I’ve been asked to comment on this remarkable excerpt from Evan Stark’s new book Coercive Control: The Entrapment of Women in Personal Life.
Stark laments that so much of the writing on domestic violence over the past thirty years has remained focused on the psychological weaknesses that lead women (who are the overwhelming victims of spousal or partner abuse) to stay in these relationships. Stark:
Because women have such ready access to rights and resources in liberal democratic societies, it is widely assumed that if abusive relationships endure, it is because women choose to stay, a decision that seems counterintuitive for a reasonable person. The logical explanation is that women who make this choice are deficient psychologically or in some other respect. Yet researchers have failed to discover any psychological or background traits that predispose any substantial group of women to enter or remain in abusive relationships. Battered women do suffer disproportionately from a range of psychological and behavioral problems, including some, like substance abuse and depression, that increase their dependence and vulnerability to abuse and control. As we will see momentarily, however, these problems only become disproportionate in the context of ongoing abuse and so cannot be its cause…
My emphasis. So if it’s not “women’s fault” for remaining with their abusers, and their decision to stay isn’t the result of a pre-existing psychological handicap, then why — why, why — do so many women find it so difficult to exit these relationships permanently? Stark points out that most of our talk about domestic violence is based around what seems like a logical assumption: that by leaving an abuser, women reduce their chances of being victimized. That may make intuitive sense, but Stark makes the case that the reverse is true:
In fact, around 80% of battered women in intact couples leave the abusive man at least once. These separations appear to decrease the frequency of abuse, but not the probability that it will recur. Indeed, the risk of severe or fatal injury increases with separation. Almost half the males on death row for domestic homicide killed in retaliation for a wife or lover leaving them. As we’ve also seen, a majority of partner assaults occur while partners are separated. So common is what legal scholar Martha Mahoney calls “separation assault” that women who are separated are 3 times more likely to be victimized than divorced women and 25 times more likely to be hurt than married women.
Bold emphasis is mine.
I’d heard this anecdotally, but confess I hadn’t really considered the implications of this.
Most of us who counsel women or girls who are in abusive relationships encourage these women to report the abuse and leave the relationship. We assume (at least, most of the folks I’ve talked to do) that getting “professional help” and “involving the police” and “moving out” are the best ways for a woman to keep herself safe. Many of us have heard women say things like “I’m afraid of what he’ll do to me if I leave him”, and we respond by making soothing noises that reassure her that the police or the courts or a shelter will provide her with all the protection she needs. Though logic would seem to make that self-evident, the sobering crime statistics Stark cites suggest otherwise.
I haven’t read the book yet, though it’s now on order. But I’m sobered by what I’ve read in this brief excerpt, and I’m all the more determined to expose our fundamental myth about partner violence. That fundamental myth says that we end partner violence primarily by empowering women to leave abuse relationships. The truth is that the available legal, social, and economic resources to protect women (and their children) once they’ve left are woefully inadequate.
Note: This thread is not to be used to launch attacks on feminism, or to question domestic violence statistics, or to advance the absurd MRA lie that men are the primary victims of partner abuse. All comments made in that vein will be deleted without warning.
wow, it’s nice to not read MRA vitriol for a change. Thanks, Hugo!
Thank you also for calling attention to this problem. What do you think would be the best way to advise women who are in abusive relationships who have reason to believe that leaving might make them less safe? If both leaving and staying endangers them, what can we do?
I guess in the same way that we need to get over the idea that there is something special [read: wrong] about rape victims that causes them to be vicitimized, we need to also let go of the idea that there is something wrong with abuse victims that causes them to either get abused in the first place, or to continue to endure abuse once it begins.
A common feminist idea is that we need to stop blaming the victims. I agree with this, of course, but sometimes it comes out as a criticism of anyone who suggests steps to avoid victimization. Why don’t we just tell the rapists to stop rather than telling women to lock their doors, as if it’s the women’s fault and not the rapists’? I think it’s more like that we know rapists or abusers are hopeless, and we hope the victims might be able to do something themselves.
The truth is, abusers and rapists are both capable of being dissuaded from their actions by consequences. That’s a good reason to take these crimes extremely seriously.
Tam - You’re right on target! While we suggest that people get good locks on their doors, do we suggest imprisoning those who are burglarized? When we make domestic violence and rape - unacceptable, there will be a lot less of them. We don’t need death sentences, but we do need taking the issues seriously and working to punish perpetrators and deal with their issues, rather than making survivors of abuse the “criminals” in a sense.
I was in a class for psychologists once about how to treat PTSD (Post Traumatic Strss Disorder.) Someone asked why some people seem to get so injured by traumatic times and then other people come through all right. Are some people just more resiliant? The instructor drew one finger across their other palm saying, You know what is the primarily determines how much someone is injured by a knife cut?…. The sharpness of the knife.
Don’t we want to believe otherwise? That we could protect ourselves? That we are not like those people who have horrible things happen to them? (Or at least, as he was addressing, that we could handle the trauma differently.) I thought that was a wise and compassionate answer.
Yeah, it is easy for me to believe that things like rape could happen to anyone, but harder for me to believe that about domestic violence, where there is an ongoing relationship dynamic. Thank you for the eye-opening post.
Hugo,
I don’t see it as pathology, but as a natural attempt to survive a horrible environment: the victim will tend to identify with the captor who is providing punishment and occasional positive reinforcement.
To say that there is nothing wrong is to ignore the years of psychological trauma inflicted.
As for the homicide rate, how many of those occur not when the person leaves, but when the person attempts to reconcile with the abuser?
One police officer finally left his abusive wife, a female police officer with the same service. She requested a reconciliation and he agreed to talk with her. She shot him. This is the pattern I saw in my years as a paramedic, although usually with female victims.
I’m not saying there isn’t a need for better laws, shelters, or something better than PFAs. Counselors attempt to tell the victims that abusers do not change. The problem is, the victims don’t always listen because of how they were traumatized.
Hi Hugo,
Thanks for writing about this. I was in an abusive relationship which I left in 2001. I still have nightmares, sometimes, about my ex. Even though we now live in different countries, there will always be tenuous contact due to him being my best friend’s brother. I never wanted to characterise what happened as domestic violence at all - I never sought outside help (except from friends) and I didn’t think the violence was “that bad” that I was what you might call a victim. There was always some excuse to be made about why it happened i.e. drink or what have you. I still feel resistance in my mind to calling it ‘abuse’ - I don’t consider myself to be a ‘victim’ in any way. However, reading things like this makes me ask myself: who does? And yeah - only now am I starting to realise how very scared I was, in that relationship, but also specifically afterwards. I remember making some weird kind of pact with my ex: he was begging me to come back, promising he would seek counselling, promising he would do anything for me. I said that if after four years away from each other (I was moving away to study) we both still ‘loved each other’ then I would come back and be with him…when I said that, I think I felt very confused and unsure about what would happen, whether I did love him (though by then the love was indistinguishable from guilt) and what he would do without me (he claimed to be suicidal and had mental health issues).
Actually, once I had moved away to a different city - it took a while for this to happen, a few months, I knew I was never going back. At first I missed him, we had lived together for two years and at some points during that time were practically inseperable to the point of suffocation. But then, I felt such indescribable relief and freedom. For a long time I wasn’t able to be intimate with anyone, emotionally, but this didn’t really matter because I was FREE. I remember laughing out loud to myself with actual glee walking down the street to my house, realising that there wasn’t anyone but MYSELF to tell me what to do or how to be.
The weird thing is, after four years of trying to forget about that period of my life altogether, and succeeding most of the time, I got a little bit scared. Because I knew - through my friends and his family - that he hadn’t found anyone else, that he still wanted me. His mother even tried to guilt trip me into going back. His name and thoughts of him are now synonymous in my mind with “bad dream”. Often in the actual dreams which I have, I am forced to go back and fulfil my word.
I am lucky because I did have the opportunities in life to leave this relationship. I needed to get far away, for a long time, to get over the idea of obligation - obligation, even, to the mess I felt I’d made of it the first time. I remember (clearer now, for years I avoided thinking about it at all) how it felt to be with someone who you thought only you could love/save.
So yes, I think fear is a factor in not leaving, or in going back. Fear for yourself and fear for the abuser (in that, like me, a lot of people who are involved with an abuser end up taking on the emotional burdens FOR the abuser, because the abuser is a mess, and you start to believe that that’s what love is).
This helps me understand why many women leave relationships with the help of an affair. While I do think adultery is wrong, in some cases it may be the lesser of two evils. If the woman can gain an instant ally and a backup source of defense, this may increase her odds of survival.
It hurts me to think of all those women in abusive relationships, and if this is true, why my advising one of them to leave last year may have been a very dangerous thing. Fortunately, it is not going to come to his hurting her. But it could have. I’ve got to get this book.
What do you think would help?
Thought-provoking post. But two questions:
1. Even if it is true that leaving is dangerous, how many of these men give ample warning before or during the relationship? I recently met a woman and we had a fairly pleasant conversation. But she mentioned that she was in a drug treatment program, so I chose not to ask for her number. I’m guessing that a lot of these guys are walking around with prison tattoos or well-deserved reputations. In the words of late Nicole Brown Simpson, “…I think you know his record.”
2. Some of my experience agrees with Rob. When I was recently volunteering at a domestic violence shelter, there was talk of a man who recently climbed the exterior of the multi-story building and banged on the window of his ex-partner.
One of the other residents asked “how did he know which window?”
So far, I haven’t read anything about the book that indicates that it’s truly groundbreaking. On another site, in fact, Evan Stark stated, “Others have said some of this before. But I think you’ll find, when you read the book, that it hasn’t been put together in this way before.”
Indeed, the use of the phrase “coercive control” in the context of domestic violence prevention and intervention goes back at least as far as Judith Lewis Herman’s book “Trauma and Recovery” (1992). In the chapter simply titled “Captivity,” she wrote, “Prolonged, repeated trauma, by contrast, occurs only in circumstances of captivity. When the victim is free to escape, she will not be abused a second time; repeated trauma occurs only when the victim is a prisoner, unable to flee, and under the control of the perpetrator.”
Herman added, “Political captivity is generally recognized, whereas the domestic captivity of women and children is often unseen.”
Finally, she noted, “Captivity, which brings the victim into prolonged contact with the perpetrator, creates a special type of relationship, one of coercive control. This is equally true whether the victim is taken captive entirely by force, as in the case of prisoners and hostages, or by a combination of force, intimidation, and enticement, as in the case of religious cult members, battered women, and abused children. The psychological impact of subordination to coercive control may have many common features, whether that subordination occurs within the public sphere of politics or within the private sphere of sexual and domestic relations… In situations of captivity, the perpetrator becomes the most powerful person in the life of the victim…”
Thus, I’m looking into how Stark’s concept of “coercive control” is substantially different from Herman’s? In what way, if any, does his work even rely or build on Herman’s (and “others”)?
I’m also intrigued by Stark’s suggestion that “coercive control” should be considered a “liberty” crime, since it is “designed to take away women’s freedom, autonomy, and dignity.”
That is true, of course. But, in most societies, it’s not just a man, one man, that cripples and crushes a woman’s, one woman’s, capacity to make choices and act on them. Instead, an abused woman is also made unfree by “manhood” often as it has been socially constructed within the context of a still-patriarchal society.
“In other words,” as wrote Nancy J. Hirschmann in a Frontiers article titled “Domestic Violence and the Theoretical Discourse of Freedom” (1996), “the ultimate barrier to women’s freedom is patriarchy, or the social, legal, and economic control that men are accorded over women; all other particular and specific barriers that individual women experience at any given time or place, in any given relationship, in any given experiential moment, can be understood only in this larger repressive context. Accordingly, battered women’s freedom is restricted by men’s violence and the sexist values that underpin and perpetuate it. Women’s freedom requires that this violence and its ideological supports be ended. As long as society does not recognize and support that goal, however, it is up to individual women to manage and cope in the best way they can. When looked at from this perspective, what may appear to be complicity, internalization of abuse, or even masochism may in reality be a form of resistance, management, or just plain survival…. But that does not mean she does not feel fear, that she wants or enjoys the beatings, or that she is free.”
I wonder, of course, whether Stark also indicts patriarchy in his book and, if so, also makes recommendations for finally bringing it to justice.
It has been widely known and discussed for decades now that batterers “develop an obsession when the victims try to leave” and “intensify physical violence and threats of homicide and suicide” (see, e.g., Subadra Marharja’s brief survey of research online titled “Violence in Marriage: Why Do Women Stay” [ca. 2000]). “Community response,” adds Marharja, “has been a major deterrent for many women to leave abusive relationships,” with the protective and legal systems being “largely responsible.”
Therefore, what I hope Stark does is offer clear and compelling advice on how DV preventionists and interventionists can put way more of their money and long-term resources where their collective mouth is to further ensure that no abused woman is LEFT behind.