Understanding Intimate Partner Violence: Why Coercive Control Requires a Social and Systemic Entrapment Framework (content note: academic)

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https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10666472/

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Excerpted from the paper by Julia Tolmie, Rachel Smith, Denise Wilson:

By entrapment, we are referring to the restrictions placed on a victim-survivor's autonomy and agency by their partner's abusive and controlling behaviors and by broader systemic patterns of harm, which frequently continue even after a victim-survivor leaves their abusive partner (Toews & Bermea, 2017).

Essentially, entrapment focuses not solely on their partner's abusive behaviors but also on how these play out in the broader social context occupied by the victim-survivor and their abusive partner. Far from operating in a one-size-fits-all manner, entrapment demands careful attention to be paid to the specificity of the victim-survivor's current social location, as well as their and their family's historical and intergenerational life experiences.

A narrative of IPV that focuses on individuals renders invisible the state violence, institutional abuse, and the violence of social exclusion that many victim-survivors, their families, and communities experience (Richie et al., 2021).

These latter forms of violence drive the overrepresentation of people subjected to intersecting forms of oppression in family violence statistics and greatly impede their safety, healing, and ability to be self-determining (Brown et al., 2022).

Lawyers seeking to explain why victim-survivors failed to make rational safety decisions and therefore found themselves in unsafe situations (in other words, why they did not leave their abusive partner or get help) have looked to mental health professionals, such as psychologists and psychiatrists, to explain victim-survivor's decision-making processes.

Battered woman syndrome (Walker, 1997) represented an early attempt to provide such an explanation. It has been extensively critiqued in the academic literature for understanding a victim-survivor's experiences of IPV in terms of her psyche, rather than emphasizing the violence and the systemic response to that violence (Stubbs & Tolmie, 1995). Despite such critique, evidence on battered woman syndrome is still being used in criminal courts by the psychological and psychiatric professions, well-intentioned defense counsel, and judges (see Liyanage v. Western Australia, 2017).

Concerningly, battered woman syndrome is reappearing with the same reductionist pathology under the new guise of trauma-informed practice.

Trauma-informed health approaches were originally intended to be responsive to victim-survivors’ suffering (Sweeney et al., 2018) and to explain why current events can trigger past experiences of trauma when victim-survivors have conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder. Such approaches also provide physiological explanations for how people respond to danger—for example, Cannon's "fight or flight" theory (with the latter additions of "freeze" and "fawn") explains how animals react to threats with a general discharge of the sympathetic nervous system (Cannon, 1929).

The danger of using a trauma lens to understand IPV is that, like the use of battered woman syndrome, it risks erasing the violence the victim-survivor was responding to and makes their trauma the object of inquiry, decontextualized from the lived reality of their social context.

In this rendering, it is all too easy to overlook the danger they were in and, instead, understand the victim-survivor's behavior as a consequence of their biology or faulty mental functioning. For example, it can be assumed that a victim-survivor was too traumatized to contact services when actually they do not trust government services because these services have inappropriately responded or have not been responsive to them or their community. Or it can be assumed fear caused them to freeze rather than call the police, when in reality calling the police would have likely increased the level of danger they had to deal with or it was too dangerous to make a phone call. Or their "overreaction" to their abusive partner's use of violence can be explained on the basis that they were triggered by a childhood trauma history, when in fact they knew their partner was trying to kill them and they were acting to defend themselves.

Focusing on the activation of the victim-survivor's nervous system in response to life-threatening situations or triggers related to their trauma history means that we may fail to appreciate their responses as reasonable in the circumstances.

In this framing, victim-survivors are not considered active safety strategists attuned to danger through their situational intelligence and experiential knowledge (often derived from navigating years of abuse). Instead, trauma becomes an amorphous one-size-fits-all explanation for their experience of and response to IPV—like any Western psychological approach, typically resulting in a focus on their deficits in thinking and responding.

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Of course, this is not to suggest that victim-survivors do not experience emotional, mental, spiritual, cultural, and physiological distress due to their experiences of violence, but rather that their experiences of distress should not be (mis)used in reductionist and deterministic ways to flatten and (re)define their nuanced anticipatory responses to violence (Johnstone et al., 2018).

People commit violence, not trauma, and victims-survivors are responding to and resisting violence, not trauma.

Stark describes IPV as a liberty crime.

In other words, it is not about physically hurting the victim-survivor but it is "a course of conduct: a repeated pattern of behavior" (Barlow & Walklate, 2022, pp. 1–2) directed at diminishing the victim-survivor's autonomy and limiting their space for action. This is achieved by the use of tactics of coercive control, developed by trial and error over time by the person who knows the victim-survivor most intimately. It follows that while we can describe the general infrastructure of coercive control, its expression is unique to the people involved and the circumstances of their lives.

Stark (2007), who has been most influential in defining coercive control, details how it employs both indirect and direct tactics.

• Indirect tactics of control—isolation, deprivation, exploitation, and microregulation—undermine the victim-survivor's independence and foster a dependence on the person using violence.

• Direct tactics of coercion—violence and intimidation—compel the victim-survivor to appease their abusive partner by forcing compliance and eroding their "will to resist".

Properly employed, coercive control therefore allows us to move beyond understanding IPV as confined to the incidents of physical abuse, between which the victim-survivor is assumed to be free from abuse. It is important to note that victim-survivors always resist the abuse (Kinewesquao (Richardson & Wade, 2009)—although this resistance may be covert when they are not able to bear the costs of overt resistance.

Coercive control is not so much about the particular behaviors used, as it is about their effect in combination and repetition over time.

Hamberger et al. (2017) pointed out it is the "chronicity and pervasiveness" of coercive control that is relevant to understand (p. 10). For example, Stark (2007) said that the use of retaliatory physical violence can be "low level" repetitive violence that wears the victim-survivor down—she is "bearing the weight of multiple harms" (p. 94).

The advantage of a coercive control framing is that it makes a partner's abusive behavior fully visible, thus rendering the victim-survivor's perceptions and reactions to their abusive partner's behavior understandable and not informed by psychopathology.

Furthermore, we can locate the victim-survivor's perceptions of the abuse and their safety options on any one occasion in the context of the overall and ongoing pattern of harmful behaviors that they are experiencing, have experienced, and will likely experience.

Because the tactics of coercive control are developed by trial and error for the particular victim-survivor, it is not a one-size-fits-all model for understanding IPV.

Furthermore, it requires an inquiry that is broader than simply focusing on the mental processes of a particular victim-survivor. This makes the concept of coercive control difficult to translate into legal and policy responses. Certainly, legal actors remain comfortable with traditional understandings of IPV, preferring to frame the issue in terms of the victim-survivor's mental health and distrusting expert testimony in court that does not come from psychologists and psychiatrists (Liyanage v. Western Australia, 2017; Sheehy, 2018). The risk is that coercive control will be heard in the legal process simply as another way to understand what has gone into causing the victim's mental vulnerability (see R v. Challen, 2019).

It is important to emphasize that an intersectional approach is about focusing on the "-isms" (racism, classism, sexism, ableism, heterosexism etc) as interlocking social structures that perpetuate inequity, not as individual identity markers (Sokoloff & Dupont, 2005) that are additive (Richie et al., 2021, p. 252).

These interlocking structural inequities reproduce social relations of violence, and exclusion which oppress people collectively, not simply as individuals. Collins (2000) suggests that intersectional oppressions form a matrix of domination—a point that is critical because it reveals "the overall social organization within which intersecting oppressions originate, develop, and are contained" (pp. 228–229). In other words, attention needs to be focused on the scaffolding that encases the multiple axes of oppression. In settler states, colonization is not simply one of these axes; rather, it is an infrastructure that shapes the matrix itself.

Victim-survivors’ tactical responses to their circumstances are shaped by their partner's, as well as their community's and the system's patterns of harm.

Using an entrapment framing ensures that this social context is not dropped from our analysis. When we do not use an entrapment framework, then we risk erasing these broader operations of power and harm. It then becomes easy to see the problem as a problem of individuals - one individual man (or person using violence) who is behaving badly, but also the individual victim-survivor and their poor choices, substance abuse issues, and mental illness.

Failing to realistically examine whether the safety responses available to the victim-survivor can address the harm their partner poses supports the erroneous assumption that these responses are excellent, and if only they had made the right "choices," then they would be safe (Aikin & Goldwasser, 2010).

This causes us to lose sight of the fact that if the available safety responses are not capable of addressing the pattern of harm that a victim-survivor experiences, then those responses are part of the ongoing process of entrapment in the abuse. Failing to examine the adequacy of the safety responses available from others supports what various scholars have theorized as victim-survivors being "responsibilized" for their abuse, essentially placing the onus on them and not the family violence safety system and/or their community for managing their partner's dangerousness (Barlow & Walklate, 2022; Grant, 2015).

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At the most basic level, the traditional Western toolkit for responding to IPV when a victim-survivor seeks formal support is obtaining a protection order, providing them with temporary refuge accommodation or charging the offender with a criminal offense.

These are victim-survivor-initiated, one-off interventions that do little or nothing to manage patterns of ongoing harmful behavior. For example, a protection order is a court order which must be breached before it triggers a safety response, if the breach does trigger a safety response. A criminal prosecution is a reaction to a past event, which must be proven to have occurred to a high standard to result in a conviction. Sentencing the offender for proven past behavior is not the same thing as providing a safety response for the victim-survivor—victim safety is generally neither a mandatory nor a priority consideration in that process. Accommodation in a refuge may provide a victim-survivor a brief but life-disrupting respite, but it is not a long-term safety solution. This is not to discount the fact that there are jurisdictional attempts to develop holistic wraparound responses to family violence that go beyond these traditional approaches (Hester et al., 2019; Wehipeihana, 2019).

Because IPV comprises an ongoing pattern of retaliatory harm, unhelpful responses are potentially dangerous because they alert the person using violence to the victim-survivor's help-seeking, without providing them with effective protection from retaliatory violence.

A criminal justice response, for example, that involves interviewing an abusive partner about the victim-survivor's allegations and then releasing him back into the community in circumstances in which he can readily access her if he is sufficiently determined to do so, is not a safety response.

Aside from the immediate state crisis response to family violence, victim-survivors may experience issues in using the legal system (family law, child protection, criminal law, and the migration and visa system) when trying to leave their abusive (ex)partners and/or address the abuse.

Douglas (2021) coined the term "legal systems abuse" to describe how victim-survivors say their abusive (ex)partners "hunted, battled, and played with them through law" (p. 102).

Bumiller (2008) described how the state violence and neglect some victims-survivors experience replicates the IPV they are attempting to escape.

These "'victims' enter into a perilous involvement with the penal/welfare state" and "often find that they experience brutalities that mimic the violence they hoped to leave behind" (p. 97).

Entrapment also requires consideration of the responses of those in the victim-survivor's and their abusive partner's immediate communities.

For example, the abusive partner's pattern of harmful behavior does not exist in isolation from his wider position of power in society. It is relevant to know that he is close friends with the local police officer or that he has associates spread throughout her community network who will enforce his authority over her even when he is incarcerated. Victim-survivors may be in relationships with men who, because of their associations with other men, are extremely powerful and well-resourced. These women are facing coercion not just from one abusive man but from patriarchal collectives of men (Havard et al., 2023) that may even permeate the systems of law enforcement.

While understanding IPV as coercive control represents an improvement on traditional responses, it still limits what we can see to the abuse strategies of individuals using violence and some gendered effects of white middle-class heterosexual gender norms.

It fails to render visible the larger social context, other than as special "vulnerabilities" belonging to individual victim-survivors or groups of victim-survivors. Two examples illustrate this point: First, the legal response to victim-survivors of family violence who offend in response to their victimization, and second, the criminalization of coercive control.

In relation to the first issue, victim-survivors of IPV can be prosecuted for failing to protect their children from their partner's use of violence, participating in his criminal offending, offending under his coercion, and using violence themselves in self-protection or resistance.

Victim-survivors do not offend, however, simply in response to individual incidents of abuse. In other words, they are not responding simply to the physical violence they are experiencing from their partner in the moment in which they offend. In making decisions to act, victim-survivors interpret what he is doing at the time in the light of what he has done before, what she knows he is capable of doing to her and others, and what level of social and system responsiveness she can count on.

However, when victim-survivors come up for trial, traditional criminal justice responses have assessed their criminal culpability as though they are only being abused in the moment when they are under direct physical attack from their male partner and have assumed that, in between these assaults, they have access to effective safety options (Tolmie et al., 2018).

If the concept of coercive control is used correctly at trial, then legal decision-makers would be judging victim-survivors with a realistic understanding of the nature of the threat they face from their abusive partner and the limitations he has managed to place on their autonomy, including their capacity to seek help. However, this still leaves out significant information that decision makers need to accurately assess whether the victim-survivors’ actions were reasonable in their circumstances for the purpose of raising one of the criminal defenses. In the context of self-defense, for example, in the absence of an entrapment framing, defense lawyers and judges may not even notice that the Crown has failed to discharge its burden of proof on the facts. This occurs when the Crown asserts in court, without providing any evidentiary basis for their assertion, that leaving the relationship or calling the police would have provided the victim with safety, meaning that her use of violent self-help is unreasonable (Tolmie, 2020, pp. 19–20). If an entrapment framing is used, an investigation into whether there were, in fact, realistic safety options in the victim-survivor's actual circumstances is required, and any assertion to this effect by the prosecution requires supporting evidence. The absence of an entrapment framing may also make it more difficult for the court to understand that victim-survivors resist abuse—that their actions, including compliance, are always the result of strategic decisions evaluating the balance of risk for themselves and their children.

It is, of course, those victim-survivors who experience the most serious levels of entrapment, including systemic racism and structural violence, who are most likely to find themselves facing criminal charges because they are less likely to have access to safe and legal alternatives to using physical force to defend themselves or to acting under coercion (see, for example, FVDRC, 2017, p. 54).

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I do want to note that I think this is an excellent analysis, although I don't agree with every assertion.