Why Understanding Coercive Control Legislation Can Help You

And why it's so difficult and important

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Anyone who has experienced coercive control, who’s dealt with someone with a personality disorder, who sends their child off to a coercive controller, is desperate for justice, for protection, for recognition of the agony and the pain. There’s a deep and deserved need for some sort of order to be restored to their lives, for a solution. The realities of Family Court, an adversarial system that allows space for both parties to be heard, are usually much different.

It’s useful to understand how legislation around coercive control can effect change and how it gets applied in Court, but also how it too is a highly charged and debated topic. Knowing what the considerations and drivers are can help manage expectations and also inform behavior and actions at the outset, so you can be more strategic going in. This is essential for anyone going up against a coercive controller.

Coercive Control Policy Change

In the past five years, there’s been a movement towards policy change around coercive control in the UK, Ireland, Australia, and Canada, where coercive control must be considered by the court in parenting claims, and in parts of the US, where more than half a dozen states have passed coercive control laws, and bills are pending in other states, including Maine, Kentucky and New York. This is a movement in the right direction‚ and at the same time it brings serious considerations along with it.

Family courts face huge challenges in identifying abuse; there are structural and practical limitations, trauma-informed education about coercive control is not mandated, and there’s a debate on how to move forward. Domestic abuse often occurs behind closed doors with no witnesses, leaving courts to navigate conflicting accounts with no clear evidence and a lot of he said/she said around personality-based disagreements.

Abusers are blamers; they have distorted ways of thinking. They may be skilled manipulators who present themselves as calm, reasonable, and credible in court settings, while victims may appear emotional or unstable. In any other setting, it would be totally rational to respond defensively and with emotion to abuse, but in court, it works against the victim. In the win-lose structure of Family Court, blaming and attention-seeking are to the abuser’s benefit. This becomes particularly problematic when lying is so difficult to prove, and is rarely punished.

Abusers exploit the legal process as a form of post-separation abuse and control, filing frivolous motions, demanding excessive court appearances, draining the victim financially, or using custody disputes to maintain contact with their victims. They play the victim despite being anything but, and paint themselves as devoted parents, while using the children as pawns. In Family Court, there are no absolute limits to how many motions can be filed, though there may be consequences after a pattern of litigation abuse.

Changes in legislation around coercive control offer a legal framework for judges to intervene when physical abuse isn’t present. All this is good, but there are challenges to making this work for, and not against, victims.

The Supposition of ‘Parental Equality.’

There’s still the supposition of ‘parental equality.’ Despite the adoption of legislation to protect victims of DV and their children, batterers are still gaining custody of children at the expense of mothers. In the early 2000’s there seemed to be renewed interest in approaching domestic violence in the courts with a more balanced approach. Yet even now, the courts are separating adult violence from child abuse, though research suggests otherwise, favoring contact over safety, and turning against protective mothers should they allege abuse.

Joan Meier, director of the National Family Violence Law Center at the George Washington University Law School, and co-author of “Child Custody Outcomes in Cases Involving Parental Alienation and Abuse Allegations,” has tried for years to get judges to understand the importance of nonphysical abuse patterns when assessing their cases.

She marks the distinction between coercive control and physical violence as a feeling of ownership over the victim: “It’s the ‘If I can’t have you, nobody can’ kind of attitude, whereas violence, per se, isn’t always necessarily that.”

In speaking in favor of CT’s SB1060, Meier testified that “the inclusion and definition of coercive control in the custody law is critically needed because the failure to identify and attend to the serious safety implications of coercive control has contributed to numerous destructive outcomes for children and mothers,” but then went on to qualify considerations, for example citing that “‘proof or impact’ among other things, of coercive control should not be a requirement, as it’s too difficult to prove what’s in an abuser’s head.”

According to Meier, “Although custody litigation is often the primary venue in which an abuser continues his fight for control over his victim(s), this danger is frequently ignored or dismissed in family courts around the country. Both anecdotal experiences and national empirical research indicate that mothers’ abuse – especially child abuse - allegations in custody cases are more often than not rejected, and actually increase mothers’ chances of losing custody. One reason researchers have identified is a tendency to discount the credibility of women who allege adult or child abuse by male litigants.”

Recently, in the US, legislation has been passed at both the state and federal levels to protect children against abuse, but the language contained therein doesn’t allow for the consideration of alienation (see Kayden’s Law). “Some of these state laws now require family court judges to be trained in child abuse and domestic violence ‘only,’ indicating that alienation education is not allowed…. education is needed for assessing and treating both abuse and alienation, so that children can be protected from domestic violence and child sexual abuse where it exists in many cases, but also from the loss of a relationship with a healthy parent due to alienation.”

It’s positive that the language of coercive control is making its way into the legislative lexicon, and at the same time, it must be treated with consideration and nuance. There are glaring issues, namely lack of clear judicial direction to apply the language, the tacit continued application of the junk, debunked science of Parental Alienation Syndrome, the concern that lower-income and diverse groups would be disproportionately targeted, and not least that some of the behaviors of a IPV survivor might be very similar to the perpetrator, in which case the very legislation enacted on behalf of the victim would end up hurting them. This might include defensive violence such as blocking a physical attack, surveilling (ie, recording or reading the abuser’s texts) as a defensive move, or hiding funds. While the victim might have been pushed to the limit, all of these things could constitute an argument on behalf of the abuser.

It’s a maddening, disquieting, re-traumatizing state of affairs for victims who are so desperate for their stories to be heard, for some sort of justice, but who may be fearful of the very institutions that are supposed to protect them, which may keep them entrapped in situations of abuse.

What you can do