Dressed Up as Conflict: Why Coercive Control Must Be Named for What It Is

Systems Change
Written By Jessica Sisler

By Nic Douglas, European Regional Manager, Safe & Together Institute

There is a question I find myself returning to time and again in my work: Why is there such a deep-rooted tendency to describe domestic abuse as conflict?

On the surface, it can seem measured. Balanced. Professional. It can signal that we are not rushing to judgement, that we are holding complexity, that we are aware of the risks of over-pathologising family dynamics. But in the context of domestic abuse, I want to argue that the word “conflict” is not neutral at all. It is a choice that determines the approach practitioners and systems take, often with significant consequences.

Let me be clear: Conflict between parents is real, and it matters. Children are impacted by parental conflict, and practitioners are right to take it seriously. But before we conclude that what we are seeing is conflict, we must assess whether domestic abuse behaviours, including coercive control, are being used by one parent against another. Because the two are not the same, they do not have the same foundation, and the approach we take should be fundamentally different.

Getting the distinction wrong has serious implications for children and survivors, creates misinformation, and ultimately makes our jobs harder.

The Language of Mutuality

Practitioners working with families affected by domestic abuse perpetration are regularly exposed to distressing material. The cumulative weight of that exposure, the organisational pressure to remain balanced, and the deeply embedded cultural discomfort around naming one person as an abuser all create conditions in which palatable language flourishes.

“Conflict,” “volatile relationship,” “parental dispute,” “acrimonious separation,” and “relationship difficulties” are phrases familiar across child protection, family court, and multi-agency meetings. They appear in assessments, court reports, and—as I will come to—even in Child Safeguarding Practice Reviews (CSPRs).

What these phrases have in common is that they distribute responsibility. They position both parties as participants in a shared dynamic, rather than identifying one person as the architect of harm. In doing so, they make the practitioner’s task feel more manageable. But they can also fundamentally misrepresent what is happening.

Coercive control is not conflict. It is a pattern of behaviour—deliberate, purposeful, and often highly strategic—by which one person establishes dominance over another. It operates through surveillance, isolation, economic control, threats, manipulation of children, and the systematic erosion of a person’s autonomy and sense of self. It is not an argument that escalated. It is not a relationship where both parties have “pushed each other’s buttons.” It is a campaign with significant impacts on child wellbeing. When we call it conflict, we are not simply choosing a softer word—we are creating a different narrative.

When Even Reviews Get It Wrong

One of the most troubling indicators of how deeply this issue runs is its presence in CSPRs. These are our most rigorous, scrutinised opportunity to learn from the worst possible outcomes for children. And yet, in review after review, I see the terms domestic abuse, volatile relationship, and conflict used interchangeably—sometimes within the same paragraph and/or to describe the same incident.

This is not a minor editorial inconsistency. It is a systemic failure of analysis. When a CSPR describes a father’s pattern of intimidation, surveillance, and violence as “ongoing conflict between the parents,” it obscures the question of who was doing what to whom. It implies mutuality where there was none. It suggests that the child’s exposure to harm was an unfortunate byproduct of a troubled relationship rather than, in many cases, the direct and intentional result of one parent’s abusive behaviour towards the whole family unit.

The Accountability Gap

Here is what the shift from coercive control to conflict does to accountability: Conflict implies that resolution requires both parties to change. Conflict-based interventions—couples counselling, mediation, co-parenting programmes—are premised on mutual responsibility. They ask: What can each of you do differently?

This is not simply unhelpful in cases of coercive control. It is actively dangerous. It places a survivor in a space where they are expected to negotiate with the person who has been controlling them, often without any acknowledgement that abuse is happening. It signals to the perpetrator that their behaviour is understood as relational, not abusive, and that they are half of a problem, not the source of it.

Coercive control, by contrast, demands a perpetrator-focused analysis. It asks: What has this person done? What pattern of behaviour have they established? What impact has that pattern had on the non-abusing parent and the children? What accountability is being held?

When we name coercive control accurately, the locus of responsibility shifts. The perpetrator and their choices are identifiable. The harm they have caused is traceable not to the relationship but to their specific, deliberate actions.

This is exactly what the Safe & Together Model has been advocating for since its inception: Perpetrator behaviour—not the domestic abuse situation in the abstract—must be the unit of analysis in child protection and family support work. We must assess for the presence of domestic abuse in cases that present as conflict and push back against those who use the term “conflict” to clearly define what we can see is abuse.

The Burden Falls on Survivors

The cost of conflict framing is not evenly distributed. It falls hardest on survivors.

When a case is described as conflict, the survivor is implicitly positioned as a participant in the problem. She is assessed for her ability to protect, her insight, and her willingness to work with professionals. She may be asked why she provoked arguments, why she did not leave sooner, or why she continues to engage in conflict with her co-parent.

The coercive control that constrained her choices, shaped her responses, and, in many cases, made leaving dangerous is rendered invisible by the conflict frame. What remains visible is her behaviour, measured against a standard of protective parenting that takes no account of the conditions under which she has been living. Practitioners assess the protective parent’s capacity far more thoroughly than they assess the perpetrator’s behaviour. And the language of conflict enables that disparity.

Children’s Harm Is Not Incidental

Perhaps the most significant consequence of conflict framing—and the one I feel most urgently about—is what it does to our understanding of harm to children.

Children who live with a coercive controlling parent are not accidental casualties of adult relationship difficulties. The harm they experience is frequently purposeful and strategic. Children are used as tools of control: through threats to take them away, through manipulation of their loyalties, through abuse that is timed and calibrated to maximise the impact on the non-abusing parent. In post-separation contexts, contact arrangements become a primary vector through which control continues.

But conflict framing erases this.

If what is happening in a family is described as conflict, then the children are being harmed by the conflict—by the atmosphere, the tension, and the disruption. That framing points towards stabilising the relationship, improving communication, and reducing hostility. It does not point towards identifying which parent is perpetrating harm, how that harm is being used, and what needs to stop.

We must ensure that practitioners are able to name perpetrator behaviour as the source of harm to children. Not the relationship—the perpetrator’s choices. This is not semantics. It is the difference between an assessment that leads to accountability and one that leads to burden-shifting.

What Good Assessment Looks Like

Assessing for coercive control in cases that present as conflict requires practitioners to move beyond surface presentation. This is not about dismissing conflict as a concern—it is about ensuring we do not name something as “conflict” before we have ruled out, or properly understood, the coercive dynamic that may be driving it. High-conflict dynamics can themselves be a product of coercive control—the conflict we observe may be the survivor’s attempt to resist continued coercion or the perpetrator’s escalation following separation. We cannot know which we are dealing with unless we assess.

Good assessment asks:

  • Is there a pattern of behaviour or isolated incidents?

  • Who has decision-making power in this family? Who does not?

  • How have the children been used within the dynamic?

  • What has the survivor’s range of choices actually been?

  • What does the perpetrator’s behaviour look like across all domains, including family ecology?

These questions require time, skill, and organisational permission to ask. They require a framework that gives practitioners a common language and a structured methodology. They require managers who can hold the space for perpetrator-focused analysis rather than defaulting to the concept of mutual conflict.

Only once coercive control has been properly assessed for—and either identified or, with confidence, excluded—can we be sure that what we are dealing with is conflict. To skip that step is not balance. It is a gamble with survivor and child safety.

Coercive control is not “conflict.” Calling it “conflict” does not make our work more sophisticated. It makes it less safe. It removes accountability from perpetrators. It places undue burdens on survivors. It obscures the strategic nature of harm to children. And, as we see even in reviews, it embeds a fundamental misunderstanding into the very documents from which we are meant to learn.

Additional Resources

Jessica Sisler
Next

When Everyone Speaks the Same Language: How the Safe & Together Model Strengthens Multidisciplinary Teams