Despite a sharpened focus on the centrality of coercive control employed by perpetrators in abusive intimate relationships, tactics of control are often overlooked by social work practitioners, service support workers, police, courts and other government officials involved in domestic and family violence cases.
In one of our most recent workshops we therefore explored some of the ways that family and friends regularly play an active role in identifying behaviors of coercive control, provide support and hope for the victim, recognise the impact of coercive control on the woman’s relationships, and negotiate potential dangers involved in leaving an abusive partner.
We also examined some of the ways we can challenge the practice assumptions relating to perpetrator abuse and victim behavior by gaining a better understanding of family and friends’ involvement in supporting women who are victims of coercive abuse. Our workshop was also designed to inform and strengthen service workers’ ability to identify covert tactics of coercive control so that they can better assist women and children exposed to domestic abuse.
Social work research has only very recently directed its critical lens towards coercive control as a technique commonly employed by perpetrators of domestic abuse. However, the use of coercive control within partner relationships such as the act of isolating the partner, monitoring and stalking is still identified as a ‘new area of challenge’ and as a ‘problem area’ by some social work researchers and regularly overlooked by social worker practitioners trained to recognise and respond to domestic abuse.
Despite the dominant cultural belief that domestic abuse can be identified as a physical expression of violence or as a series of physical alterations between two people, abuse does not only, or even mostly, consist of physical acts or body punishing behaviors. The core dynamics of domestic violence are most often non-physical in expression. These can be explained as forms of psychological and emotional abuse part of a larger pattern of coercive abuse.
Coercive control often includes extremely manipulative tactics. These often start off small, hardly recognizable even to the victims themselves and rarely to outsiders, these later expand to threats, shaming and undermining of the victim’s self-esteem with the aim of completely dominating the victim partner within the relationship. The severity of its impacts centers on the 5 common operations of control, power, terror, threat, and the instilling of fear. What we need to know here too is that these techniques can and often vary and therefor in isolation they are difficult to recognize as domestic abuse. As the control shifts depending on what the perpetrator sees his victim as relying on, valuing or gaining strength from- it is about intimidating, disempowering and isolating and ultimately controlling the entire being.
So for example, if the victim is close to particular family members or friends, then these are often the individuals that the perpetrator will attempt to isolate the victim from. In our workshop we explored some of the ways in which some family and friends to victims often become skilled at identifying techniques of coercive control. Many family and friends are regularly able to ‘read between the lines’ to detect forms of partner control. In our workshop we discussed some of these ‘clues’ as well as how friends and family negotiate potential dangers for the victim involved in leaving the abusive relationship. Our workshop was very successful and many of our participants shared their views and thoughts on gendered violence within the home.
We are very interested in your views on this topic. Are you a friend or a family member to a woman who has been exposed to coercive control? What kind of control techniques did you identify? In what ways were you able to offer support? We value your thoughts and comments.
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