: 2). This version of coercive control attempts to capture the ‘cage’ of intimidating, degrading, and regulatory practices engineered by abusers to inculcate fear and threat in victims’ everyday lives (Myhill and Johnson, 2016: 357; see also Kirkwood, 1993). Stark emphasizes the centrality of gender in these processes, arguing that coercive control most frequently operates within heterosexual relationships in which men use ‘social norms of masculinity and femininity… to impose their will’ (2007: 6; see also Westmarland, 2015) and argues that coercive control can exist in relationships with or without the presence of physical violence. Importantly, it is the threat of violence and abuse that limits victims’ autonomy, choice, and day-to-day activities. As a result, a victim’s psychological well-being can be adversely affected, with the seriousness of this varying depending on factors such as the extent of control, the type of tactics used, and/or a victim’s level of resilience and coping strategies (Williamson, 2010). The adverse effects of a sustained period of coercive control amount to psychological trauma and in some cases can result in suicide (Bettinson, 2020). Central to Stark’s (2007) theorization of coercive control is that the abuse comprises a sustained course of conduct rather than isolated incidents of abuse.

This brief overview offers a flavour of the way in which the key proponents of this concept developed and interpreted its salience in understanding domestic abuse since the early 1980s. From this overview, it is self-evident that while there is some common agreement on the presence of coercive control, there is not the same level of agreement on the extent of its presence and/or how it might be manifested. Indeed, in a recent overview of work using this concept Hamberger et al. (2017) identified 22 different definitions and operationalizations of this concept, all of which led to different research findings on its efficacy. Further, Walby and Towers (2018: 11) argue that there is ‘conceptual confusion’ endemic in the use of this term. They particularly stress conceptual disagreements concerning the relationship between physical violence and nonphysical coercion, with coercive control being interpreted in public debate as focusing attention on nonphysical, psychological abuse, rather than physical violence. In light of this kind of confusion, they propose a third approach to conceptualizing domestic abuse. This they call ‘domestic violent crime’ (Walby and Towers, 2018). In this framework, all violence is conceived as coercive and controlling. For them, violent crime is defined by reference to both the act and the harm it causes, where what counts as physical abuse can include more than just cuts and bruises. This approach not only centres the gendered nature of domestic abuse; it also places importance on the sex of the victim, the sex of the perpetrator, the perpetrator-victim relationship, whether it includes any sexual dynamics, and potentially any gendered motivation. One important implication of this approach is that it permits the inclusion and analysis of same-sex relationships as having the potential for the same dynamics as heterosexual relationships. In other words, in separating out sex from gender, coercive control while a predominantly gendered strategy is not necessarily sexed and/or the sole preserve of heterosexual couples. However, not all commentators agree with this approach, arguing that it affords primacy to physical abuse over psychological abuse (Donovan and Barnes, 2021; Myhill and Kelly, 2021). Furthermore, Donovan and Barnes (2019) suggest that sexuality is rendered invisible in Walby and Tower’s (2018) concept of domestic violent crime.

In many ways, the debate alluded to here reaches into one that stretches beyond coercive control itself and into contemporary pre-occupations with the terms sex and gender and what each of these terms might mean. These are issues not of direct relevance to the discussion here. Nevertheless, the search for the operationalization of a concept that does not assume heterosexuality as the norm is important, especially in relation to devising appropriate ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 What is ‘coercive control’?
• 2 Coercion into crime: The role of coercive control
• 3 Coercive control and victimization
• 4 Criminalizing coercive control
• 5 Coercive control, the man of law, and the role of the state
• 6 Concluding thoughts: Coercive control, victim-survivors, and the policy process
• Index