Genesis The Podcast

Evan Stark: Coercive Control and Its Damaging Impact on Children - An Urgent Call to Action

• Genesis Women's Shelter • Season 3 • Episode 5

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What if the very institution meant to protect you, weaponizes and silences you instead? This disturbing question lies at the heart of our conversation with renowned Professor Emeritus, social worker, and author Evan Stark. Evan's staggering and transformative research exposes the damaging impact of coercive control on children, and how this abuse often stems from a terroristic pattern within households.

Evan elaborates on the terrifying power play in which children become pawns, mirroring the tyranny suffered by women. His research unveils the chilling reality that domestic violence provides the most prevalent context for child abuse. We navigate through the insidious control mechanisms, the resulting intimidation, and the profound long-term effects on the victims. Evan also reveals how child welfare systems and children-serving systems were forced to adapt in response to his ground-breaking findings.

Towards the end, we steer the conversation towards the crippling influence of coercive control on the legal system. Evan shares cases where children were manipulated and forced into silence, and the abuser often remained unseen by both child welfare experts and medical professionals. Yet there is hope. We highlight examples of countries - such as Scotland that are working to create secure environments for women and children around the world including naming coercive control as a crime. 

Speaker 1:

Professor, emeritus, social worker and author, evan Stark is best known for his work on the subject of coercive control and his 2007 publication Coercive Control the Entrapment of Women in Personal Life. His new book, children of Coercive Control, released October 13, 2023, explores the insidious behavior even more deeply, revealing how children are weaponized, making child abuse tangential and espouse abuse. Professor Evan Stark is here to discuss his latest book and help break down the impact of coercive control upon children. I'm Maria McMullen and this is Genesis, the podcast. Dr Stark, welcome to the podcast. So we've been just sitting here having a great conversation about your new book, children of Coercive Control. How about you give us an overview of the book? What is it about and how does it build on your earlier work of the book Coercive Control?

Speaker 2:

I mean basically years and years ago too many years ago to remember we did a piece of research in the emergency room and in the medical complex at Yale and show that domestic violence was the leading cause of injury for which women sought medical attention. It was more common than rapes, muggings and auto accidents combined. That became the basis of ant-flitcraft medical thesis at Yale. It became the basis of 15 years of government funded research that we did out of Yale through the National Institute for Mental Health. It basically put domestic violence on the map as a medical and health issue. It gave a tremendous boost to other research in the area and it was a major stimulus behind President Clinton's signing of the Violence Against Women Act.

Speaker 2:

At the same time that we did this body of research and there was hundreds and hundreds of other people doing work in the research in the area we were building a movement based in the abused women and their children themselves. We were starting shelters. We started hiding women in our own home in 1972 who were abused. We opened a shelter here in New Haven in 1976. We visited Sharon Horn in St Paul, minnesota, in 1977, who had started one of the first shelters in the United States, and Hannah and I went to England and we visited Cheswick House, which is the first refuge for bad women anywhere in the world as far as we know.

Speaker 2:

In this current cycle. Last year we sheltered almost four and a half million women five million women worldwide in thousands of refugees and shelters in the United States. With the passage of the Violence Against Women Act, we had $150 million given to our movement to support shelters. We thought we had won a tremendous victory. We had won a tremendous victory. We had gone further on the abuse issue than probably any other movement had done in our history. And yet we got evidence back from police, from child welfare departments, from the justice system that even though we were arresting more than a million men each year for domestic violence, never before in history had that happened the homicide killing of women had not dropped one percentage point.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so all of these things are the basis for your original work, right? Coercive control.

Speaker 2:

This was. We were so excited that we had done work. So the question, the thing I want to have to tell you is because it was a terribly depressing discovery that, even though all of these reforms had been made, we'd done it and as far as we thought we'd go with domestic violence, we hadn't produced the incidence of abuse one percentage point. Two questions came up at that point. First, what have we done wrong? And the second was what about the children? These are the two questions that we hadn't answered. First question was most important what have we done wrong? Because obviously, if violence had been the issue and we were arresting people of a violence that searched large numbers, violence should go down. The first woman we hid in our house many, many years earlier I remembered, but only remembered much later had told me when I asked her to talk about the violence, dawn had said violence wasn't the worst part. And I, thinking, oh, of course it's very hard to talk about violence Said to her again talk about the violence, because that was what shocked me. Now that voice came back to me and with that voice came a series of questions and we started to talk to the woman and, for once, listen to them, not only to talk to them, but to listen to their children. And one thing led to another, and the thing that that led to was the discovery that physical violence against women was taking place in the most serious cases, and then the vast majority of cases, in the context of a terroristic pattern of coercive control, that in 70% of the cases where women were being abused, they were being not only physically abused but also psychologically abused and being controlled and intimidated and isolated and sexually abused and manipulated in dozens of other ways over a period of years. And this abuse was continuing, whether they were separated or living together, whether they were living in separate communities. For many, many years. Moreover, we learned that everyone in that family was being subjected to the same tyranny. If there were parents in the house, grandparents in the house, they were being subjected to it. If there were neighbors who tried to intervene, they were being subjected to it. Coworkers were being subjected to it. Friends of theirs who came to their house and tried to intervene were being subjected to the coercive control. They too were being stalked. They too were being threatened, but, most importantly and most immediately, we discovered that children were being subjected to it.

Speaker 2:

I had been doing research at that point on child abuse and I, as part of my work at Yale, had learned that domestic violence was the single most important context within children who are being abused. That was incredible finding at the time. Yeah, because at Yale, when we did that study, yale was darting the children for being abused, taking the children, referring them to child welfare, pulling the children out of their homes and the mothers were being darted and charged with failure to protect. And there wasn't one identification of an abuser of the child, even though we could tell from the medical records of the women and from the pediatricians we interviewed that they knew and everyone knew that the men responsible for hurting those children could have been identified. Had they been removed, their children would have been saved. So we wrote the book and I noticed it has the wrong part in the story, but it's very important because this is how history happened. So the domestic violence became all corrupt in the United States.

Speaker 2:

By the time we finished with the Clinton Lighthouse, every child welfare department in the country had adopted the stock for the correct risk screen. There was screening for domestic violence in their child welfare programs. Family costs were screening for child welfare. Pediatric hospitals were screening for domestic violence. I mean, everybody was screening for domestic violence and our shelters were beginning to look at children and meaning to talk about the children.

Speaker 2:

But two things happened. We went in opposite directions. In the shelters when we looked at the children, the children talked about the same course of control tactics that mothers talked about. But when the child welfare system talked to their children and they heard that the children had been subjected to abuse in the homes, they pulled the children from those homes. They diverted the mothers for child welfare, for child welfare abuses. They did nothing. The men were made just as invisible as they had been in Yale.

Speaker 2:

When we first did our research, I got a phone call from a lawyer in New York named Jill Giacani. She said she had a group of mothers whose children had been taken away by the city of New York Slowly because the mothers had been abused and that the children had been put into foster care. And that do you know what she said? New York City is using as an excuse to take those mothers away the fact that Dr Evan Stark had done research showing the importance of domestic violence as a source of injury and harms to women. That was the reason that City of New York was giving to justify taking children away from mothers and putting them in foster care.

Speaker 1:

What was your response to that?

Speaker 2:

We brought the constitutional charge against the City of New York and Federal Court. We charged them with violations of the 15th Amendment against slavery, of the 13th Amendment, of the 9th Amendment, of the 5th Amendment. We said they were denying those children the basic rights that they had under the Constitution to life and liberty by taking them away from their mothers and failing to protect them by holding the men responsible for abusing the mothers and their children accountable. And we had a five-month trial and I gave evidence in the trial that I explained in each of those cases. In many of these cases the fathers were out of the home and the abuse of the children was the institution of welfare, were the police who were removing them, not the fathers. The police themselves were taking the children away. The police themselves were preventing the mothers from getting jobs by labeling them as abusive mothers. Anyway, long story short, we won that case and we prohibited the child welfare programs in the United States from ever labeling mothers as abusive because they exposed them to domestic violence and saying that they should under all reasonable circumstances hold the men accountable who were responsible for that abuse.

Speaker 2:

And that began the journey, because now the child welfare system and the children's serving system, had to look for a different way to process women and to process children who were exposed to abuse other than blaming the mothers. And that set us on the road to new legislation, set us on the road to Scotland, where I worked with the government and the women's organizations in Scotland to frame a new crime, of course, of control, which included not only physical violence but all of the forms of isolation and restriction and control that were imposed over the years and, moreover, included the children said when their children are treated the same way the women are treated, which is what happens in these cases, is to crime, and this crime in Scotland carries 14 years in prison, the same time as murder, that same conviction. It's not a domestic violence misdemeanor. So now many, many states are doing that.

Speaker 2:

Australia, france, ireland, many, many countries have implemented a course from the wrong, and so, once we finished framing a new way of understanding women, the next step was to show that this is a global offense, that this is an offense that is motivated by a person's desire to appropriate all of the resources and privileges and opportunities that are available in family or household space, their own personal use and anybody who gets in the way, not only children, but particularly children, but anybody who interferes with that, including the police when they enter the area, including in-laws, including baby-sins, including workmates, is grist for the Court of Control and Mill and therefore it's a whole new understanding of the crime of appropriating human rights and dignity.

Speaker 2:

So I don't know if that gives you some sense, but that's why I wrote the book on children and it was in attempt to now get children's voices to listen and talk to children, both indirectly by proxy hear the voice of children who were murdered and what they went through and were trying to say before they were killed and also literally talking to children in refuges and in my practice about what they've experienced and put that into a book form.

Speaker 1:

See, I knew you could do a better job of summarizing the background in the book than I could, so thank you, I'm so sorry, I'm not far this way. So there are so many great concepts in children of Court of Control that we won't have time for all of them today, but some of the highlights are your argument about child abuse being tangential to spouse abuse. I'd love for you to explore that idea and how these abusive actions lead to the secondary victimization and or the weaponizing of children.

Speaker 2:

I say that the Court of Control of children is a form of secondary victimization and what I mean by that, of course, is that it's not secondary. Harming children is not secondary in importance, of course it's not, but it's secondary in the sense that the primary aim of the abuser is to hoard. As I said before, is to hoard the privileges and the resources that are available in the household to get the woman to be devoted to him, only to have all the money that's available in the household, to have all the time to watch television, to have access to the car, to have other women and have the wife at home, have all the cleaning done, etc. Etc. Now let me give you an example of a case in Wyeth's board. And people think well, if I say he's only interested in the woman, I'm trivializing children and I'm saying no, if you wait for a child to be harmed in a Court of Control situation, the child will be killed before there's any animosity.

Speaker 2:

And I tell the story about there was a case of a vehicle, the IOLA case a little boy named Adrian IOLA and his mother I was representing. His mother was one of the forensic sociographers for his mother and his mother was abused. She got a protection order and the boyfriend respected the protection order. He didn't come near the house during the time. The mother had the protection order out. So he went back to court and he said I want to see my boy, my two-year-old. And the judge asked me well, but do you think Dr Suggie's perspective is protection or why shouldn't he see the two-year-old? The mother said no, I don't want him to see the two-year-old because if he tries to get the two-year-olds he'll come after me. Two-year-old's name was Aidan and he he tries to get the two-year-olds who'll come after me. And I said, judge, the mother's absolutely right, but you're right. But Dr Suggie said this guy has no history of hostility towards a child at all. In fact he's carrying a picture of this child in the water. He loves this child. And I said I know he doesn't. You know I have no dad. He does. But the reason he's going to hurt the child is because it's the only way he can get to his wife and we have stopped him from getting access to his wife. Lo and behold, the judge said I can't, do not. He gave him supervised visitation. We had a sheriff with him. When he showed up to see the baby. Mother turned over the baby. He threw himself and the baby in the water drowned. The baby killed the baby. He didn't drown, he lived and, lo and behold, he had a picture of the baby in his wallet.

Speaker 2:

This is not typical, but what I'm saying is something that people in the family courts don't understand. People in the criminal courts don't understand that the hostility it's like a kidnapper or anybody else. It's not that the man has any. He may not even have any particular venom towards his wife. What he wants is the privilege and the opportunity. He wants the sex, he wants the money, he wants the material rewards, he wants the attention. The child is disposable. So I call it secondary victimization, because I say if you wait for harm to the children, it's too late, because in these cases the hostility is a global greed encumbering power and resources and everyone within that mill is disposable. And that's the same thing.

Speaker 2:

When I say the child abuse is tangential spouse abuse, I just mean that the children are being subjected to many of the same tactics. The children are being isolated, they're being sexual abused, they're being controlled. They may just sit in the corner. They may eat until you can finish the plate. They're made to sit silently. They're made to do certain things for the father that are inappropriate with respect to habits in the house and things like that. All the same rituals the mothers tell us about the children will also tell us about. But it's tangential in the sense that his aim is to bring almost always to bring the mother to heal. It's not necessarily to get the child to be obedient or anything else.

Speaker 2:

I have cases where children become proxies. I have one case in New York where the mother was a prominent Wall Street broker and the father didn't want to leave any bruises, so he would just beat the child. He would beat the son, the teenage son. When he wanted to get the wife to a home, the son was seeing a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist thought the boy had some kind of delusion. The husband was also seeing a psychiatrist because he didn't get along with his son and he was being medicated for marriage depressively for her. But the husband didn't lay a hand on the wife until she filed for divorce and she had enough money to leave the thing. Then he tried to kill her with a barbell. Up to that point the son was a proxy. He lived. You see what I mean. Again, I know this is a horrible story, but this is what coercive control is.

Speaker 2:

We thought domestic violence was a relatively insignificant problem because the police used to respond to it the same way they respond to Friday and Saturday night from the store. The fact that they had been responding to the same homes repeatedly, year after year after year. These relationships sometimes go on. The abuse can go on for 25, 30 years and in 25% 30% of the cases there's no physical violence. When we did our research at Yale, we thought physical violence was the most dramatic element of abuse. It turns out that there's a lot of physical violence in coercive control, but it's not bone breaking, murderous physical violence, but the most part because he wants essentially to keep her working and keep her money and keep her cooking and keep her sexually active.

Speaker 1:

He wants control.

Speaker 2:

It's what I call the Japanese call death by a thousand cuts, slow pushing, shoving, grabbing, nothing that would even leave a mark, nothing that's going to get her into the emergency moment to get an arrest for domestic violence, but the weight of an accumulated weight. And the same thing with children. The children are held, they're grabbed, they're pushed. They're not necessarily slapped or punched. If we wait for those bruises and the child protection system is going to come in and scream, we're not going to see anything like what the children described. They described suffocating control. Okay.

Speaker 1:

So I want to talk a little bit more about the children and what's in the book, because the book offers what you call a working model of the coercive control of children. Help us understand that model and its application.

Speaker 2:

Well, the main aspect of the model is identical to the model that women report happening to them. The violence against children tends to be again. In 35, 40% of cases there's no physical violence against the children, but in many cases, in the majority cases, there is, and physical violence tends to be low level grabbing, shoving, slapping, pushing Nothing that leaves marks, necessarily, but the cumulative weight of which is suffocating. Secondly, there's a spectrum of sexual violations. Again, the power ends at a spectrum is rape, but with women. Much more common is what I call rape is a routine where she doesn't say no but the sexual activity is coerced nonetheless because of fear of what will happen if she refuses. Is great. With children, the sexual Infant interventions are equally as not just. I have a number of cases in the book where I show that Some children in families are selected for little rapes and some children are selected for other kinds of sexual Interferences. You know, in new window, teasing, pinching, exposing, walking into the shower when the door was in the shower, accidentally come, leaving the door open in the toilet. They again in this, the spectrum of sexual offenses, all of which are designed not so much to achieve sexual domination as they are to achieve a sense of Violation, a sense of feeling Vulnerable, of feeling Shamed, so that you can all understand that for yourself. All of these things are designed in children to reduce their feelings of autonomy, they capacity for self definition.

Speaker 2:

The third element that we see with children is Intimidation, the creation of fear. Again, little threats are common enough. You know, in one family he made the dog disappear. Often the threats that children experience in coercive control are so our proportion to the violation that the Sense that the threat leaves is one of overwhelming impotence. For instance, one father's step talking to his son, one, two whole years, because the son lost his baseball hat on the way to from birth to second base, a sacred hack that he was not supposed to. I mean, is that kind of prohibition, so that it's not so much that the punishment is not related to some there's something that he was supposed to do but it's so our proportion that the fear is enormous. Intimidation includes stalking staying in the room, leaving the door overnight, interfering when you're on the computer, little messages letting you know that you're being watched. You know, by putting listening devices in your car if you're a teenager, putting and coming to school, unexpected showing up at your classroom, events, sporting events. You know there are all kinds of things that children tell me about their parents. In Germany, and these things particularly go on during custody fights, where the subtle messages that are being communicated Are only understood by the children and very often are not communicated to their mother for fear of heightening the conflict that's already going on in the.

Speaker 2:

The fourth element of the court is the control of children. Is isolation Making extremely difficult for children to maintain the normal relationships with their sips, With their grandparents, with their mothers, with their friends, with their classmates. All of the mourning, social mourning from which children get their identity, become the obstacles that the abuse of parent uses to disable the child's ability to Muster support sufficient to give you the mother's support or stand up against him, and these things are. I mean, gel Tory was the uh used to be the manager of the new york yankees and the los angeles Dodges, told me the story of how he and his brothers would become isolated when their father came home. They automatically had to leave the house. The sister was home and she had to bear the bond of it, but they had. They became isolated. They would sit in the car and listen while he abused and their mother. To this day, tory remembers, 30 years later, the effect of that isolation here had had on him, and even his sister, who was present and heard the beatings, told me that she had nowhere near as much effect as Tory does. Even today, when he begins to talk about it, he tears up. So I'm just telling you because the sense of children when there's an abuse going on in the house, they want to connect, they want to protect, they want to witness.

Speaker 2:

It's one of the things that I talked about in the book, how witnessing abuse has been talked about as harmful to children. Well, it can be harmful to children, men and women too. But particularly abusive men use witnessing, force children to witness as a way of hurting them, a way of scaring them. Regularly is a form of intimidation. But I also children have told me learned that children use witnessing as a way of Making themselves feel that they've done something and giving their parents's mother a sense of being protected. And when children are isolated they cut off. On that. They they're imagining what has happened. Tory told me his imagining of what his father was doing to his mother were probably much worse than anything he really did, but came down to a hundred years later when it was filling up.

Speaker 2:

So isolation is very important part of this, but the key piece, of course, control. Children is the control element. It's the actual, literal appropriation of what is there taking their toys, taking their favorite animals, taking their favorite clothing, getting rid of it, the appropriation of what is theirs, the Micro management of their lives. You will sit till Everyone is finished eating at the table. We'll eat all of the vegetables. You will do your homework and I corner. Every single moment of their life is Micro managed by the father until they're afraid to do anything, even elliptic pencil, without permission. I mean, there's so many examples I can give from Men and women who told me how these boys and girls, they were micro managed in their households so that today, little rituals like going to sleep without a favorite piece of music on or you know some other thing, is a ritual for them because the only way they could get away from remembering All the things they had to do it or fill their fathers.

Speaker 2:

One boy I hadn't really got a little bit it's so long a lift. He made it so second base and his half fellow of his baseball hat fell off on his way to the bridge. Running to second base and he stopped. He was going to make second base and we easily would have won that game and he stopped and he went back to get his hat. So I went back and afterwards I said Sam Sam, why did you Just got second base? So my father was going to kill me and you know, at the time I didn't think twice about his saying he's talking to kill him. But then, years later, when I heard kids telling me about what their fathers did to them when they had little, when they got their pants dirty or they got their Sunday school clothes dirty or what have you I learned?

Speaker 2:

So control is the is the fifth element, and the violence and sexual abuse, the eye studies and imagination and control and the Micro management is very important. But, with that said, there are several aspects of the control of children that are unique to children. One of them is this idea of using children's skateboards, where children the one example I gave from the stock broker where the child was beaten and said that does not happen. Women and that skate go to somebody else. They're the objects directly. Another thing that's unique in the use of children is their weaponization, the idea that children can be actually made into instruments of spying and control over their partners, and I have two cases in the book where well, several cases where that happened and it's very difficult because in those cases I'm often hired where the children have been used as witnesses against the mother In one case. I have time to say this case quickly, I'll just tell you the case book.

Speaker 2:

This was a case. The mother's name was Anna Colvin and she was her name's Sergeant. The daughter's name was Anna Colvin. The mother was killed on New Year's Eve by the father in the apartment. She was murdered and Anna Colvin discovered the body. The daughter discovered the body and she was the main witness who knew that her father had killed her mother. The father was arrested. I was charged with murder but for various reasons he wasn't immediately brought to charge.

Speaker 2:

Very prominent lawyers, a very prominent family. The aunt and uncle hired me because they wanted custody of Anna and her brother. Anna said that she wanted to be with the father. New York usually in the old days had given the child wishes the priority but it had just changed its rule about six months earlier. To say that, I'm sorry, new York had given the best interest to the child's priority and it just changed its rule six months earlier to prioritize the child's wishes. So the lawyer for the children, who normally would have seen that this guy was there, the mother he obviously not gonna be the best parent. She should go with the aunt and uncle. The lawyer for the children was bound by her obligation, fiduciary obligation, to represent Anna's wishes and I was hired by the aunt and uncle.

Speaker 2:

So what did I want to do? I didn't want to discredit Anna, because I've believed in listening to the voice of the child, even if the child's wrong. I asked my children lie to me all the time. Everybody lies to me all the time. Everybody lies. Most people lie most of the time, especially about things that I'm asking them about sexual abuse and stealing money and things like that. So you know, but children lie also and I'm not immune from lying. But if I want children to lie, I believe that I have a obligation to listen to them and understand why they're saying what they're saying.

Speaker 1:

So yeah, there's a section in the book where you talk about that very thing. It's in the section about the forensic analysis approach where you mentioned my primary responsibility is to make it safer for children to live with their truth.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I couldn't have said it better myself, but I think that's right. I mean, in these cases, in the case of Anna Coven, I realized that she was protecting herself but protecting her father, that she didn't believe, that she believed her father had killed the mother, her father would next kill her and her brother, and that her aunt and uncle could not protect her. The police could not protect her. I used the concept in that trial of identification with the aggressor that it was her way of protecting him, what her protection itself was by protecting him. And I mean, as it turned out and in other cases I've had the same thing, so that even when children lie about something like this, another case I have in the book is Mariah Nack. Mariah Nack, all I had in that case is a father had never abused her mother and I had a five-volume diary of abuse, but the diary was in Chinese and we couldn't afford to translate it.

Speaker 1:

Oh, wow.

Speaker 2:

And so but so when we had Mariah Nack in the bad woman's shelter with her mother, we had the diary and I had some parts of it translated and the shelter work. I had torn out one page of the diary and I tried to introduce the diary and the lawyer for the father said look, there's a page out of the diary. And finally the shelter work. I had to admit she tore the page out so we looked like we lost the case we had. We couldn't use the diary. So I called the shelter worker to the stand. I had the shelter worker called the stand. I said what was on the diary and she got your tour out. She said I don't wanna tell you. So I said you have to. You don't know. And the judge said you have to say it. So the judge said okay.

Speaker 2:

She said the girl had written in her diary this is Mariah's diary, not the mother's diary. The girl had written in the diary I hope you die, I hope you die. She'd written that to her mother I hope you die, I hope you die. Who said that to the mother? The father had continually said that to her mother. So I was able to show the court that the girl had regurgitated, through identification with the father, the exact words of the father that she was been made to sit at the table and endure the abuse night after night after night, that the father had put the mother through and that he was and that. So those are two cases in which, even though the children were weaponized and they were used, you could still listen to the voices of the children and come away with a reasonable result that was in the interests of the mother and the child.

Speaker 1:

How typical is it that you're able to hear the voice of the child in these cases? I mean, a lot of times it seems like they're silenced. There are examples of that in the book as well.

Speaker 2:

Well, silence is not always silent. I mean the example. One of my favorite cases in the book is the Pellke case, and this was a case in which I didn't testify, because I came into that case when the mother was already in jail for killing the boy and her husband was in jail for killing the boy. I went to some of the trial and I was. I wish I had been there for that, but I took the case after the mother committed. The mother committed suicide in prison on the first anniversary of the boy's death and but what was so fascinating to me with that case is that everyone go into the whole case. But there were years and years and years of investigation. In that case there were 3, 400 case workers, police, nurses and others who had gone through that house.

Speaker 2:

All during this time, the 12 years when they had gone through the house, the mother was being abused, the boy was being abused, the daughter, anna, was being abused. And the man who was abusing them, marius Krezilek, this monster of a guy who was beating the hell out of them and controlling them and dictating them and making them, tying them in a toilet and monitoring their food and taking their money, doing everything. He was staying right in the middle of the house. He's not just gonna make an appearance in one pediatric rate, not in one hospital record where the woman is hospitalized for abuse. Now the boy gets to school.

Speaker 2:

So the visibility of the whole family being abused is now at risk because the boy is being exposed on a daily basis. He's being sent to school on limited rations. He's losing 10, 15, 20, 30 pounds. He has all the signs of physically emaciated abuse child that Henry Kempe classically told to throw up foreign child abuse. The mother is bringing him to school. She's covered with bruises, she's wearing makeup and she's giving him a little bit of bread for lunch and he's stealing cake from the other children. The teachers see he's stealing cake.

Speaker 2:

He's quiet in school, he doesn't say anything, he's silent, he's withdrawn and yet he's a very good student. So they don't ever question why is a boy so silent? I won't be leb at the thing, but I mean I go on and on about how could they miss all the signs of physical violence, abuse and course control all these people all these years? And then they go to the pediatrician a week before the death, before he started to go to the pediatrician, and the mother's in the pediatrician and the pediatrician is sitting down with the boy. Again, all of the classical symptoms bruises on his body, the sudden weight loss with no clear physiological explanation, quiet, you know, and so forth. And the mother is sitting there and the pediatrician does what doctors did before 1960s, before 1970s, before they had any kind of child abuse they, he, sent the child for a metabolic workup for rare blood disorders, rather than questioning about abuse.

Speaker 1:

And yet this was not in the 60s. This did not happen in the 60s.

Speaker 2:

this case, no, no no, it didn't happen in the 60s, but since the 60s. Every pediatrician this happened in the 90s every pediatrician, every pediatrician who went to medical school studied the signs and symptoms of the classic child abuse and knew that this boy you would have had a picture of this boy first year of pediatric medical student couldn't have told you about child abuse. So it's an odd pediatrician, believe me, knew it was child abuse. So why didn't he know? So when he got on the stand he testified that he he thought maybe there was something going on, but he didn't know. So I got a hold of the pediatric record when I was reviewing the materials in the case and I found in this pediatric record a pencil-written note from the pediatrician on the record that hadn't been in the computer file and anything saying mother's boyfriend is in the room, in other words Kreselik, this guy who had been invisible. Mario Kreselik's barrel had been visible to the police, to the social workers, to the nurses, to the teachers, to all of the hundreds of professionals who had been through this house over the 12 years that he was torturing and terrorizing his families was invisible to the pediatrician, right in the room where he was there, intimidating the pediatrician and the thing, and he was even in the courtroom intimidating the pediatrician. So this is why I talk about the invisible man, because one of the aims of my book is to make this man, who has been so invisible to the child welfare field for so many years, visible, bring him out of the shadows. And to take the abused mother, who people have seen as a contradiction in turn, because she was a mother, how could she let herself get abused, never understanding that a mother is the most complex of all social roles that people play and that the fact that a mother can mother through domestic violence can live through these contradictions?

Speaker 2:

One of the cases I have in a book is a case of a mother who, in the throes of her own being abused, abused her own daughters and abused her own son and beat her own son at request. I mean, she participated in this abuse of the children that her boyfriend, miguel Sebastian, ordered. And when he was home from Vietnam about 10 years ago, I asked him. I said, Johnny, how did you feel about this? I mean, mother slapped you, she kicked you, she did these hit you with a belt, like Miguel told him to do.

Speaker 2:

How could you deal with that? She said I know why she was doing it. I know that if she didn't do it he would have done worse and he would have done worse to me and he would have done worse to her. But the child abuse people who have for years, and the medical people who have been years seeing these abused mothers, even when they heard their children as culpable, without understanding the gall of the in the room, without understanding the extent to which they themselves are living in an intolerable pressure system that we can relieve simply by moving that man out of the room, we wouldn't hesitate if this was a terrorist or any other situation.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely so. We started off this conversation talking about how your call to action is the elimination of trial perspective services and let's explore that for a minute about how can we take action against this coercive control of children and abate some of these experiences of abuse.

Speaker 2:

Well, I mean the way countries are doing this. Now I mean and we don't know how it's going to work, and this is an experiment. So latest is Australia and Scotland is is there including child abuse as one element of a serious criminal offense akin to kidnapping, akin to the most serious crimes of embezzlement? And it's a multiple element. Crime includes child abuse, a chemical violence, and all of these elements are present and they're used to subject somebody to the problem of their rights and liberties over a significant period of time. Then the person is removed from the society. Now, whether we put them in prison or whether we restrict them in some other way, I don't know.

Speaker 2:

That's one part of the solution. The second part of the solution is obviously to harden the victims, is to provide really quality opportunities, because look, the secret to why there's so much coercive control. Coercive control, in my view, is not a gender crime. It's not based on men being more evil than women, and the fact that they're more men of control women and women control men or men control other men, is not a function of anything other than in fact that men are more people and women in every society we know about. That is, men have more money. They have more access to power not all men, but most men have more access to more resources and more opportunities than most women. And those opportunities, as inequalities come to a head in personal life, when men are allowed to exploit the advantages that women have gained, to take away from them those advantages and then to degrade them back into inequality. So obviously, the other side of any kind of punishment, because no criminal law is going to solve a problem this magnitude. You have to eliminate inequality, that it's a space you have to create opportunities for women and children in the community, safe spaces so they can move freely without being interfered with in their attempts to express themselves, so they can wear what they want, think what they want, spend the money the way they want, work where they want, you know, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 2:

And so those are two problems of a single process, and what I would do is, yes, I would eliminate what we now call child protection services altogether. I think it's a complete, it's based on a complete myth, which is the method. There's a continuity between the very few cases of child death which are caused by mental illness, are caused by substance abuse, which are caused by immaturity or are caused by you know, some kind of insanity, very few cases that there's a continuity between those and the millions of cases of child neglect, on the basis of which a lot of this system against its justification, which are 75 to 80% of them embedded in patterns, of course, of control and domestic violence. So if we were handling those cases through the criminal justice system, with Israel violence and not accidental child deaths, 75 to 80% of them, of course then we could have a community based services to deal with domestic violence, to deal with alcoholism, deal with drugs, deal with all the misdemeanor nuisance offenses which now preoccupy majority of our police services. What we're doing in countries like Scotland, very slowly, and in countries like Australia, tanzania, tasmania, france, scotland, a number of other places, but this is being tried. They're moving slowly and very unevenly, but social policing, well, policing along the spending their time dealing with, you know, the sort of misdemeanor issues that should be dealt with with community services and spending their time dealing with crimes against rights and liberties and property, which are really where policing should be doing its work. It's a long transition process, it's very slow, but we wouldn't even be talking about course control today If women hadn't made tremendous gains in the last 50 years.

Speaker 2:

50 years ago it was enough to say he can't hit her. Now we recognize that the issue was never physical harm. But the reason we focused on physical harm was because that was what we were ready to prohibit, as women had made gains and we've made gains as a people in our understanding what children's capacities are, for self-expression, for development, for contributing to the community. We have an array of rights and liberties that they can that must be protected. In the same way that we think we should protect them in men, now that we should protect them women and children.

Speaker 2:

So course of control is really discovered not by me but by a movement of women, and the countries like Scotland that have passed course control laws are going to be effective not because they have good law, because no matter how good the law is, unless there's really quality in the community, you can't enforce it because there's only so many people you can arrest. But the reason countries like Scotland have good law is because we have the wind of the women's movement and our back when we're making those laws. There were women in the street. There were women judges. There were women in government. There were women in parliament. There were women in the police. There were women and there were men who supported women in all of those arenas. And the same will be true of children. We're not going to recognize children's rights unless children themselves make it clear and they will and they are all over the world make it clear that you know that place is not simply to be seen and not heard.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely. I'm afraid I have to let you go we're on the time, but that was a fascinating dialogue about the content of the book, about the issues of coercive control and how it impacts children, and thank you for having me. Attention, spanish-speaking listeners. Listen to the end of this podcast for information on how to reach a Spanish-speaking representative of Genesis.

Speaker 3:

If you or someone you know is in an abusive relationship.

Speaker 1:

You can get help or give help at genesisshelterorg or by calling or texting our 24-7 crisis hotline team at 214-946-HELP 214-946-4357. Bilingual services at Genesis include text, phone call, clinical counseling, legal services, advocacy and more. Call or text us for more information. Donations to support women and children escaping domestic violence are always needed. Learn more at genesisshelterorg. Thanks for joining us. I'm reminding you always that ending domestic violence begins when we believe her.

Speaker 3:

Genesis. El podcast anuncia servicios bilingües disponibles en Genesis Women's Shelter y Support. Si usted o una conocida este en una relación abusiva, puede recibir ayuda o dar ayuda a genesisshelterorg, o por llamar o mandar mensaje de texto a nuestra línea de crisis de 24 horas al 214-946-4357. Bilingual services at Genesis include text, phone call, clinical counseling, legal services, advocacy and more. Call or text us for more information. Donations are always needed to support women and children escaping domestic violence. Aprende más a nuestra página de internet en genesisshelterorg, barra inclinada donate. Gracias por unirse con nosotros. Recuerden que el terminar la violencia domestic a empieza cuando creemos a la victima.