An extensive report (over 500 pages) prepared for the US Department of Justice, written by Mary Ann Dutton, Lisa Goodman, and R. James Schmidt. Download the entire report here. Here is the beginning of the Executive Summary:
For decades now, battered women’s advocates have placed the notion of coercive control squarely at the center of their analysis of intimate partner violence (IPV). Indeed, they have defined IPV as a “pattern of coercive control” (Pence and Paymar, 1993) in which the batterer asserts his power over the victim through the use of threats, as well as actual violence. Violence is simply a tool, within this framework, that the perpetrator uses to gain greater power in the relationship in order to deter or trigger specific behaviors, win arguments, or demonstrate dominance (Dobash and Dobash, 1992). Other tools might include isolation, intimidation, threats, withholding of necessary resources such as money or transportation, and abuse of the children, other relatives, or even pets. Explaining the Duluth Model, a widely used batterer treatment program, Pence (1993), one of its founders, wrote that the program “assumes battering is not an individual pathology or mental illness but rather just one part of a system of abusive and violent behaviors to control the victim for the purposes of the abuser” (p. 30). And, in an eloquent description of “battered women’s” responses, Stark (1995) wrote:
Physical violence may not be the most significant factor about most battering relationships. In all probability, the clinical profile revealed by battered women reflects the fact that they have been subjected to an ongoing strategy of intimidation, isolation, and control that extends to all areas of a woman’s life, including sexuality; material necessities; relations with family, children, and friends; and work. Sporadic, even severe violence makes this strategy of control effective. But the unique profile of “the battered woman” arises as much from the deprivation of liberty implied by coercion and control as it does from violence-induced trauma (p. 987).
Yet, despite this common assumption, borne out every day in the horrific stories told by battered women throughout the country, surprisingly little work has been done to conceptualize and measure the key construct of coercive control. In the absence of a clear conceptualization, measures of coercion, usually embedded within broader measures of psychological abuse, are neither comprehensive nor internally consistent. Researchers have variously included behaviors ranging from verbal put-downs to intimidation to kidnapping under the rubric of coercion. For a number of reasons, detailed below, the need for a tighter conceptualization and operationalization of this notion has gained new urgency in recent years.
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