Coercive Control in Children's and Mothers' Lives

Coercive control is a severe form of domestic violence experienced by millions of children worldwide. It involves a perpetrator using a range of tactics to intimidate, humiliate, degrade, exploit, isolate and control a partner or family member. Some coercive control perpetrators use violence, others do not.

Drawing on interviews with children and mothers who have experienced coercive control-based domestic violence, this groundbreaking book sheds light on the impacts of coercive control on children, how it is perpetrators who must be held accountable for those impacts, and how resistance by children and mothers occurs. Resistance happens in everyday life, not just in response to incidents of violence. Breaking free from coercive control is not a one-off event but a sustained battle for safety and recovery in which child and adult survivors need supports and professional interventions that work.

Written accessibly for students, researchers, practitioners, survivors of domestic violence, and anyone with a general interest in the topic, the book provides a child-centered perspective to revolutionize our understanding of how children are affected by coercive control-based domestic violence.

Emma Katz, Ph.D., is Senior Lecturer in Childhood and Youth at Liverpool Hope University, UK. Katz's scholarship explores coercive control-based domestic violence and abuse and its impacts on children and young people, including both the harms experienced by children and mothers and their recoveries. Katz is an internationally-acclaimed researcher, winning awards including the Women Against Violence Europe (WAVE)'s Corinna Seith Prize. Her research has been extensively utilised by organisations and practitioners in Europe and globally.