For 15 years, the Safe & Together Model has trained professionals in the importance of centering coercive controlling patterns of behaviors if you want to understand the harm domestic abuse perpetrators create for their children & how that is parenting choice. Failures to link coercive control to child abuse & neglect make it easier to blame adult survivors, who are being protective, with failure-to-protect & parental alienation.
The Safe & Together Model's perpetrator pattern-based approach links coercive control in a number of different ways, creating a foundation for a domestic violence-informed practice that helps professionals to partner with survivors and intervene with perpetrators as parents while also mapping the adult survivors attempts to protect children which may not have access to formal services such as police, child protection or counseling because these interventions may not be safe & can create more danger for adult & child survivors.
New research is backing up this approach by exploring how coercive control impacts children directly via multiple pathways to harm. In this episode, Ruth and David talk with Dr Emma Katz, a leading research specialist in the harms caused by perpetrators to mothers and children in the context of domestic abuse. The topics of conversation include:
Access Dr. Katz's Research
Dr. Emma Katz Bio
She is a Senior Lecturer in Childhood and Youth at Liverpool Hope University and has won multiple awards for her research, including the Corinna Seith Prize, awarded by Women Against Violence Europe in 2016. Emma has also written for the academic journal Child Abuse Review. Her most recent article, ‘When Coercive Control Continues to Harm Children: Post‐Separation Fathering, Stalking and Domestic Violence’, is now available to read and download, as is her 2016 article ‘Beyond the Physical Incident Model: How Children Living with Domestic Violence are Harmed by and Resist Regimes of Coercive Control’, which is one of the journal’s most viewed articles to date. Alongside these, Emma is releasing a book titled Coercive Control in Children’s and Mothers’ Lives which will be published in early 2022 by Oxford University Press.
Now available! Mapping the Perpetrator’s Pattern: A Practitioner’s Tool for Improving Assessment, Intervention, and Outcomes The web-based Perpetrator Pattern Mapping Tool is a virtual practice tool for improving assessment, intervention, and outcomes through a perpetrator pattern-based approach. The tool allows practitioners to apply the Model’s critical concepts and principles to their current case load in real
Check out David Mandel's new book "Stop Blaming Mothers and Ignoring Fathers: How to transform the way we keep children safe from domestic violence."
For 15 years, the Safe & Together Model has trained professionals in the importance of centering coercive controlling patterns of behaviors if you want to understand the harm domestic abuse perpetrators create for their children & how that is parenting choice. Failures to link coercive control to child abuse & neglect make it easier to blame adult survivors, who are being protective, with failure-to-protect & parental alienation.
The Safe & Together Model's perpetrator pattern-based approach links coercive control in a number of different ways, creating a foundation for a domestic violence-informed practice that helps professionals to partner with survivors and intervene with perpetrators as parents while also mapping the adult survivors attempts to protect children which may not have access to formal services such as police, child protection or counseling because these interventions may not be safe & can create more danger for adult & child survivors.
New research is backing up this approach by exploring how coercive control impacts children directly via multiple pathways to harm. In this episode, Ruth and David talk with Dr Emma Katz, a leading research specialist in the harms caused by perpetrators to mothers and children in the context of domestic abuse. The topics of conversation include:
Access Dr. Katz's Research
Dr. Emma Katz Bio
She is a Senior Lecturer in Childhood and Youth at Liverpool Hope University and has won multiple awards for her research, including the Corinna Seith Prize, awarded by Women Against Violence Europe in 2016. Emma has also written for the academic journal Child Abuse Review. Her most recent article, ‘When Coercive Control Continues to Harm Children: Post‐Separation Fathering, Stalking and Domestic Violence’, is now available to read and download, as is her 2016 article ‘Beyond the Physical Incident Model: How Children Living with Domestic Violence are Harmed by and Resist Regimes of Coercive Control’, which is one of the journal’s most viewed articles to date. Alongside these, Emma is releasing a book titled Coercive Control in Children’s and Mothers’ Lives which will be published in early 2022 by Oxford University Press.
Now available! Mapping the Perpetrator’s Pattern: A Practitioner’s Tool for Improving Assessment, Intervention, and Outcomes The web-based Perpetrator Pattern Mapping Tool is a virtual practice tool for improving assessment, intervention, and outcomes through a perpetrator pattern-based approach. The tool allows practitioners to apply the Model’s critical concepts and principles to their current case load in real
Check out David Mandel's new book "Stop Blaming Mothers and Ignoring Fathers: How to transform the way we keep children safe from domestic violence."
Speaker 1: [00:00:16] All right, we're back, we're back. So welcome to partner with a survivor. And I'm Kristen Mandel. [00:00:22][5.6]
Speaker 2: [00:00:23] And I'm David Mandel, and I feel like we haven't done this in forever. So I feel like I'm a little bit out of practice. [00:00:28][5.2]
Speaker 1: [00:00:28] We'll get right back on the OK. [00:00:29][1.1]
Speaker 2: [00:00:30] OK. So I'm the executive director of the Safe and Together Institute, [00:00:32][2.4]
Speaker 1: [00:00:33] and I'm the strategic relationship e-learning and communications manager. [00:00:37][4.3]
Speaker 2: [00:00:38] And I don't know if you officially had that title fully last time we did the show, but it is. It is official. It is. And it's people should write her and ask her what the strategic relationships part of the title means, because it's actually a very important part of what she does. Yes. So, so this podcast partnered with Survivor, you know, going back to the beginning, so people understand was Ruth's idea, and it was a way for her and I to extend our conversations about my experience as a professional and her experiences as a survivor. [00:01:07][29.3]
Speaker 1: [00:01:08] But above and beyond that safe and together institute one of their principles and components, is partnering with survivors. And that concept really works its way through everything that we do, that the outcomes, the practices for populations which are survivors need to be grounded in survivors experiences and professionals need to hear that and listen to that even when it's hard. [00:01:33][25.2]
Speaker 2: [00:01:34] So in a minute, we're going to talk about we're going to do an interview, not talk about. We're going to talk with Dr. Emma Katz. But before I introduce her, I just want to say that we've been getting a lot of feedback from folks about listening to the show and how they were using it. You know, and just yesterday, somebody was talking to me about how they're listening to the show on how being trauma informed is not the same thing as being domestic violence informed and to just want to encourage people, you know, that are professionals out there to use the show for supervision, for group supervision, for discussions? We're hearing people using them for continuing education. Yeah. And so we're really pleased that we regularly now once, twice, three times a week will be on other calls and people were reference how they were listening to the show and how it impacted them. So we're we're real excited about that. Yeah. And we're really excited about this interview. I'm actually super excited and I say super excited a lot. I realize I am and and I'm we're going to be talking with Dr. Emma Katz around coercive control and children. And coercive control has been at the center of the safety of the model for 15 years, and we're child centered models. So this is right in our wheelhouse. And so let me introduce her and and then we'll start the conversation. So Dr. Emma Katz is a leading research specialist in the harms caused by perpetrators to mothers and children in the context of domestic abuse. She's a senior lecturer in childhood and youth at Liverpool Hope University and has won multiple awards for her research, including the Coroner Prize, whereby Women Against Violence Europe in 2016. Emma has also written for the academic journal Child Abuse Review and her most recent article When Coercive Control Continues to Harm Children Post-Separation Fathering Stalking Domestic Violence is now available to read and download, as is her 2016 article. Beyond the physical incident model, our children living in domestic violence are harmed by and resist regimes of coercive control, which is also published in Child Abuse and Review. And it's one of their most viewed articles to date, actually, which is which is no surprise. And now, probably most excitingly, we were just chatting before the week we started the recording that coming out in early 2020. Two, fingers crossed, is Dr. Katz book title, course Control and Children's and Mothers Lives, which is going to be published by Oxford University Press. So. So, Emma, thank you for joining us. [00:04:14][160.3]
Speaker 3: [00:04:16] Thanks, David, for. [00:04:16][0.6]
Speaker 2: [00:04:17] You know, and you've already keynoted one of our conferences. You're not a newcomer to the safe and together space, but we're really excited to welcome you to partner with Survivor. And I'm going to just jump right in there because for anybody familiar with the domestic violence field and the children, domestic violence knows there's tons of writing out there about domestic violence and kids, you know, and about the harm domestic violence has done to children. But your work is actually unique, and I really believe that you're really adding something to the field and by talking about coercive control and how it relates to both mothers lives and children's lives. And so I'd like you to talk about, you know, what's so groundbreaking about about this work that you've been doing? [00:05:07][49.5]
Speaker 3: [00:05:08] Sure. Well, I remember reading Evan Stark's book Coercive Control. How? How Many? In fact, women in personal life a while ago and thinking, this is so brilliant. But what about children and the mums are living under this awful, awful coercive control that the perpetrator was doing day in, day out is it's affecting every area of her life. What about any children who are in the home? What are they living with? What does that daily life look like? And so much of the children and domestic violence literature talks about how children are harmed by being exposed to witnessing or knowing about the physical violence between the parents. And I thought that was a really limited way of looking at it because where there's coercive control, the perpetrator won't just be using physical violence, they will be using emotional abuse manipulation. They will be using economic abuse, depriving their targets of of money and economic resources and assets. They will probably be being sexually coercive and they will be continually monitoring and conducting surveillance on their targets to see whether they are complying. That will be punishing them for any small act of resistance that they think they're detecting. So they're doing so much more than being physically violent. Indeed, some coercive control perpetrators use very little or even no physical violence at all, because if they can get what they want from you, which is your total obedience to them without being physically violent, then that is probably a safer bet for them because it's less likely that they'll ever be picked up for the abuses that they are. Because they haven't caused a bruise, they haven't broken an arm. Everyone will struggle to figure out what it is that doing so for children. I thought it doesn't make sense to talk about them being exposed to this because it really is so much more than exposure. So I interviewed with with mums and children who'd who'd been through this and come out the other side and were separated from perpetrators. And what I found was that everything that the perp was doing to the mum was also happening to the children. So if I just say here that we think in about 90 to 95 percent of cases, the coercive control perpetrator is the man in the family is much rather that it is the woman. But it does sometimes happen that it is the woman. But because it's 90, 95 percent of the time, the man I'll be talking about, you know, the man is the perpetrator here. But that's not to suggest that it can't happen the other way around. Sometimes it does. But yeah, so whatever. What I found in my research was that whatever the dad was doing to the mum, it was also affecting the children's lives. So if dad wouldn't let mum go out much if he'd taken away her car, if he insisted that that she she could only go to the shops for 10 minutes and then she had to be home if he insisted that she had to be back by four o'clock and then she couldn't leave the house, after all. What do you think that was doing to the kids lives? She couldn't take them out because she wasn't allowed out. They couldn't do the extracurricular activities after school because they finished at 5:30 and she wasn't allowed out, after all. So she couldn't take them to their friend's birthday parties. Because if she did, and the dad would accuse her relentlessly of having an affair with one of the other dads. One of the other kids at the birthday party, the kids couldn't have their friends around to their own house because that might kick off in the words of one of my interviewees. So that was out of the question. Dad was too unpredictable for that. So the kids were living in the very same isolated and lonely world as their mum as a direct result of the father's coercive control. And it seemed to me that the father either. Was doing this on purpose and wanted to personally control the children as well as the mother. Really, that was part of his agenda, or he was mostly interested in controlling the mum, but he really didn't, didn't have any any reservations or concerns about the impacts that this is having on the children at all. And there's this really good quote by my brilliant coercive control researcher Jane Monckton Smith, who wrote this fantastic book called In Control and it's come out recently. And she says that coercive controlling behavior is the campaign. And like most campaigns, it has a purpose and a plan. The perpetrators plan to control their target is often rigid and takes priority over anything and everything. And I think that when it comes to children, that's the case with children. Their plan to control their target, who's usually their girlfriend or wife, takes priority over anything and everything. And that would include the safety, wellbeing and health of their children, which they will be spectacularly unconcerned by because what they're fixated on is controlling their target. So, yeah, I looked at how how the kids who are experiencing this, and of course, it was causing them a lot of distress. They were socially isolated. They were missing out on so many good opportunities to build their confidence, you know, to have fun, to really explore life. And that, I mean, and that's just the example of how the isolation affected them. I could talk to you for the next three hours about how they were affected by every aspect of what the perpetrator was doing way. So, you know, I think that that's one way that my research is really unique is that I really wanted to look at how this was affecting the child's life and get away from this concept of exposure and see children really as victims of what the perpetrator was doing, not witnesses, not secondary victims, but CO victims because their life was being directly affected. [00:11:13][365.3]
Speaker 1: [00:11:15] And I think that's a it's a really accurate portrayal. I think one of the things, though, that I have a question about because when we speak about coercive control, we almost speak about it in and really clear terms. But the behaviors of coercive control can hide behind excuses such as, you know, you have a disability and I'm controlling your life because I'm concerned about your disability. But it's truly being a can, of course, overly controlling human. Or, you know, we're part of a cultural belief system that believes that, you know, this is my right. This is my entitlement. So how do you kind of put it behind and talk about those ways that people hide their coercive control, particularly in the context of children, especially when coercive control can be framed as the rights of parents, you know, cultural rights, men's rights, religious rights and in fact, here in the United States recently, there was a bill passed down in Georgia that was focused on on child abuse, that they actually wrote an exemption in for religious rights, which is really, really interesting. So how do you kind of go behind that sort of big, broad bucket of coercive control and go into the behaviors that really kind of hide that as excuses that say that it's something else? [00:12:46][91.4]
Speaker 3: [00:12:48] Yeah, absolutely. So I think what defines coercive control as a really harmful form of abuse is that the perpetrator has established what we call a credible threat over their target. And that means that they've established that if their target does x y z, they will be punished. And it might be it might be a physical punishment such as being beaten. Or it might be that it might be a verbal punishment, such as being ripped into verbally for half an hour and told how stupid and fat and ugly and useless you are good for nothing and a piece of trash. And until you're crying and crying and crying, or it might be that the perpetrator will harm the pet in the family or will go and and and do something horrible to your mother or something. But whatever they choose is the punishment. They know it is something that is going to really upset you, that going to that you're going to dread and that you'll do almost anything to avoid. So they establish that there is this credible threat that if you disobey them, there will be this really vile punishment. And so you start to change your your behavior to try and avoid that punishment. And you you are not behaving the way that the average person in your society has the freedom to behave. So. The perpetrator will make it clear that they want to control a lot of aspects of your life where you can go, who you can talk to, how long you can spend in a particular place and and you know how you can appear, what opinions you can express, what feelings you're allowed to have. And and so it's a really heavy, heavy, heavy form of control goes way beyond what we might call ordinary parental control, which you know, should be balanced with with allowing the child independence. And obviously, for children, we we start off, you know, having to to control them quite a bit when they're really little. But then the older they get, the more independence they need because they're going towards being fully in control of their life. So if we treated a 16 year old the way we treated a six year old, how is that? Then how can a 16 year old going to cope when they turn 18 and they suddenly face, you know, stop being an adult with no practice? So childhood is all about the parent guiding the child towards increasing independence and whatever control we have over them when they were extremely little, you know, we gradually let go off and let them take the reins. Perpetrators will very often cloak their behavior, as you say, with excuses, and they're really good at picking the excuses that the people are going to believe and people are going to buy into. So if it's a male perpetrator and they're trying to excuse their behavior towards their wife, though, they'll pick on all the sort of common stereotypes around wives, the kind of sexist stereotypes in society because they know people believe what they're saying. So they'll say, you know, I didn't really do anything that bad, but you know, what I did was because she was nagging me, nagging me. He was pushing my button. She was provoking me. And these are stereotypes we have around women and women's behavior that they're sexist stereotypes and the perpetrator knows at work. So they use them the same with kids. You know, they will say that the child is perhaps just a child, as has revealed a bit about what's going on, though they'll join stereotypes around children, so they'll say the child is a fantasist. They can't tell fantasy from reality. They make up stories. They're a liar and exaggerator. They're living in a dream world. These are all stereotypes we have about children that they're unreliable. Whether it's a teenager, they'll say that they're rebellious out of control, hormonal, hysterical, moody going through a phase. Again, these are all stereotypes that we, we have about teenagers, and it's so easy for the perpetrator to pass off what they're doing and the response that target is having using those stereotypes. So whenever you hear those stereotypes, just beware that they might be being used as a very sinister reasons. [00:16:52][243.8]
Speaker 1: [00:16:52] Yeah. And I think to just landing and in practice, when you hear those stereotypes as professionals, you really need to ask the next question, Well, what does that mean? What does that look like? What are those behaviors? And then really assessing those behaviors is incredibly important. [00:17:09][17.0]
Speaker 2: [00:17:10] So I want to go back to something you said right when you were explaining why the work you're doing is so groundbreaking and and explore a little bit. You reference kind of the common language. Children exposed to domestic violence or child witnesses, to domestic violence or to the two common phrases that have been used for decades to describe the nexus of kids experience. And the two things I always say about that is is the perpetrators invisible and those phrases, right? This is like passive statements. And it really focuses on this, this witnessing seeing being in the room Nexis, which which connects up and may have grown out of a mix. You don't know which is this idea of of of of a trauma focus and a focus that is in many ways very mental, health oriented and very physical, violence oriented. And you said something that's very much in alignment with what we do with safe and together, you know, we'll talk about multiple pathways to harm. We'll talk about family ecology there change, you know, all these different things for kids. And you said something really simple that I want to underscore, which is how the courts control changes the day to day life of the child. And and it's so central to what I think of as domestic violence, an informed work to really approach it in that I don't say non-clinical. I don't want to dismiss the clinical diagnosis. I want to be additive. I want to be like and and we must include that really basic. How is the children the child's life different? [00:18:43][92.9]
Speaker 3: [00:18:45] And completely, yeah. [00:18:46][1.4]
Speaker 2: [00:18:47] Can you talk about what you learned? You know, what did that awareness for you come from, say, from Evan's work did come from you, from listening to the stories of the survivors, you know, how did you kind of end up landing there in that? Because the research is so much, we look at the research, part of it is so clinical the diagnosis. Kids have depression, mom has depression and we have correlate to mom's depression with kids depression. And there's almost finger pointing at moms and say, [00:19:14][27.1]
Speaker 3: [00:19:15] Well, moms has. One thing that drives me nuts is that we we as soon as we start talking about the parents we're not talking about, the parents are joking about the mom as though she is the only parent. And then we we start saying, well, something negative mom is being negatively affected by the abuse. The abuse is just said in this very passive way, as though it's just happening spontaneously like some sort of occasion passing through rather than by dads of youth mums being affected by the abuse. And and her mental health is bad. So therefore she's not preventing the kids very well. Therefore, their mental health is bad. But that happens in so much of the research that we do. And that was, oh, that always gets me quite annoyed. So what about the parenting of the perpetrator? What is that parenting like? I mean, to what extent do these perpetrators believe that they have the right to control every aspect of the child's life? To what extent do they have empathy for their child? To what extent do they view the child as their own object? And how is all that affecting the child's emotional health and well-being? Because they have a parent who usually was an owned object and has no empathy for you? I think that that is, you know, intuitively, we can see that that would be very damaging for the child. And yet those questions are so rarely asked so, so few studies looking at how the parenting of the perpetrator is affecting the child. [00:20:38][83.4]
Speaker 2: [00:20:39] Mm hmm. And and for me, I mean, the answer to that is is in some ways super simple, which is we have such low expectations for men as parents and we don't hold them to the same expectations. So we we that's how we end up with both in the research and in the practice of very mum blaming thinking and approaches. And so. So, you know, it's it's it's it's so great to hear and refreshing to hear you talk about how perpetrators are changing their daily lives because you can almost ask that question clinically or diagnostically in child safety. You could just say sitting down, you're listening to a story around aggressive control, domestic violence, and the next question could be OK, how did the domestic violence perpetrators behavior change the children's daily life? Just by asking that question is groundbreaking. [00:21:28][49.3]
Speaker 3: [00:21:29] Absolutely. And you know, I'm not quite sure how I ended up thinking in that way. I know that I just had an instinctive understanding that that was an important question. I couldn't tell you where it came from, but and I can tell you how I got the information. I added a question to my interviews, which I think was the crucial question. I, when I was talking to my interviewees about what they've been through, I said to them, What are the things that you that you felt you couldn't do or you felt you had to do because of how the perpetrator would react? And that usually got them talking for the next 30 minutes about all the ways they were collectively controlled. So I would really recommend that question to practitioners is a very good question. And what they were talking about had very little to do with the physical violence that might have been physical violence as well. That might not have been, but there were so many ways that daily life was limited and constrained and changed by the credible threat the perpetrator had established. If you do this, I will punish you. [00:22:34][64.3]
Speaker 1: [00:22:34] Yeah, and such a tremendous amount of anxiety that's produced in that cycle as well. It doesn't even have to be physical. It can just be that that take control and that the high levels of emotional punishment that really can deeply impact a child's well-being and development and create anxiety, create depression and create mental health disorders in them during that really critical neuro plastic time where their brain development is happening. So you've studied a lot about post-separation coercive control, and at the Safe and Together Institute, we've been doing a lot of work with family courts around custody and access. Can you share some of your learnings from post-separation research on coercive control on children? [00:23:21][46.5]
Speaker 3: [00:23:22] Absolutely. So just to go back to that, that quote from Jane Monckton Smith, the perpetrator has a plan and is often a rigid fan if they're fixated, and that plan takes priority over anything and everything. So if you tell somebody like that, I don't want to be with you anymore. That's. It up. They're not going to take that as a, you know, they're not going to respect your wishes. They never respected your wishes before. They're not going to start now. What they're going to do is carry on. And indeed, you challenge their control over control. They've probably been working for years to establish and keep it with you. The challenging their control, you'll say by saying to them, I'm not going to be controlled by you anymore. So they will be double their efforts to either get control of you again or to demonstrate that they still have control over you or to punish you like crazy for daring to break their control, daring to challenge them. So we often see the perpetrators abusiveness really escalates around the time of leaving. We know this is the most dangerous time is the time when if they're going to turn, if they're going to resort to murdering that the adult victim, their kids or perhaps killing themselves. You know, if if death is going to come into the picture, it will often be at that point. It's a really high risk time. And one of the key ways that perpetrators can stay in the life of the people they've been abusing is is by demanding access to their children and ongoing access to their children. And often they've shown very little interest in their children. Before this point, they might have of being hostile towards the nearly all the time or ignored them most of the time, seeing them as inconveniences and nuisances. But now they really want to see them. They're saying they really want to see them because it's a means of getting control. Or they might have been very interested in their children in an unhealthy way where they viewed the child as an old object and that to meet their needs rather than them as the parent being there to meet the child's needs. So and what with the coercive control of the say, they have so little empathy for the people in their household. Whatever their previous relationship with the child was like, it's there's going to be a heavy, heavy dose of unhealthiness in a minimum, if not outright abusiveness in a lot of cases. So yeah, they from the child's point of view, then the children who I interviewed described some really scary behaviors separation from their dads. They described how that could come to the front door and bang on it, and that they had to hide. And, you know, they were hiding in the corner. They were scared for their lives. They described dad stalking them. They described how they couldn't go to places in the community for fear that dad would would pop up and be there and perhaps kidnap them. They described how after even after five or 10 years of separation, because dad still kept up low-level stalking of them where, you know, sometimes he would stalk them just to remind them that they weren't free and he was still there and that they were afraid to go to their dance class. They were afraid to go to their football match or whatever it was, because that might appear, and they talked about how they had to uproot everything and leave. And and indeed, there's a great quote by by a woman here in the UK called the owner, who said he used to present this program called Crimewatch. And he said domestic violence is the only crime where we expect the victim to go on the run rather than the perpetrator. And so often that's what we expect. And so children have had to flee to a new community, leave behind their friends. Perhaps, you know, they've had to severely restrict that, that what they can say on the internet because the perpetrator will be monitoring to see if they can find out where they are by looking at online activity so they they can't be open about their lives online, which is so terribly important to the children often and young people, often nowadays. And and then, of course, if if the perpetrator is dragging mum too expensive and legal processes that will drain mum's financial resources and the children will then be plunged into poverty with her. So there's so many ways it post-separation abuse negatively affects them. We also we often see perpetrators using children during contact visits in a very manipulative sort of way. You know, mate, there's one example of the 14-Year-Old girl I interviewed who described how her dad behaved on contact visits when her and her sister of a court order to visit dad. And she said that when I would go to see that, he would tell us how it was all mum's fault and how he couldn't see us because of mum and the family had split up because of mum. And also because of them. He blamed them as well, and he would just go on and on and on about it. And she said I felt sick and I felt small and I felt bad, and she was just being reduced to an awful emotional state on these visits. But then he would also say to her, I'm depressed because I can't see you often enough. He would say to her and her sister, You're the only ones who love me. So as awful as the visits were, they they kept being. Obligated to go back because that had made them feel emotionally responsible for him. They were like five, six, seven, eight years old at this time, and so they had to go back no matter how painful it was to them. And of course, it was court ordered, so they couldn't really get out of it anyway. And this just happened every week and and they would see that on Monday, over the weekend. And then by Monday, they were so ill and so drained from it that that the girl I was interviewed, she said. My sister would just be on the sofa crying and crying and crying and couldn't even go to school. And that was happening every weekend for them. And that's what the court system had decided was best for them because they decided that this dad was an appropriate parent. They not properly evaluated his parenting. And so, yeah, it's it's a it's a real, real concern. And it's it's not over when the separation, these perpetrators really do not stop until something stops them until you really put a roadblock up to stop them abuse, you really make it impossible for them to carry on. Then they usually carry on. Yeah. Well, sometimes we see that they stop with COVID victims because they found a new one. And then so often in my research, the mums and the children said he finally left us alone. But it's because he had a new girlfriend. He told the new children, and he was now focusing on them, which is not good in the long term at all. [00:30:09][406.6]
Speaker 1: [00:30:09] Yeah. Now, historically, acts of resistance to chorus of controllers, particularly on the part of women, has been really demonized in the system and women have gone to jail for those acts of resistance. They've had their children removed for those acts of resistance. How has the system responded to children's acts of resistance to coercive control or is classically? [00:30:33][24.3]
Speaker 3: [00:30:37] Mm. And I mean, I can't speak to my own research on that because. And the children really haven't attempted to fight the system themselves and just the ones that I spoke to, I spoke with 15 families. But we do see all the time in other people's research. It's it's a really well known phenomenon from various other people's research that that if children, for example, say to the Family Court, I don't want to see and might have and usually that it's my dad, but not always. They say, I don't want to see my dad. I'm terrified of my dad. My dad's abused me. My dad's hurt me. My dad's been violent towards me. My dad is perhaps sexually abused me. We think that it's hard to know the precise figures, but we think that the in these sorts of domestic violence cases, that perpetrators are sexually abusive of the children and maybe five or 10 percent of the cases. So you will get a lot of cases of that cropping up in the Family Court and the children. And it's well known that sometimes children will attempt to say this to the courts and and they will be told you have to see your father. It's in your best interests and you will be damaged by not seeing your father and that they're told and we don't believe that you were abused. Your accusations of abuse are not credible. Your mother's coached you to say this. She, you know, the mother was made out to be a spiteful, manipulative and expletive word. And, you know, again, drawing on the stereotype that women are more vindictive than men, which I'm not sure there's any empirical evidence for that. It's it's kind of believed culturally. And so yet very often children are sent into contact visits with with abusive parents kicking and screaming, terrified, traumatized, you know, literally kicking, screaming, crying and and if they continue to resist, sometimes the courts will even transfer them full time into the custody of the perpetrator to put a stop to their resistance, which is the most horrifying response. And I cannot even begin to imagine the trauma that that then goes on to cause. [00:32:47][129.9]
Speaker 1: [00:32:48] Yeah, we have quite quite a few cases here in the United States where teenage children, which is, you know, there's a level of respect for teenage children's wishes for who they want to live with, saying to a judge, I don't want to have contact with this parent. This parent has been abusive to me. And the judge putting them under arrest in a juvenile detention center until they comply with the order. So really traumatizing responses by the system. [00:33:17][29.0]
Speaker 3: [00:33:18] And it is coercion all over again. You know, the perpetrator taught them, you have to obey or you'll be punished, and then the court literally makes them obey or puts them in jail. [00:33:26][8.4]
Speaker 2: [00:33:27] Yes, it's you know, this story is told all over the place you just referenced, you know, the United States. But you know, Emma, you're you're connecting this to UK experience and then Australia, where we're doing a lot of work in this space. It's the same story in Canada. Same story, and I think probably many places in the world. So one observation and another question. And to again, I'm on this kick today about the changing the lives of the kids, and I want our listeners to really hear the part where you said a few minutes ago, afraid of moving around in public, afraid of going to the public space. You know, the the the, you know, the football match, you know, to be on the street, you know that that place that public spaces become scary, other places that should feel safer aren't. And I think again, I've got this, this metaphor in my mind going about positive and negative and and sort of people are very focused on the the positive evidence of abuse, the physical violence, and they're not as focused on the negative evidence, which is the lack, the missing. And this is what Luke and Ryan Hart talking about. They do as well, you know, that sort of I don't move into a space that's really mine. I don't do the things that I have a right to. And again, it's Evan Stark really talked about. This is a liberty crime or a human rights crime. And I think this framework that you're talking about that we share really about the impact on what people have a right to do, freedom to associate the freedom to an education, to stable housing to to relationships or homes that are healthy and nurturing. If you use the UN charter and the rights of children, it's a really, actually good touchstone to sort of overlay on this and say, wait a second. [00:35:08][101.2]
Speaker 1: [00:35:09] And I really have to interject that that people working against, you know, acknowledging this framework of coercive control and how it impacts children really despise the UN charter on the rights of the children. You know, there's there's a correlation there, but you know, truly that it is one of those things about negating the things that you don't see. Emma did talk about how the unpredictability of those perpetrators. Comes an embarrassment and a piece of shame for children. If you're in a public space and your parent pops off in that way or threatens you physically or demeans you in front of other people, you really start to withdraw from wanting to have complicated interactions and doing things that are fun because you can't trust that the person that you're with is not going to make that interaction into a really painful and demeaning thing. And so, yes, you got to look at what people are willing to do. Are they afraid to have friends over to the house? Are they declining invitations because particularly with both parents, with the partner, that may be abusive because that person can't be trusted in that public space to behave themselves in a way that's not going to cause alarm, discomfort, shame, embarrassment, demeaning danger. So it's important to absolutely yeah. [00:36:43][93.8]
Speaker 3: [00:36:44] And some perpetrators, though, are incredibly clever, manipulative, and they will never show to the public how abusive they are. So they will be charming and company. They will be funny. They will be seen as one of the best dads in the neighborhood. You know, that was seen as an outstanding person. You know, they might they might have a great deal of charity work and volunteering work that be seen as funny, smart and caring, generous, a great person to be around, the guy who wants all your parties. And sometimes, sometimes that's the case. And then, of course, when survivors speak up, nobody will believe them, which is precisely why the perpetrator has carefully cultivated this image and nobody will believe them. No, nobody will take their side, except perhaps one or two extremely wise people. But even then, possibly not. So, yes, sometimes perpetrators. It's quite obvious that something's the matter with their behavior, but some of them are so clever, so manipulative. They have such a good mask on that you just wouldn't know unless you were their family member. [00:37:49][65.6]
Speaker 2: [00:37:51] So often that just one more question specifically around the post-separation coercive control in in the work we're doing with Family Court, I underscored for for them that money and children, you know, are this such a powerful tool of control especially post-operation? Did you hear from your subjects? You know, the participants in the in the studies that you did, that the ways that their partners tried to use or extend their coercive control through Family Court or through child safety? Did you get specific examples of that in your interviews? [00:38:29][38.4]
Speaker 3: [00:38:31] Yeah, absolutely so. And as I say, there's there was the perpetrator who was using his his contact visits to make his books as they were just measured. And that was a really good way of keeping control of the daughters and of upsetting the mother. The mother had we partnered and and so was kind of beyond his clutches. But you know, a really good way to punish the mother was by upsetting the daughters for the next 10 years. So that's what he was doing. And that's yeah. I mean, beyond that, there were certainly lots of examples of of it. So in one family, the court had an ordered. Twice weekly contact with the perpetrator, a mum described how when she had to take them to his, to his place, she had a panic attack. She was terrified because she knew that she had to go where he was. So that was disturbing her mental health twice a week or even four times because she had to drop them off and pick them up twice weekly. And then while they were there he was, he was filling their head with with how awful mum was encouraging them to disrespect mum and were saying to them things like You're going to get shot and stabbed in the area your mum has taken you to because that's what happened in that area. You know, you should, you know, you should hate your mum for taking you there. And so then when they got home to mum. Their behavior was was incredibly disturbed. They were verbally attacking mum. Her 14 year old son, who was taller than her, was was being quite physically aggressive with. And it was all because of the distress and the manipulation and the abuse they got while at Dad's. And this was happening twice a week, so they had no respite from it whatsoever. Because with that kind of frequency, you know, the moment that the kids are calmed down, they were off to see that again and they knew they want to see that again. So they probably never calmed down because they knew it was constant. And this father who'd got one daughter, who was the one he'd always favored quite often they perpetrated, they really need to make sure siblings don't bond together, so they will treat them quite differently from each other. So there's a lot of jealousy and resentment and dislike among the siblings, so they can't bond together because if they bond together, they're a threat to the perpetrators control. So in this case, this family, he had one daughter who he'd always favored. He'd been pretty overtly hostile to the other kids. But with this daughter, he'd taken her to her favorite school. He'd spend particular time with her. He'd he chose her more attention and she was still living with him post-separation. And she was saying she didn't want to live with mum. And on the rare occasions that she knew she when she saw mum, she was gathering surveillance on mum for dad. She she had, you know, she was taking recordings on her phone. He was there and sending these recordings off to children's social services to try and get her investigated as a bad mum, which she wasn't. I couldn't see any sign that she was when I when I went to their home and interviewed them, she was under a great deal of stress, of course, because of what was happening. But she seemed like she was trying really hard as a mum. And yeah, the daughter was was surveilling. The mum knew that anything she said to the daughter was just going straight back to the father, so it was like she was acting as his agent in the mum's home. So the mum wanted to try and repair her relationship with this daughter, but really had no chance of doing so. She wouldn't have even known when where to start that. There's no opportunity because the daughter was very much in the father's clutches, and again, that that's something that that needs to be looked at. And that, you know this there's there was a clear history of abuse from this father. The the children could describe their father's abusive behavior, the motherhood, the cold, the police, when the father had raped her and that was on file. But he was considered a perfectly good father to have complete custody of this one daughter and and twice weekly visits with the other siblings. So not looking at the patterns of behavior and not matching the perpetrator whatsoever. [00:42:35][244.5]
Speaker 1: [00:42:36] Yeah, it's really it's really, you know, I don't understand how people haven't solidified in their minds that normalizing that type of behavior is really feeding the cycle of violence. That child believes that her father, who is a perpetrator, has a right and a rationale to do what he's doing. Yeah, she you know, so she's she's she's really absorbing those messages that to her is not a normal relationship, and that's very dangerous for her, for her future. But also, we can't minimize the impact to to to male children as well. Witnessing these type of behaviors and then having the court system. You know, mental health professionals, child protection professionals say, no, this is just high conflict. This is just normal. You have to have contact with your parent and then they're really absorbing that this is OK. So really, the whole focus has to be on. Well, my mom is saying it's not, and she's she's really, you know, emotional about this. Therefore, she's crazy. Everybody is saying it's normal. That's what, you know, that really the systems themselves don't leave any room for understanding that we are really perpetuating the cycle of violence, actually, ladies. [00:44:00][84.0]
Speaker 3: [00:44:01] And these ideas that we have in society that every parent is good for their child, no matter how abominably behaves, they are. That is a really peculiar idea, I mean, if a child's teacher or sports coach was emotionally abusing them, physically beating them, raping them, we would not tell the child, you need to keep seeing the feature of the sports coach because obviously this person is doing them enormous harm. And yet, because they're the parent, we have this peculiar idea that somehow seeing that parent will do more good than harm despite their absolutely atrocious behavior. And that being, you know, having dinner with somebody doesn't create a functioning, healthy relationship. And where parents are good for children is where there is a functioning, healthy relationship, not where there's abuse and ease of use. So I wish that as a society we could become we could really become more aware of the harm that some parents can do their children. And also, you know, these common phrases like blood is thicker than water. Oh well, you only have one mother, you only have one father. You just have to put up with it and make it work. Those phrases, they just normalize the situation, which, as you just described, is just so destructive. [00:45:15][73.8]
Speaker 2: [00:45:17] It reminds me of when I talked to people in training or in settings, they'll say, OK, you've got a parent who's violent, you know, and it's domestic violence identifies domestic violence, and it's put in a different category, like you're saying, Emma. I said, What if I just said, How would you assess the safety of a child going to this person with a history about a person with a history of violence? Or we've got a rapist here? How comfortable would you, you know, send your own [00:45:46][29.1]
Speaker 3: [00:45:46] child [00:45:46][0.0]
Speaker 2: [00:45:46] to the child in the care of this person? What would you need to know about them? [00:45:50][3.2]
Speaker 1: [00:45:50] Now I'd like to say to professionals, send your own child to see that person well, but I think [00:45:54][4.2]
Speaker 2: [00:45:55] that you realize if you drop the word out, I use this example the other day, the old social psychology experiments and where they were on the street, they would reenact seat they were. They used to do this stuff they don't do anymore. I think this kind of guerilla theater social psychology experiment. So it was it was a man and woman on the street, and she was being accosted by the man and one version. So the bystanders didn't know that this was not real. And again, I don't know if you would do this today. And in one in one example, she says, Get away from me. Leave me alone. I don't know you. That's version one and version two is Get away from me. Leave me alone. I don't know why I ever married you. And and in scenario one, people jumped in. Yeah, it's there are two people stayed away, right? [00:46:44][48.9]
Speaker 1: [00:46:44] Because we've created this container that says that violence within the context of relationships is normal is natural and is acceptable, which is all incredibly damaging for children and for society in general, right? [00:47:01][17.4]
Speaker 3: [00:47:02] So. Absolutely. [00:47:02][0.4]
Speaker 2: [00:47:03] So we got a couple more things we just want to pick your brain about. And one is just, you know, the implications of this for clinicians. And you saw from my earlier comment that I'm very interested in how mental health professionals formulate domestic abuse as a clinical issue and how they their triggers and and their. It's particularly important to me not only because of the quality of the work they do with families, but they're often providing opinions to child safety or to family court. Right. So how they conceptualize what they're saying and how they understand it? Do you have any thoughts about what all this means for folks, particularly working with kids? If you're in a mental health setting or clinical setting, like what? What should they take away from your research? And. [00:47:50][47.1]
Speaker 3: [00:47:52] Gosh, well, I would say I've been what springs to mind, I've been hearing a lot of examples recently of the problem of not naming the perpetrator and of using neutralizing language. So I would say whenever you write a report name the perpetrator, identify which parent is the perpetrator. Don't say the parents have issues. Name the perpetrator, describe their behavior. If a child is presenting with mental health difficulties, you know, asks him the question, Are there things that that you feel you can't do or things you feel you have to do because of of how one parent will react? What about the other parent? Are they more reasonable or are they not? You know, so dig in to what was actually brought that child to that space. I mean, one of the young men I interviewed, his father had treated him so violently and abusively all his life. And when, as a teen, he was in mental health settings? Nobody picked up on this. Nobody asked him about it. And he was just treated as though he, you know, he was a troubled teen as though he had problems and the fact that his father was one of the most horrific abusers I've ever heard about was never even picked up in that setting. So yet identify the perpetrator, name the perpetrator on every report, describe the perpetrator's behavior and destroy and also describe what they what the other have. If they try and find out what they are trying to do to protect that child and what they're trying to do, that's in that child's best interests. And that might not be the things that are obvious to you because that for the the parent who's being abused alongside the child, that will have very limited options as to how they can protect the child. And a lot of the things that they would like to do, they can't do it because the perpetrator won't let them. So but they will be trying to do all sorts of things to make the child's day better, to give them a nicer life. All in all cases, because not all adult victims are good parents, but most of them, in my experience, are and they try really hard to make the child's life better. So try and identify the protective behaviors of of the victim survivor parent alongside naming the perpetrator. I would say [00:50:06][133.9]
Speaker 2: [00:50:07] that that's so important not to decontextualized that kid's mental health or their issues from the perpetrators behavior and pattern and choices. Is there a different message for a family court? You know, you know, there's so much overlap and I think what you're saying, but is there is there is there for professionals working in family court. Is there another takeaway from your research for them? [00:50:27][19.6]
Speaker 3: [00:50:28] And don't assume that domestic violence has nothing to do with the child. If the if the perpetrator is a coercive control, they will have harmed so many aspects of the child's life. You know, as as you say, it's a parenting choice, you know, if you stop the child's mother from going out after four o'clock, if you stop her from leaving the house, that's to go to the supermarket for 15 minutes. That is going to severely isolate your children. And if you don't care about that, that says a great deal about you as a parent and what you do and don't care about, right and how little you prioritize your children. So it is a parenting choice. It has everything to do with parenting if that perpetrator is a coercive control. And I think separation does not equal safety if the perpetrator is in family court. It almost certainly means they're carrying on their campaign of coercive control. Where is the evidence they have stopped being a coercive control? Where is the evidence that they no longer have this intense drive to control this other person that has dominated their life for probably the last three, five, eight, 10 years? Where's the evidence that that has disappeared? Why would it have disappeared? It probably has not dissipated. Why are they in that court? They will say yes because they love their child or they're worried about their child. But do they really have any empathy for their child? Can they really describe what their child is like as a character in a way that isn't just a reflection of them and their wishful thinking? Can they name their child five best friends and they describe the things that their child doesn't like? Can they give an example of when their child disobeyed them, when that was actually a good thing and taught them something? Can they describe an example of where their child challenged them and they learn, and they grew from that and they, you know, they they gave their child more freedom as a result of that challenge, not less. Look at that, I and [00:52:24][115.7]
Speaker 1: [00:52:25] that's a great. Those are great bits. That is great. Those are great. And since we have survivors and professionals listening, what do you want to say to each group about coercive control and its impacts on children? [00:52:37][12.4]
Speaker 3: [00:52:39] Well, for survivors, I would say that I know that when, when, when haven't survivors really start to realize how helpful it did affect their child's life, they can feel overwhelmingly guilty about it. I would say it was not your fault. You never chose to put your child in those circumstances. You were thoroughly entrapped by the perpetrator. You had you entrapped in like five or 10 different ways, probably. And you it's you know, if you're listening to this, you probably did everything that you could to look after your child as best as you could in those circumstances. And you probably were a better parent in those circumstances than a lot of other people ever could be, because it's like asking you to parent in a condition of of of a nightmare. And we never we can't imagine what it's like to try and parent in the sort of nightmarish scenario. So I would say you did your best and you should be very proud of what you did and and any life away that you managed to give your child a better day made them happy, make them smile from time to time and protect them from something. Or, you know, make them feel good about themselves. Occasionally, any little victory that you had that you did so well. And I would say that if I was, if I was the prime minister, more the president than I would be giving each survivor a million pounds in compensation and a medal for surviving a war because that's what they deserve. [00:54:08][88.8]
Speaker 2: [00:54:09] I mean, that's a that's a great message to professionals, policymakers, politicians and everyone. So I just was really looking forward to this interview and I did it. It lived up, lived up to and exceeded expectations. And I think it's going to be really important for our listeners, you know, because coercive control is on everybody's mind. And I think kids and family caused everybody's mind. So we really want to thank you for spending your time with us today, Emma. [00:54:38][28.6]
Speaker 1: [00:54:38] Thank you so much, Emma. [00:54:39][0.9]
Speaker 3: [00:54:40] So it was a pleasure. And can I just thought before before anyone accuses me of being a man hater, which does occasionally happen because I have said the perpetrators are usually dads and or the man in the relationship, which is the case. I just want to say absolutely not. Not a man hater. I think that some men are the most brilliant and fantastic fathers and husbands and wonderful human beings. And the fact that we do so at such a low bar that we think that this behavior from male perpetrators is normal. I think that is the thing that is offensive to men. The idea that we ever excuse male violence is boys being boys or they couldn't help it or it was natural. I think that is so offensive to men. And I think saying that men can be respectful, kind, generous partners. And if they're not being, then that needs to be challenged because it can be so much better than that and we need to do better than that. I think I think that is a good thing. And also just again to say that sometimes women can be perpetrators, and if anyone sitting out there who has been the victim of a female perpetrator? I hear you. [00:55:43][63.7]
Speaker 1: [00:55:44] Yes, and I would. I would. I would totally back that up and also say that I was dealing with the behaviors and looking at patterns of behaviors and mapping those actually helps us to clarify when women are perpetrators and when men are being abused. And so in the best interest of being able to properly identify people doing that, consistently doing that well and looking at both parents patterns of behaviors creates a lot of clarity and allows for us to avoid those counter allegations, which caused a tremendous amount of confusion and family for it and in child protection. [00:56:24][40.3]
Speaker 3: [00:56:26] All right. Yes. [00:56:26][0.6]
Speaker 2: [00:56:27] Well, again, Emma, thank you so much for spending some time with us, and Ruth and I are encouraging folks who are listening to share this episode and all our other episodes, which we have more and more. We hit the 50000 download mark in the last month, which is super cool. Yeah. And so please share subscribe. Join us in a platform and then we have a discount that we do and do. [00:56:53][26.3]
Speaker 1: [00:56:54] I know that I made up 15 percent discount for any of our courses. That's on our virtual academy, which is Academy Dot and Together Institute dot com, and it's partnered all lowercase. So if you want to do some training and you want a little discount, please use that discount [00:57:09][15.5]
Speaker 2: [00:57:10] to get our website safe. Would together in sitcom and follow us on the usual social media suspect's LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, and I created a my own Twitter feed, which I did so, [00:57:21][11.7]
Speaker 1: [00:57:22] and Dr. Emma Katz is also on there, right? [00:57:24][2.3]
Speaker 3: [00:57:25] And I'm pretty active on Twitter. So if you want to hear more for me, follow me on Twitter. Dr. Emma Katz, Dr. D.R. Emma Katz Katz. Just about Katie said. [00:57:35][10.4]
Speaker 2: [00:57:36] Yep, right? And keep keep an eye out for her book. Which will be coming in, we hope fingers crossed in six to eight months. There we go. There you go. So anyway, so again, Emma, thank you. And we're out. [00:57:36][0.0]
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