Coercive control in intimate partner violence

The Criminalisation of Coercive Control: The Power of Law?

“…This recourse to the law fails to recognise the law itself as coercive and controlling (Douglas 2018), the problems of operationalising coercion as it already exists within legal discourse (Brunk 1979) and the associated problems of (in)voluntariness (Kuennan 2014). All of these issues are returned to below; however, at this juncture it is of value to note that the early evaluations of this specific legal intervention, alongside other strategies listed above, more often than not replicate the problem of defining coercive control, as identified by Hamberger, Larsen and Lehrner (2017), now reappearing in problems of policy implementation. Thus, taken together, these issues unveil the potential of (mis)recognition of coercive control for perpetrators, victims and practitioners alike, perhaps leading to the fundamental question asked by Crossman and Hardesty (2018: 196): 'what makes control coercive?'…”

“…The erasure of agency in this way carries implications, of course, not just for women in cases of coercive control, but for all women, particularly as legal discourses can be, and are, used for purposes other than they were intended (Smart 1989). The potential slippage from individual women to all women highlights the slipperiness of coercive control as a concept (Hamberger, Larsen and Lehrner 2017), and as a result, its lack of specificity-particularly in the law-carries with it significant unintended consequences for its use.…”

“…Making sense of intimate partner violence (IPV) has long been seen through the lens of coercive control (Johnson 1995;Schechter 1982;Stark 2007). Indeed, in a recent overview of research on this topic, Hamberger, Larsen and Lehrner (2017) identify 22 different ways of defining and operationalising coercive control, all of which generate findings with different emphases. Nonetheless, their review of this work points to three features of coercive control on which there seems to be some agreement: intentionality on the part of the abuser; the negative perception of the controlling behaviour on the part of the victim; and the abuser's ability to obtain control by use of a credible threat.…”

Understanding domestic violence: masculinity, culture, traditions

“…Feminist research reiterates that domestic violence is a consequence of patriarchy, a system that promotes male dominance by giving men powers to dominate and control women ( Dobash and Dobash, 2017 ; Hamberger et al., 2017 ). Some researchers have attributed domestic violence to a set of interlocking factors, such as patriarchy, cultural beliefs, community norms, unemployment and low levels of education ( Jewkes and Morrell, 2018 ; Mshweshwe, 2018 ).…”

La oportunidad en los delitos de violencia de género

“…), agrediéndola sexualmente, haciendo daño o amenazando a los familiares (de ella), o bien haciéndole daño física y psicológicamente. Diversos estudios han conceptualizado tres facetas principales de la construcción del control coercitivo en una relación: la primera es la intencionalidad y motivación del agresor para obtener control sobre la víctima; la segunda es la percepción, por la víctima, del comportamiento como negativo, y la tercera es la capacidad del agresor para hacer una amenaza creíble 54,55 . Para Day y Bowen 56 , los que perpetran la violencia de forma rutinaria usan la violencia coercitiva de control en las relaciones íntimas.…”