Season 2 Episode 12: How Coercive Control Harms Child Safety and Well-Being: An Interview with Dr. Emma Katz

About This Episode

For 15 years, the Safe & Together Model has trained professionals in the importance of centering coercive controlling patterns of behaviors if you want to understand the harm domestic abuse perpetrators create for their children and how that is parenting choice. Failures to link coercive control to child abuse and neglect make it easier to blame adult survivors, who are being protective, with “failure to protect” and “parental alienation.” The Safe & Together Model’s perpetrator pattern–based approach links coercive control in a number of different ways, creating a foundation for a domestic abuse–informed practice that helps professionals to partner with survivors and intervene with perpetrators as parents while also mapping the adult survivors attempts to protect children, who may not have access to formal services such as police, child protection, or counseling because these interventions may not be safe and can create more danger for adult and child survivors.

New research is backing up this approach by exploring how coercive control impacts children directly via multiple pathways to harm. In this episode, Ruth and David talk with Dr. Emma Katz, a leading research specialist in the harms caused by perpetrators to mothers and children in the context of domestic abuse. The topics of conversation include:

• How perpetrators of coercive control create danger and harm for their children within relationships and post-separation

• How professionals and systems are failing to assess the parenting of the perpetrator and how that increases the danger for child and adult survivors

• How the language of “child exposed to domestic violence” obscures the multiple ways perpetrators harm children and hides the choices of the perpetrator as a parent

• How coercive control impacts child safety, well-being, and family functioning  in the absence of physical violence

Additional Resources

• Article: When Coercive Control Continues to Harm Children: Post-Separation Fathering, Stalking & Domestic Violence

• Article: Beyond the Physical Incident Model: How Children Living with Domestic Violence are Harmed By and Resist Regimes of Coercive Control

• Dr. Katz’s book Coercive Control in Children's and Mothers’ Lives

• David Mandel’s book Stop Blaming Mothers and Ignoring Fathers: How to Transform the Way We Keep Children Safe from Domestic Violence

• Safe & Together Institute’s domestic abuse–informed trainings

• Safe & Together Institute’s upcoming events