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Coercive control is a severe form of domestic violence experienced by millions of children worldwide, where a controlling individual asserts continuous oppression over their family in everyday life. Drawing on in-depth interviews with children and mothers who have experienced coercive control,
Coercive Control in Children's and Mothers' Lives identifies the harms caused to mothers and children, and their processes of recovery. Analysing their struggles and successes, Katz shows the abuse that children and mothers were subjected to and how they can strive to reach out to each other and rebuild their lives.
List of contents
- 1 Understanding coercive control
- 2 Coercive control and the agentic child
- 3 Interviewing children and mothers about coercive control
- 4 Coercive control: Harms to children
- 5 Mother-child relationships under coercive control
- 6 Ready to recover? Challenges faced when breaking free of coercive control
- 7 Helping each other to recover: Mothers' and children's strategies
- 8 And they lived happily ever after? Outcomes for mother-child relationships after coercive control
- 9 A new way of life: Mutuality and closeness between mothers and children
- 10 Ways ahead
About the author
Emma Katz, Ph.D., is Senior Lecturer in Childhood and Youth at Liverpool Hope University, UK. Katz's scholarship explores coercive control-based domestic violence and abuse and its impacts on children and young people, including both the harms experienced by children and mothers and their recoveries. Katz is an internationally-acclaimed researcher, winning awards including the Women Against Violence Europe (WAVE)'s Corinna Seith Prize. Her research has been extensively utilised by organisations and practitioners in Europe and globally.
Summary
Coercive control is a severe form of domestic violence experienced by millions of children worldwide. It involves a perpetrator using a range of tactics to intimidate, humiliate, degrade, exploit, isolate and control a partner or family member. Some coercive control perpetrators use violence, others do not.
Drawing on interviews with children and mothers who have experienced coercive control-based domestic violence, this groundbreaking book sheds light on the impacts of coercive control on children, how it is perpetrators who must be held accountable for those impacts, and how resistance by children and mothers occurs. Resistance happens in everyday life, not just in response to incidents of violence. Breaking free from coercive control is not a one-off event but a sustained battle for safety and recovery in which child and adult survivors need supports and professional interventions that work.
Written accessibly for students, researchers, practitioners, survivors of domestic violence, and anyone with a general interest in the topic, the book provides a child-centered perspective to revolutionize our understanding of how children are affected by coercive control-based domestic violence.
Additional text
This is a timely book addressing an under-researched area of domestic abuse — the impact of coercive control on children. Katz begins with a powerful sentence, "if a situation of coercive control was a political system it would be a dictatorship", setting out clearly the entrapment victims experience. It has hitherto been popularly considered that children merely witness abuse and control, but this book graphically documents the experiences of both mothers and children showing that children are victims in their own right. It should be compulsory reading for every child protection professional and every family court judge.
