Evan Stark

• Eme at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Over the last decade in many European countries, legislators, magistrates, government ministers, law enforcement agencies, lawyers and service providers have recognised that prevailing approaches to domestic violence were failing and have adopted the new model of "coercive control" to reframe domestic violence as a crime against rights and resource...

Cette dernière décennie, des législateurs, des magistrats, des ministres, des avocats, des forces de l'ordre et des associations de nombreux pays ont reconnu l'échec des approches de la violence conjugale qui la définissaient à partir d'« actes » épisodiques. Un nombre croissant de pays a donc adopté le modèle du contrôle coercitif pour redéfinir l...

Volume 17, Issue 3 Special Issue:Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Domestic Violence and Coercive Control September 2020 Issue Edited by: Stephanie Brandt Table of Contents -Editor's introduction to the special issue: Interdisciplinary perspectives on domestic violence and coercive control Dr. Stephanie Brandt MD -A psychoanalytic perspective on...

Drawing on a model developed by the author, coercive control was adapted in 2012 as the framework for a new “cross governmental” response in the health and social services to woman and child abuse in Great Britain, including changes in the criminal laws. I illustrate the forensic utility of the coercive control framework by applying it to explore t...

The potential efficacy of a new offence of coercive control will be determined by the constellation of factors that surround its implementation. Drawing on experiences with s 76 of the Serious Crime Act 2015 (E&W) in England and Wales and the Domestic Abuse (Scotland) Act 2018 (Scot), these factors are identified as: a coherent national strategic f...

This article reviews the background, introduction, and critical response to new criminal offenses of coercive control in England/Wales and Scotland. How the new Scottish offense is implemented will determine whether it can overcome the shortcomings of the English law. We then review new evidence on four dimensions of coercive control: the relations...

This new edition of the bestselling Responding to Domestic Violence explores the response to domestic violence today, not only by the criminal justice system, but also by public and non-profit social service and health care agencies. After providing a brief theoretical overview of the causes of domestic violence and its prevalence in our society, t...

Summer's Death was written by Lori Post, an associate professor at Yale Medical School, a domestic violence researcher, and a close friend. On September 22, 2011, the Winter Solstice, Lori's sister and brother-in-law, Terri and Michael Greene, were brutally murdered in the couple's home in Delta Township, Michigan. Terri, age 46, was an environment...

The current policy, legal, and criminal justice response to partner abuse is based on a “violent incident model” that equates abuse with discrete assaults and gauges severity by the degree of injury inflicted or threatened. Although application of this model by police has reduced serious and fatal partner violence, it has not significantly improved...

The model of abuse that guides society’s understanding and response to domestic violence has failed us. Based on a straightforward analogy between domestic violence and assault, this model identifies the seriousness of a partner’s acts according to legal degrees of criminal abuse: according to how much violence is involved and the degree of injury...

This commentary revisits a core dilemma in “Controversies involving Gender and Intimate Partner Violence in the United States” by Langhinrichsen-Rohling (2010), how to reconcile gender parity in the use of force by partners with the gender asymmetry in the dynamics and effects of partner abuse. This dilemma is a byproduct of a domestic violence par...

The critical appraisals of Coercive Control focus largely on what my analysis implies for intervention, a matter to which the book devotes only limited space. In this reply, I reiterate core concepts in the book and acknowledge that much more work is needed to translate the realities of coercive control into practical legal and advocacy strategies....

This article was prompted by the publication of “Assessing Allegations of Domestic Violence,” by Gould, Martindale and Eidman (2007). It critically reviews the family court response to domestic violence cases, highlighting evidence that most partner abuse consists of coercive control rather than physical assault alone. After outlining what is known...

Despite its great achievements, the domestic violence revolution is stalled, Evan Stark argues, a provocative conclusion he documents by showing that interventions have failed to improve women's long-term safety in relationships or to hold perpetrators accountable. Stark traces this failure to a startling paradox, that the singular focus on violenc...

This review assesses a law and criminal justice based approach to domestic violence from the vantage of recent reports from the advocacy movement in the United States (DasGupta, ‘Safety and justice for all’) and Amnesty International (It's in your hands: stop violence against women) and the work of legal scholar Linda Mills. The US movement is hard...

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Introduction This chapter contributes to an exploration of the themes that drive this volume by analyzing the racial dimensions of woman battering. Part I introduces the problem, defines its scope, differentiates common domestic violence from the pattern of coercive control, and provides an overview of its significance. Drawing on population survey...

Public awareness regarding the life-threatening nature and intense traumatic impact of domestic violence has substantially increased in the past decade. At the same time, dramatic changes have taken place regarding criminal justice and social work policies and practices applied to domestic violence intervention. And while the prevalence of domestic...

"Women at Risk" challenges current explanations of domestic violence and argues that reframing health in terms of coercion and violence is key to the prevention of some of women's most vexing problems. Presenting major findings of studies conducted over 15 yrs, [the authors] maintain that the medical, psychiatric, and behavioral problems exhibited...

This article explores the importance of woman battering for female suicidality, with special attention to the link among black women. Suicidality has classically been framed with a distinctly male bias. As a result, suicide attempts (a predominantly female event) have been defined as "failed suicides" and the distinctive social context of suicidali...

Examines widespread belief that blacks, and particularly young black inner-city males, are far more prone to violence than are whites. Considers family problems and Aid to Families with Dependent Children; racial stereotypes of welfare recipients; the underclass; victims of crime; and drug abuse. Concludes that, despite its weak foundation, myth of...

Although homicide is the fourth leading cause of premature mortality in the United States and the leading cause of death for young blacks, the health professions have been largely oblivious to violence. Prevailing explanations contribute to this neglect by emphasizing biological or psychiatric factors that make homicide unpredictable and cultural a...

Viewing child abuse through the prism of woman battering reveals that both problems originate in conflicts over gender identity and male authority. Data indicate that men, not women, typically commit serious child abuse. A study of the mothers of child abuse victims shows that battering is the most common context for child abuse, that the battering...

This chapter will describe how domestic violence is distributed in various populations, identify its demographic features, and distinguish its etiology, insofar as this is possible, by comparing violent with nonviolent groups. Within certain limits, we identify the clinical components and sequelae of the problem, set them in a social context that m...

While young people are fairly good predictors of their parents' job satisfaction and working conditions, they do not know more about mothers' than fathers' jobs, even though mothers may talk more about their work.

This paper explores the relationship between child abuse and woman-battering. In so doing the authors test and reject the hypothesis, common in the violence literature, that ‘violence begets violence’. The vast majority of woman-batterers do not come from homes where they were beaten, and the vast majority of men who were beaten as children do not...

This paper distinguishes a materialist from a medical approach to health (including as medical the clinical, epidemiological, sociological, environmental, and radical approaches). Three themes are developed. The first concerns a broad definition of medicine. Derived from the actual strategies that capital and labor adopt to health, this definition...

Our objectives are to describe the pattern of abuse associated with battering and to evaluate the contribution of the medical system and of broader social forces to its emergence. A pilot study of 481 women who used the emergency service of a large metropolitan hospital in the U.S. shows that battering includes a history of self-abuse and psychosoc...

The concept of disease causation has changed twice, first from natural to social determining factors, and, second, from determination by social conditions to determination by stressful social relations. These changes roughly parallel the emergence of industrial capital and its change from a highly individualistic and competitive process to a “socia...

Comments on the work of R. J. Gelles (see record 1993-39670-001), M. A. Straus (see record 1993-37999-001), J. D. Schmidt and L. W. Sherman (see record 1993-37994-001), E. S. Buzawa and T. Austin (see record 1993-37979-001), and P. K. Manning (see record 1993-39676-001) on mandatory arrest of batterers. Battering is examined as a social phenom...