Parenting Under Siege: Reckoning with Coercive Control

Coercive control is a pervasive form of domestic violence in which one partner engages in a prolonged and multifaceted campaign of abuse in order to gain and maintain dominance over the other partner. While some coercively controlling partners employ physical violence to ensure compliance with their demands, others use exclusively non-violent tactics. In co-parenting relationships, coercive control not only inflicts severe harm on the targeted parent but also affects children as co-victims of both direct and indirect abuse. As a result, co-victim children suffer significant emotional, developmental, and social harm, and adverse health outcomes, even in the absence of physical abuse. Yet legal frameworks addressing domestic violence typically focus on discrete acts of physical violence, adhering to what scholars term the “violent incident model.” Recognizing this gap, several states have introduced legislation that would expand state law domestic violence definitions to include coercive control, both in criminal and family law contexts. This Article critiques these trending legislative reforms, arguing that such expansions are unlikely to meaningfully benefit survivors and may instead be weaponized by abusive partners, resulting in criminal prosecution, loss of custody of children, and other negative consequences for survivors of coercive control who are unjustly swept up in broad statutory language. Systemic flaws in both the criminal and family law systems make women of color and other marginalized victims particularly vulnerable to this risk of being falsely classified as perpetrators of coercive control. This Article recommends against these broad definitional changes, instead proposing a more nuanced approach combining training initiatives with legislative reforms that expand key legal protections to victims of coercive control. The Article concludes by noting that more comprehensive solutions will remain out of reach without a fundamental shift in societal values which challenges the deeply patriarchal social norms of abuse and victimhood that entrap and endanger coercive control victims and their children.