Richard Jones asks three interesting questions about my new book on Coercive Control, how my position differs from earlier views of coercive control, like Judy Herman's whom he quotes; whether my concept of coercive control as a crime against individual liberty is compatible with broader criticism of "patriarchy" and manhood; and whether I make recommendations to bring patriarchy to justice. The question of how coercive control is linked to sexual inequality and justice for women is at the heart of the book.

Coercive Control attempts to close the gap that separates how men subjugate women in personal life from the domestic violence model that guides the current response. I describe the basic elements of the domestic violence definition of abuse, show that interventions based on this model such as programs for batterers or arrest have failed to substantially improve women's safety, provide an alternative model of abuse based on viewing coercion and control as the key rather than assault, illustrate the new model with dozens of case examples, and argue that adapting this model could put the domestic violence revolution begun in the l970's back on course. The violence approach is based on a "calculus of harms:" the most severe the violence, the more serious the crime. I argue that coercive control jeopardizes individual liberty and autonomy as well as safety and that its center is the micro-regulation of women’s default roles as wife, mother, homemaker and sexual partner. In this model the primary harm is the denial of freedom, equality and respect that are preconditions for citizenship in democratic society.

I devote considerable space in the book to earlier theories of coercive control, a term that has floated around the edges of the battered women’s movement for three decades. Originally used to describe the brain washing of POW’s in Korea, coercive control was first applied to abuse by feminist psychologists in the early 70’s (twenty years before Herman or I used the term), adapted by David Adams when he started Emerge, the pioneering group for abusive men in Boston, and is illustrated to a greater or lesser extent in a number of popular books on abuse, including Jones and Schechter’s When Love Goes Wrong and Lundy Bancroft’s Why Does He Do That?. While the passage Richard Jones cites from Herman is intriguing, her book is primarily about the psychological consequences of prolonged, repeated trauma. By contrast, I focus on the strategies men use to subjugate women and how women resist. I devote about l50 pages to detailing these strategies, trace the process by which coercive control emerged from simple domestic violence as men’s strategy of choice, and show how reframing domestic violence as coercive control illuminates aspects of women’s subjugation that have not been widely discussed until now. Unlike Herman and others who talk about “psychological abuse,” I emphasize the external controls men put in place, such as taking a woman’s money, monitoring her time, and restricting her movement rather than psychological dynamics, which I view as secondary.

I argue that men have made coercive control their abuse strategy of choice because many of the supports for the traditional patriarchy have been swept aside by women’s liberation, economic progress and the attainment of formal sexual equality. In countries where women’s lives are still circumscribed by religion and they remain economically, politically and socially marginal, there is no need for individual men to regulate a woman’s dress or control their money, since they have none. If women’s attainment of formal equality leads men who wish to dominate them to construct what amounts to a patriarchy in miniature in individual relationships, they can only succeed in this adventure because men can exploit persistent inequalities, such as the huge difference between men and women’s earnings. Thus, coercive control is personal because it is constructed in personal life; but it could not exist if women enjoyed full equality.

I distinguish partner violence—which women use against their partners as well as men—from coercive control precisely by the extent to which the latter depends on sexual inequality and focuses on the imposition of stereotype sex roles. Among the other recommendations I make is to identify coercive control as a distinct course of conduct crime that incurs serious penalties. But I do not believe that doing so will end male domination any more than outlawing lynching put an end of racial inequality. What I do believe is that identifying and stopping coercive control could open a space for women’s self-expression in millions of homes and relationships.

Jones ends his letter by agreeing with Carolyn about recognizing the danger signs and standing up to abusive behavior firmly and as soon as it happens. This is a much simpler matter with violence than with coercive control, where many of the early signs—such as insisting she stay home or quit school or her job for me initially feel like love. It suggests that women get caught up in coercive control because of a failure of nerve or ignorance. In fact, as the stories in my book show, we build public monuments to men who exhibit the courage in the face of adversity that women routinely exhibit in these relationships. We don’t urge a hostage or a kidnap victim to “stand up” to the kidnapper or terrorist. Instead we take forceful, collective and public action to right the wrong that is done. This is what is needed with coercive control.