Coercive Control

Understanding Coercive Control: The Hidden Pattern Behind Intimate Partner Violence and Child Abuse: Looking Beyond Individual Incidents

For many years, domestic violence and child abuse were primarily understood through discrete incidents of physical violence. Professionals often focused on individual assaults, injuries, or isolated episodes of abuse when assessing danger and determining interventions.

Today, research and practice have shifted toward understanding coercive control as one of the most significant predictors of ongoing harm to intimate partners and children.

Coercive control recognizes that abuse is rarely defined by a single act of violence. Instead, it is a pattern of behaviors designed to dominate, intimidate, isolate, exploit, and restrict another person’s freedom. Physical violence may occur within this pattern, but coercive control often continues even when physical assaults stop.

A person can live in constant fear without being physically assaulted every day. They may alter how they think, speak, spend money, parent, socialize, or even breathe in order to avoid provoking the abusive partner. This chronic loss of autonomy is the defining feature of coercive control.

Modern intervention programs increasingly recognize that understanding coercive control is essential to preventing both intimate partner violence (IPV) and child maltreatment.

What Is Coercive Control?

Coercive control is a repeated pattern of domination in which one person intentionally limits another person’s freedom, independence, and ability to make choices.

Rather than focusing only on physical assaults, coercive control includes behaviors such as:

• intimidation;
• surveillance and monitoring;
• isolation from family and friends;
• financial abuse;
• threats;
• emotional degradation;
• humiliation;
• stalking;
• technological abuse;
• reproductive coercion;
• using immigration status as leverage;
• controlling employment or education;
• controlling transportation;
• interfering with medical care;
• manipulating legal systems; and
• using children to maintain control.

Each behavior may appear minor when viewed individually. However, when viewed together they create an environment of fear, dependency, and chronic intimidation.

The goal is not simply to win an argument—it is to reduce another person’s freedom until they begin organizing their lives around avoiding the abusive partner’s reactions.

Coercive Control Is About Freedom

One helpful way to understand coercive control is to ask:

“Whose freedom is expanding, and whose freedom is shrinking?”

Healthy relationships allow both partners to make choices, maintain relationships, pursue employment, access finances, and parent without fear.

Coercive control gradually removes those freedoms.

A survivor may stop:

• seeing friends;
• spending money;
• attending school;
• practicing religion;
• seeking medical care;
• pursuing employment;
• disagreeing;
• disciplining children;
• reporting abuse; or
• leaving the relationship.

Over time, the survivor’s world becomes increasingly organized around managing the abusive partner’s behavior.

Coercive Control and Intimate Partner Violence

Physical violence often represents only one component of coercive control.

Many abusive partners rarely use physical violence because they have learned that psychological control can be equally effective.

Examples include:

• checking phones and social media;
• demanding passwords;
• controlling clothing;
• tracking locations;
• requiring constant communication;
• threatening self-harm to prevent separation;
• controlling finances;
• threatening deportation;
• threatening custody actions;
• making false reports;
• destroying property;
• intimidating pets; and
• isolating partners from support systems.

These behaviors often escalate over time and frequently continue after separation.

In fact, separation is one of the highest-risk periods for serious injury or homicide because coercive control is threatened when the survivor attempts to regain independence.

Coercive Control and Children

Children are rarely “just witnesses” to domestic violence.

Even when they are not physically assaulted, they often experience coercive control directly.

Children may be:

• manipulated to monitor the non-offending parent;
• pressured to take sides;
• exposed to chronic fear and unpredictability;
• forced to keep secrets;
• used to deliver messages;
• threatened with removal;
• emotionally abused;
• exposed to degrading treatment of the protective parent; or
• made responsible for managing adult conflict.

Children living in coercively controlling homes often learn that safety depends upon constantly monitoring the abusive person’s mood.

Many develop hypervigilance, anxiety, depression, emotional dysregulation, difficulty trusting others, sleep disturbances, academic challenges, and trauma-related symptoms.

Importantly, these impacts can occur even when children are never physically struck.

The Intersection of Intimate Partner Violence and Child Abuse

Historically, domestic violence and child abuse were often addressed separately by different systems.

Research now demonstrates that these forms of family violence frequently overlap.

The abusive partner’s behavior often creates multiple forms of harm simultaneously:

• harming the intimate partner;
• undermining the survivor’s parenting;
• exposing children to fear;
• using children as instruments of control;
• creating chronic household instability; and
• increasing children’s risk for emotional, behavioral, and developmental difficulties.

Children are affected not only by what is done directly to them but also by what they witness happening to the protective parent.

When one parent is terrorized, isolated, financially controlled, or emotionally degraded, children’s sense of safety and stability is also compromised.

The Safe & Together™ Model

One of the most significant developments in child welfare practice is the Safe & Together™ Model, which is being implemented in many child welfare systems across New York State.

The Safe & Together Model shifts the focus away from asking:

“Why didn’t the survivor leave?”

Instead, professionals are encouraged to ask:

“What is the person using abuse doing that is creating danger for the adult survivor and the children?”

This represents a profound change in practice.

Rather than placing responsibility on the non-offending parent for “failing to protect,” the model recognizes that the abusive partner’s pattern of coercive control is often the primary source of risk to the entire family.

The model encourages professionals to document and respond to the perpetrator’s pattern of behavior rather than focusing primarily on the survivor’s responses to abuse.

Three Core Principles of the Safe & Together Model

The Safe & Together Model is built around three guiding principles.

1. Keep Children Safe and Together with the Non-Offending Parent Whenever Possible Research consistently demonstrates that children generally fare better when they can safely remain with the protective, non-offending parent. The model recognizes that removing children from that parent may compound trauma if the primary source of danger is the abusive partner.

2. Partner with the Protective Parent Survivors are often doing far more to protect their children than systems initially recognize. They may be de-escalating conflict, creating safety plans, seeking resources, shielding children from violence, or making strategic decisions to reduce risk.

Professionals are encouraged to identify and build upon these protective efforts rather than assuming inaction.

3. Hold the Person Using Violence Accountable The model emphasizes documenting the specific behaviors of the abusive partner, including how those behaviors affect the survivor’s parenting and the children’s well-being. Accountability means shifting attention to the choices of the person causing harm and requiring them to take responsibility for the impact of their actions.

Coercive Control as a Parenting Issue

One of the most important contributions of the Safe & Together Model is recognizing that coercive control is also a parenting issue.

An abusive partner may interfere with parenting by:

• undermining parental authority;
• sabotaging routines;
• withholding financial resources needed for children’s care;
• frightening children;
• forcing loyalty conflicts;
• preventing medical treatment;
• interfering with school attendance;
• manipulating custody arrangements;
• threatening to take the children; or
• using visitation to continue abuse after separation.

These behaviors directly affect children’s health, development, and emotional security, even if the children are never physically assaulted.

Implications for Abusive Partner Intervention Programs

Modern APIPs should help participants understand that coercive control harms entire family systems.

Participants benefit from examining:

• how coercive control develops over time;
• the beliefs that support entitlement and domination;
• how abuse affects children’s brain development and emotional health;
• the impact of undermining the protective parent;
• the ways coercive control continues after separation;
• strategies for building respectful co-parenting relationships where appropriate; and
• the importance of accountability for the full pattern of abusive behavior, not just isolated incidents.

This work should be paired with structured risk assessments, ongoing monitoring, and collaboration with survivor advocacy organizations to ensure that intervention remains focused on safety.

A Family-Centered Approach to Safety

Understanding coercive control changes how professionals assess danger and plan interventions. Rather than viewing violence as isolated incidents, it encourages practitioners to see the broader pattern of domination that affects every member of the family.

By integrating the principles of coercive control with the Safe & Together Model, child welfare, courts, probation, victim services, and Abusive Partner Intervention Programs can better identify risk, strengthen accountability, support protective caregivers, and improve outcomes for children.

Ultimately, preventing family violence requires more than stopping physical assaults. It requires restoring safety, dignity, autonomy, and healthy relationships for survivors while holding the person using abuse accountable for the full impact of their behavior. When professionals focus on patterns rather than isolated events, they are better equipped to intervene effectively, reduce future harm, and support lasting change.