Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life
By Evan Stark (Oxford Univ. Press, 2007). 464 pgs. $37.95. Order, www.oup.com/us/catalog. 
 
Reviewed by Dianne Post 
 
Every attorney who represents clients in family court should read this book. Approximately 80 percent of all divorces involve violence or abuse, and for attorneys to properly and effectively represent those clients, especially the victims of the abuse, they need to understand domestic abuse.
 
Years ago, when I was first conducting training for lawyers on domestic violence, one told me that he had been practicing for more than 15 years and had never seen a divorce case with violence. He called me about a month after the training and said how shocked he was that in the last month, he had seen more than five cases with violence. I replied, “They were there all along. You just didn’t see them.”
 
Likewise, many lawyers today don’t see the behavior pattern author Evan Stark calls “coercive control.” Stark’s main thesis is that outright violence is not working so well for men today given the advances in women’s rights in the United States and the changes in the laws regarding violence in the family. So men have switched gears to more controlling behaviors that in fact do more than violate the right to be free from violence, by violating the right to individual liberty. The primary harm to women is not physical but political: depriving women of liberty, personhood, and citizenship. Stark argues that this form of subjugation more closely resembles kidnapping or indentured servitude than assault. Because this behavior is not recognized either in its actions or its effects, the response of women is often not understood. In fact, Stark shows that women subjected to coercive control are acting as any reasonable person would to protect their human dignity and liberty.
 
The means of coercive control is micromanagement over every detail or action of a woman in some or all spheres of life. The goal is to maintain the superior position of the male as the person who dictates what is proper. It’s patriarchy writ small. It often consists of elaborate behavioral rules, lists, and monitoring, including electronic and other methods. One Russian prosecutor understood it as he said to me, “Why would a man beat a woman when there are so many better ways to control her?”
 
In spite of all the work on gender-based violence in the last 30 years, Stark shows that in fact women are not really any better off now than they were in 1977. Partner homicides dropped – for men. Severe violence dropped, only to be replaced by more “minor” violence and coercive control, which achieves the same end. The failure of the law has been to see gender-based violence as an incident rather than a pattern. Simply stopping violence won’t guarantee freedom or equality. Guaranteeing freedom and equality will stop violence. Countries that have the highest index of gender empowerment generally have the lowest percentage of abuse of women. The United States falls in neither of these categories. Stark argues that abuse of women should be treated as a human rights violation.
 
Stark also makes the point that through it all women have maintained their agency, although for various reasons this often is not recognized. First, it is easier for a judge to sympathize with a poor, battered woman victim who is hysterical and crying than a woman who is standing strong and fighting back tough as a survivor. Second, it is harder to betray the stereotype of women and perhaps the “deserved what she got” way of thinking. But a man who is being controlled and abused in the same way would have every right to fight back and would be praised for standing tall and being tough. In this situation, the law fails by treating people in the same situation differently. In other circumstances, for example the battered woman who shot her husband when he was asleep, the law fails by treating people the same when they are in very different situations. By not understanding the dynamics of violence against women and coercive control, lawyers and judges continue to violate the promise of justice and equal protection of the law.
 
Dianne Post, U.W. 1979, practices in Phoenix, Ariz.
Review originally published in Wisconsin Lawyer, Vol. 82, No. 4, April 2009
http://www.wisbar.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Wisconsin_Lawyer&template=/CM/ContentDisplay.cfm&contentid=80212#Coercive