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RESEARCH ARTICLE
The coercive control of Daniel and Magdalena
Lucek: A case of child abuse as tangential spouse
abuse
Evan Stark Ph.D, MSW, Professor Emeritus, Rutgers University
School of Public Affairs, Rutgers University,
Newark, New Jersey
Correspondence
Email: starkevan203@gmail.com
Abstract
Drawing on a model developed by the author, coercive con-
trol 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 the cir-
cumstances leading up to the murder of 4-year old, Daniel
Pelke (DP), in Coventry, England in 2009 and to critique the
response by the various service providers to the family and
the Crown's decision to try Daniel's mother, Magdalena
Lucek, for the murder. Had the new approach been in place
when the Lucek case came to public attention, the coercive
control could have been recognized and effectively
addressed.
KEYWORDS
child abuse, coercive control, criminal law, domestic violence,
family law
1|INTRODUCTION
Evan Stark is a sociologist and forensic social worker whose book “Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in
Personal Life (Stark, 2007)”became the gold standard for the field. In 2012, The British Home Office adapted “coer-
cive control”(CC) as the best framework for a new “cross-governmental response”to women and children through
its health and social service systems (New definition of domestic violence –GOV.UK, 2012). In contrast to the previ-
ous emphasis on discrete assaults, the new “Working Definition”(WD) defined coercive control to include “Any inci-
dent or pattern of incidents of controlling, coercive or threatening behaviour, violence or abuse between those aged
16 or over who are or have been intimate partners or family members regardless of gender or sexuality.”Coercion
DOI: 10.1002/aps.1672
262 © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Int J Appl Psychoanal Studies. 2020;17:262–276.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/aps
encompassed psychological, physical, sexual, financial, and emotional abuse. Controlling behavior was defined as
“making a person subordinate and/or dependent by isolating them from sources of support, exploiting their
resources and capacities for personal gain, depriving them of the means needed for independence, resistance and
escape and regulating their everyday lives.”From 2012–2014, the new WD replaced more than 20 other, conflicting
definitions that guided the funding and delivery of services to abuse victims throughout Britain. Over the next few
years, coercive control became a serious new criminal offense in England, Scotland, Ireland, Taiwan, and elsewhere
(Home office, 2015). Currently, it has no legal standing in the U.S.
The trial of MK and ML for the murder of DP was one of the last to be carried out under the old framework. In
this analysis, I show how a coercive control framework could have been applied to save two lives by mental health
practitioners, social workers, pediatricians, police, judges, and nurses.
This illustrates the forensic analysis of “child abuse”as tangential spouse abuse, when a partner's primary pur-
pose in hurting a child is to subordinate his adult victim. Children in these cases are considered “secondary”victims
because the coercive control of the adult partner usually antecedes the child abuse, the tactics used to harm the
child(ren) are chosen for their effect on the adult victim primarily, risk to each is assessed by the cumulative danger
to both, and ending the coercive control of the adult victim usually ends the risk to the child, often by pursuing crimi-
nal charges against the primary perpetrator. Straightforward forensics is challenged in cases like this because adult
victims are often a focus of criminal charges or other legal attention, often regardless of whether they directly
harmed the child or caused a death. The charges usually stem from the degree to which the adult victim is said to
have “colluded”in the child's abuse, “failed to protect”the child from harm, or actively abused the child in ways that
appear to be unrelated to whatever domestic violence may have occurred. In no sense, is harm to the child second-
ary in importance, of course.
I examine “child abuse as tangential spouse abuse”through the lens of the now infamous 2012 British case of
Daniel Pelka(DP) –a 4-year-old who was starved and beaten to death by Mariusz Krezolek(MK), the mother's live-in
boyfriend. Magdalena Luczak (ML), the abused mother, was charged with directly causing the boy's death.
2|CASE BACKGROUND: THE KILLING OF DP BY MARIUS KREZOLEK
There never was any doubt that MK delivered the fatal blows to DP and merited his 30-year prison term.
1
But ML
was also charged with murder and the couple was tried, convicted, and sentenced together. The Crown acknowl-
edged ML may have been abused by her boyfriend. But even if this was so it contended this had little bearing on her
behavior. Throughout the trial, the Crown insisted there was little difference between their involvement.
ML admitted failing to prevent MK from killing DP. But there was no allegation that she struck or otherwise
abused her son. She insisted she had not done so and claimed to have been too frightened to oppose MK because of
his abuse. During their trial, unflattering photos and other negative portrayals of ML were as pervasive in the English
tabloids as had been the images in the U.S. of OJ Simpson handcuffed, unshaved, and head down after his arrest for
killing Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman in 1994. Typical of the media representation was a caption below ML's
photo, identifying her as “The evil mother who put love of drugs, alcohol and vile boyfriend before DP's basic needs.”
The motion for separate trials was rejected. So, their stories, like their fate, became inseparable.
Much of the media reported ML's claims that MK had beaten, raped, and repeatedly threatened to kill her. But
neither the legally required serious case review (SCR), completed by a host of service professionals under expert
guidance before the trial, nor any of the commentators in the press connected this “admission”of abuse to DP's mur-
der, let alone suggested that ML's victimization might reduce her culpability for DP's death
ML's face was described as “expressionless.”I suspected it was more likely that the young immigrant woman
with little English at her defense during the trial had been rendered near insensate to the events around her by the
terror in which she lived. MK's presence in the house had been unbearable. His presence in the courtroom extends
STARK 263
this terror into a defining moment in her life. A year after she went to prison, ML hung herself in her cell on DP's
birthday.
ML had not stopped MK from beating and starving her son. But was she merely a bystander? Using ML's “sin of
omission”as the starting point, the Crown built a case for her legal guilt for DP's death by highlighting critical junc-
tures during his deterioration when she actively concealed the realities at home, deceived outsiders, and encouraged
behaviors that hastened the boy's decline. In his sentencing, the judge pointed to two such instances he considered
particularly heinous. Though she was aware DP was so hungry that he would take food from a school dumpster, ML
told his teachers to limit DP's food intake at school to the cheese and bread she provided for his lunch. ML failed to
tell his caregivers about his abuse and instead gave accounts of his injuries she knew to be untrue. A week before his
murder, when she had taken DP for a pediatric exam, ML had kept from the clinician the vital and potentially life-
saving information that abuse by her live-in boyfriend was the source of DP's enigmatic medical and physical prob-
lems, including his extensive bruising and his dramatic weight loss. Even at this extremely late juncture, intervention
would have saved DP's life. Seemingly perplexed by the case, the pediatrician resorted to blood workups for obscure
metabolic disorders, provided vitamins, and made a referral for another opinion.
Before adapting the Crown's viewpoint, I ask readers to take on faith that when refracted through the prism of
the victimization of mother and son, ML's ostensible “collusion”will reappear as behavior designed to resist, refuse,
and expose MK's coercive control, while minimizing harms to herself and DP. These are examples of what I call “con-
trol in the context of no control.”I identify DP's self-incriminating behavior, such as his theft of food at school, as
similarly intentional and strategic in relation to his own safety rather than as provocations that led to his tragic
demise. The respective struggles for survival by ML and DP illustrate the parallel dilemmas posed for battered
mothers and their children when coercive control takes the form of “child abuse as tangential spouse abuse.”
3|THE SERIOUS CASE REVIEW (THE SCR)
The family in focus was well known and highly visible in every sector statutorily responsible for the problems at
issue. A conservative estimate is that during the period when these events occurred, ML and DP were seen,
questioned, interviewed, tested, and assessed by over four dozen separate home visitors, visiting nurses, home
nurses, school nurses, nurse midwives, pediatricians, teachers, assistant teachers, police, and social workers. A num-
ber of these professionals had received specialized training to work with abused or neglected children and a number
were licensed to do so. Dozens of these encounters took place in a critical time period for DP when opening a win-
dow even a crack could have been lifesaving. The information that should have prompted early intervention was
readily available both in written records and from participants. MK too was often seen by police, midwives, home vis-
itors, and the pediatrician. My professional experience tells me that this level of prior knowledge and professional
involvement is common when children are killed in a domestic abuse scenario and may even be typical.
The SCR report in this case, the Pelke Case (heretofore simply “SCR”), is a 76 single-spaced document with three
appendices reviewing the known facts of the case; describing and assessing each recorded encounter between an
affected family member and provider professionals in the home, school, pediatric clinic, and other points of service;
enumerating conclusions about the overall quality of the services received; and recommending improved practices.
In this essay, I critique the overall approach to child protection assumed by all the professionals involved in the Pelke
investigation and reflected in the overview adapted by the SCR. I want to stress that the coercive control of ML was
the source of Pelke's risk. For me, the spatial intersections between ML and DP (the “when?”“why?”“how?”and
“what?”of those interactions) were functions of the increasingly constrained field of action defined by MK's coercive
control. The exclusion of MK from the purview of the professionals involved in this case, whether conscious or not,
created a blinder that deflected all of their efforts from achieving the only meaningful objective, namely removing
the immediate threat to the family –this ensured that all subsequent efforts would be ineffective. The SCR con-
cluded that the events that led to DP's death were out of sight. But this observation merely heightens the tragedy of
264 STARK
the case, since, for the purposes of inflicting his will, MK was in plain sight. As it turns out, he was also physically pre-
sent at key moments when his presence went either deliberately ignored (as in the pediatrician's office) or elicited no
response (as when he forcibly removed ML from her hospital bed).
2
These were times when key personnel responsi-
ble for health and safety simply decided to “look away.”
Despite his having no official presence, the pervasive influence of MK on the SCR as a specter is felt by his dis-
torting effects on everyone in the case. His abuse is documented as well, both reflectively, in the parallel physical
deterioration of ML and DP, and in notes made by police, a home visitor, a nurse, or a teacher. However, the abuse
is treated not as a problem with an identifiable cause about which something decisive might have been done early
on. Nor is it linked to any events in the case, let alone offered to explain why ML or DP behaved as they did, why
they remained silent one moment or said what they did in the next. Instead, the abuse takes its place alongside other
“facts”about ML's condition (she is “an abused woman”) and is woven tightly into a tapestry with the other facets of
her life such as her poor facility in English, problems in her earlier marriage, her alcohol use, her immigration status,
and her insufficient income. In this manner, the abuse ceases to have an alien existence as a hostile act susceptible
to remediation and reappears as a byproduct of who she is, as a mother and woman. It is as if any victimization she
suffered at the hands of MK was an inherited deficit she brought to the table rather than the primary cause of their
son “starving”and growing increasingly “malnourished.”I call this process “over-contextualization.”It describes a
common type of sociological analysis, which reifies a process that is happening to a woman in such a way that the
process (in this case, the abuse) appears to be something she is (an “abused woman”). When applied to case work,
over-contextualization has the unintended consequence of justifying institutional inaction (by child welfare, police,
and the school in this instance) while paralyzing the victim with an overwhelming array of contradictory expectations
and demands. Rather than parse her problems into those for which she is responsible, remediable problems associ-
ated with her existential condition (such as poor housing) and those (such as abuse) caused by bad actors for which
she needs to take concerted action on behalf of herself or her children, are all collapsed into a single profile of her
relative risks. She is an “abused”mother. Thus, in the eyes of her providers, an “abused mother”is a not a type of
abuse victim with responsibility for a child, but a subtype of mother whose peculiar deficit predisposes her to poor
housing and poor parenting, thereby depriving her of the assumptions of deference due to other types of mothers.
An abused mother is a woman who is disqualified because of her poor choices from the deference accorded to
motherhood.
Each tragic dimension of the family's ecosystem had its counterpart in professional service providers who ran in
tandem with these social factors, making errors inevitable. The irony is that, in the final analysis, the professionals in
the Pelke case were able to ignore the ill-effects of their interventions because their malfeasance affected ML and
DP much in the same way as MK did; it isolated and silenced them.
4|THE CHILD'S VOICE
Retrieving children's voices poses a major challenge to forensic assessment in coercive control cases. Prohibitions,
limits, and directed speech are common means of suppressing children's autonomy in coercive control, dividing their
loyalties and enlisting them as allies. All children have visual, aural, emotional, and verbal responses to coercive con-
trol. Accessing these responses can take patience and imagination, and interviewers must resist the temptation to
view children's reticence, claims of developmental delays, or even “trauma”as impugning the utility of a child wit-
ness, even among very young children. Another major obstacle to hearing children's voices is the temptation to iden-
tify with their fear of the abuser and so to miss echoes of resistance. Because we so quickly empathize with
children's fear, grasp its magnitude by sensing their utter vulnerability, we can easily miss the ego strengths shielded
behind it, the calm in the face of the storm, the kernel of rage.
There is no record among the hundreds of professional encounters with the family that anyone had a conversa-
tion with DP. But if DP's silence is deafening; this is not, as the SCR claims, because he had poor language skills or
STARK 265
lacked confidence. As could easily have been discerned if the possibility had been imagined, DP does not talk about
what is happening to him at home because he and his mother had been shown what would happen to them if they
did so. DP's silence was the direct result of his being silenced by MK, the agent who managed to remain off stage
while the play was being analyzed. A coherent understanding of DP's and ML's behavior as a rational response
becomes possible only when we read their behavior as an adaptive response to “coercive control.”As we have come
to appreciate, the vectors of power in coercive control extend “through social space”like the strings on a marionette,
limiting the person's capacity for current attention by continually reminding them of their commitments to the “rules
of engagement”“or else.”We must note that MK is not invisible but is rather “unseen.”
The persistence of acts, whose author commands anonymity, creates dilemmas for those who observe these
acts and must respond. It is by explicating these dilemmas and drawing attention to the force-fields around them that
we substantiate the presence we seek. MK was not often observed directly, but his acts were well-known, albeit
indirectly, through their effects on DP and on ML. The appearance of these effects seems alien to their nature and,
at first, their presence leaves the appearance of paradox: A boy who is well-liked by other children goes “silent;”a
boy who comes to school neatly dressed loses 30 pounds; a mother who presents her children well-groomed each
day instructs the teachers to restrict her son's food intake to the lunches she provides. Without recognizing MK's
malignant tyranny as the explanation, observers reconcile these paradoxes by attributing heretofore unrecognized
deficits in the targets, for example, DP is “silent”because he “lacks confidence”and “language skills”; ML's collusion
reflects her underlying “ambivalence”about the abusive relationship. But the simple answer is fear. It is only
stretching this a bit to guess that some of the professionals involved used denial and projection to manage their fear
of first ignoring what they knew about the source of the effects they observed on DP and making it appear that the
effects emanated from DP himself, much like the “force of nature”to which the pediatrician alluded when he asked
for the metabolic workup for a rare blood disorder. To this extent, DP became a “totem”for the teachers and the
pediatrician. In DP, they could “know”MK's fearsome power through its effects without having to face him directly;
he served a parallel function for the various professionals involved in the case as well. A similar analysis applies to
ML, so long as her reactive voice was mistaken and misrepresented as her own, it was unrecognized as the coerced
and internalized voice of MK.
5|RECONSTRUCTING THE PELKE CASE
Because our primary sources are deceased or otherwise inaccessible, we retrieve our clues from the reports and trial
record. This is problematic because both these records are constructed to highlight ML's co-responsibility and refers
to her abuse to diminish its importance.
Our first challenge is to put MK back into events from which he was removed. (A note to my forensic colleagues.
Coercively controlling men almost always leave a broad trail of evidence and have been witnessed while engaged in
controlling and coercive acts on more than one occasion. A “cloak of invisibility”can nonetheless appear to protect
these men from detection, and even friendly witnesses can appear suddenly dumb to commonsense realities when
cases are in court. My only advice is that persistence pays off.)
But in DP's condition of deterioration, no prompting from the school or the pediatrician was needed, nor even
x-rays to reveal the most prominent risk factors Henry Kempe identified with child abuse –dramatic weight loss due
to no known medical cause accompanied by scattered muscle-skeletal bruising in various states of healing, with-
drawal, regressive symptoms and so forth. So transparent was this diagnosis that even the normally gun-shy SCR
questioned the pediatrician's “professionalism”for turning to the differential to a blood workup for a rare metabolic
disorder, let alone dispensing vitamins for the 32 pound weight loss.
But in pointing to an unfortunate professional lapse, the SCR begs the question. What would prompt a reasonably
intelligent physician to search for a “force of nature”that had brought this child to the brink of starvation? The mystery
was resolved at the trial, where the pediatrician acknowledged that MK was in the room during the last visit, a fact he
266 STARK
had conveniently omitted putting on his own medical record of the encounter. MK was smirking and making “threat-
ening gestures”toward them both throughout the visit, he testified. Still, ML has conveyed enough information about
the boy's deterioration at home to justify an emergent response, if not a rescue call. ML had done her part.
What were the physician's options? The pediatrician could have asked MK to step out for a moment, so he could
be alone with the mother and boy, introducing emergency rescue as an option. Or he could just have talked to DP
about what was making him afraid. Whatever the specifics, it was something MK said, or did, or represented, and
nothing ML did that sent the pediatrician scurrying to find an obscure cause for DP's deterioration.
Once we properly situate MK as the source of illegitimate authority in the household, the vectors of all transac-
tions, statements, and behaviors of family members can be reframed with reference to MK, starting with how they
meet their primary needs for safety (defensive) and autonomy (assertive). As is the case in any regime of terror, in a
family regulated by coercive control, normative guidelines for daily living become command rituals of subservience
and degradation punctuated by outbursts of benevolence directed at “favorites”whose docility or fawning yields
quickly to resurgent terror. Behaviors by dependent targets that appear “self-serving,”collusive, irrational, or passive
to outsiders are forensically reframed as “strategies of endurance, resistance and survival”in relation to a decipher-
able calculus of ethics and risks, including the behaviors of minor children. The initial purpose of this contextualiza-
tion process is to demonstrate a client's normative capacity even under extreme duress, not necessarily to defend
the substance of their decision-making. I am claiming that identifying a strategic logic behind ML's action illustrates
her capacity for purposeful, ethical, or value-laden action that has been thought, by some, to be inconsistent with
high levels of victimization, such as those associated with coercive control. The caveat is acknowledging that the
choices she is given are already contingent on her operating within a universe where the most desired options, those
involving autonomy safety, liberty, or dignity, for instance, may have been foreclosed by a malevolent other.
3
Thus,
all choices must be assessed as context contingent, as bounded by the perceived availability of options (what is put
on the table may not be relevant); the perceived consequences of choosing “wrong”(“the ‘all-else’proviso”); and the
perceived unlikelihood that any choice will make a difference, as “control in the context of no control.”Refusing to
choose in situations of enormous perceived constraint—what the Philosopher Herbert Marcuse dubbed “the Great
Refusal”—qualifies forensically as an important tactic in resistance/self-preservation, particularly with children, who
may have fewer illusions than adults about the futility of “choosing anything.”
4
We depict ML as a person whose choices are value laden by the requisites of autonomy, such as dignity, liberty, secu-
rity, and physical integrity. We describe the power valence (coercive control) that is constraining the available choices, and
track the degree to which modes of adapting to these constraints (resistance, escape, refusal, collusion, etc.) are consistent
with the original values, albeit in diminished form. This is what is meant by “control in the context of no control.”
By behaving strategically with respect to survival for herself and the boy (hoping to elicit attention and support
without inciting retaliation/escalation from MK), merits recognition as the co-victim of this crime not as its perpetra-
tor. She continues to defend autonomous personhood, though she has none. Her action, though unsuccessful,
removes her responsibility for the failure to protect.
6|REFRAMING ML'S EXPERIENCES OF ABUSE
A brief review of ML's history is relevant here. As an immigrant with few skills, ML's prior relationships also involved
police reports of violence, alcohol abuse, and reports of sexual assault.
6.1 |Mr. Pelke: Domestic violence 101
Between 2005 and 2009, when she met MK, ML was primarily involved with Mr. P., D's father. The record of this
relationship consisted of a half dozen incidents of documented police involvement, all involving physical altercations
STARK 267
or “fights,”all but one occurring in their shared home and with ML or both she and Mr. P. reported to be drinking or
drunk. In an instance of alleged aggression on her part, ML is said to have threatened Mr. P. with a knife (though he
was arrested). Though police calls represent only a small proportion of actual instances of abuse, I saw nothing in the
record indicating coercive control. In the context of ongoing abuse, ML's intoxication indicates her vulnerability, both
in that she is unable to properly defend herself if drunk, and historically, as a mode of adaptation that minimizes but
not does nothing to end the pain. But the drinking disqualified her as a worthy client and confounded the police
response. When ML reported a sexual assault, police failed to investigate, because “she had been drinking.”After the
frustrating police visits, ML took an “overdose”of tablets and alcohol in two suicide attempts and, in a third attempt,
she threw herself in front of an approaching ambulance. These responses, the increased use of alcohol and drugs
and repeated suicide attempts in the context of ongoing domestic violence are consistent with the “pleas for help”
our research team at Yale identified among abused patients decades ago ((Stark & Flitcraft, 1996). In September
2008, the hospital referred the children for services to assess the impact of ML's suicide attempt, but there was no
follow up. At the very least, the hospital had the responsibility to determine if it “was safe at home”for ML and to
conduct a “safety audit”for the children as well. The hospital made a referral to the local abuse service and arrange-
ments were made to “contact mother,”but nothing was done.
Instead, after her second stay, ML left the hospital with an “unidentified male.”By this time, she was 12 weeks
pregnant. A visiting midwife also noted she had “no money.”The same midwife also noted “a history of abuse”but
made no referral. She saw this as a past concern.
6.2 |Mr. A.: Domestic violence + stalking
The unidentified male with whom she left the hospital may have been Mr. A., the man into whose home ML and the
children moved in November 2009. Over the next 4 months, ML moved back and forth between Mr. P. and Mr. A,
police arrested Mr. A. when they found ML holding DP protectively when they arrived, but they did nothing at three
other calls because ML was drunk.
By January, ML had a flat of her own. Mr. A. tried to force his way in with a knife was tried and convicted on the
weapons possession and given a community order of 120 hours of unpaid work. Note, despite admonitions for
“doing nothing”about her abuse or the risk to the children from the SCR and the trial judge, at this point in her life,
ML was talking to anyone and everyone about her predicament. And, over the next year, police, the health visitor,
probation, the children, and community services mobilized the full arsenal of their resources to respond to this rela-
tionship. On various occasions, they arrested Mr. A. (for possession of the knife), arrested both parties; removed ML
and the children to her sister's for “safety,”“took no action”(because she was drunk); assessed Mr. A.'s risk as
“moderate,”then changed it to high and finally resentenced Mr. A. (suspending his community sentence) and
imposed a 13 weeks nightly curfew, which he promptly violated. It would be hard to conjure a more “service rich”
domestic violence scenario. All of this activity belied the recognition that, from ML's perspective, Mr. A's conduct
constituted a single course of terroristic abuse.
ML was reporting and the various systems were responding. Mr. A. continued to coercively control ML and her
children simply because at no point was Mr. A. held accountable for his ongoing course of coercive control of ML or
DP. Without this simple step, no other intervention could help. Instead of responding to Mr. A's crimes against MP
and DP, the justice system responded as it would later to MK to the abstract wrongs (“destruction of property,”“pos-
session of a knife”) without regard for their target. This resulted in “community”sentences and “curfews”that actu-
ally sustained Mr. A.'s proximity to ML as a term of compliance. The breach for which Mr. A. was eventually
convicted involved the knife, not the stalking, the break in, or the assault. Her experience was that police and justice
intervention made her space-for-action more constricted.
5
In the SCR account, ML's history with her prior partners set the stage for the tragic narrative that followed,
wherein DP's deterioration was made to seem the more inevitable by his unfortunate caretaker, an alcoholic,
268 STARK
immature immigrant who is involved in drunken brawls with a series of boyfriends who abused her. The Crown's nar-
rative followed a similar moral logic at trial. Throughout these ordeals, ML was portrayed as selfishly choosing her
own immediate gratification via sex or alcohol over her own or her children's well-being, failing to seek appropriate
support, concealing the realities of abuse at home, all the while actively confounding assistance. This account blamed
the victim for an outcome that should have been prevented.
The SCR was right about this much. Before she met MK, ML had become extremely ambivalent about outside
intervention of any kind and particularly about the police response to her abuse and the corresponding social work
response to her children. But far from being the character flaw the judge identified, her apprehensiveness about pro-
fessional help was reality-based. ML became ambivalent only after repeated solicitations for help led nowhere, prom-
ised support was withheld, the men whom she had arrested were returned to the home and community to hurt her
again, and her basic needs for money, employment, and housing had gone unmet. Given this experience, she adapted
a utilitarian approach: Although police might be some use in emergencies, calling police did nothing to enhance long-
term security. Both calling police and refusing further intervention when the situation calmed were consistent with
her experience of how policing worked. Note, her response placed no objective limit on what police could have done.
The further requirement that a victim press a complaint against her assailant is neither a legal prerequisite to arrest
nor desirable when the offender is a partner. The Court's disinterest in ML's well-being was not lost on the abuser
who returned. But instead of pursuing the assailant based on this evidence, they took ML and the children to stay
with her sister and referred the case to child protection. Again, ML “would not cooperate”and no charges were filed.
Even so, their next step implicitly acknowledged police were aware that her “paralysis of will”in the face of danger
was the direct result of the fearsome power MK continued to exercise over ML “across social space”–Police now
raised the risk status of the case to “high.”This, however, did not indicate an awareness of coercive control, nor was
there any attempt to remove the obvious source of abuse. Police could have not provided a better prompt for her
skepticism.
Forensic reviews in domestic violence or child abuse cases almost always include long, complicated histories of
involvement with police, battered women's programs, and multiple other health, family, children, and social services
agencies, particularly after a death has occurred. Rarely are the offenders or victims in such cases “unknown.”The
records of these encounters can be the source of information that is vital to every dimension of a case, including nar-
rative portions where more informal, personal observations may be recorded.
6
Resources promised, delivered, or
withheld critically shape what options are perceived, selected, or rejected. Even if only one or two incidents in a
record contain a positive identification of a partner assault, there are usually enough “probable”or “suspicious”
events surrounding these incidents to form a scatter diagram of the duration of any domestic violence that occurred.
Aligning police reports, medical records, child protective service reports, school reports, court records, and other
records of contemporaneous encounters usually adds substantial insight into the breadth of the abuse, whether sex-
ual coercion, stalking was involved, the extent of drug or alcohol abuse, and how children may be affected. Narrative
portions of these records are likely to touch on less obvious dynamics of the cases, including the types of denigration
being utilized. As we have seen in this case, it is essential to approach even seemingly routine encounters with the
service infrastructure from a standpoint other than its own, by which I mean to see these encounters critically from
the standpoint of the specific other whose experience you are trying to frame forensically. For this kind of forensic
evaluation, where so much of what is happening involves keeping what women and children want to say or do from
surfacing, we always assume a rational strategic intelligence is at work, trying to cope with incalculable odds. Only
then do the accidental remarks during routine service encounters afford entry unavailable via more traditional paths
of inquiry, interview, testing, and observation.
In this case, the myriad service professionals were running blind. To each of them individually, as well as their
systems, each episode of domestic violence was as if de nuevo rather than part of an ongoing pattern of coercive
control. They saw a family huddle together in fear but thought them merely “overwrought”because they had no way
to gauge the historical depth or the scope of the oppression occasioning their fears. Adapting a coercive control per-
spective does not guarantee high-quality professional practice. But it does shift the terms for evaluating that practice
STARK 269
from a grasp of situational dynamics to a grasp of situations in their historical and political contexts. In assessing
harms, we shift from measuring the physical/psychological valence of specific violent acts to an emphasis on the
concurrence, frequency, and duration of multiple forms of oppression. Extreme physical and psychological injury, or
trauma, remains important in measuring the weight of these harms to individuals. But coercive control extends
through social space to every type of relationship and relational setting where it affects our personal interface (harms
to dignity, autonomy, personhood, etc.) our material interface (access to money, food, clothing, transport) and our
political interface (speech, assembly, and so on) in all the ways that tie into the practice of citizenship. Finally, coer-
cive control has a temporal or historical dimension that reflects its exercise over time and the cumulative weight of
its effects on the women, children, and others in its orbit. The analysis is complete with an appraisal of how each per-
son was effected and responded, individually or in subgroups, including when and how they adapted, resisted, sur-
vived, colluded, or succumbed.
The application of a global assessment of coercive control is based on the argument that perpetrators design
coercive control to encompass family members and other perceived obstacles to the monopolization of privilege.
The corollary principle is that children best thrive in families or family-like relationships when the competent adults
responsible for their care can advocate in their interest as free and self-determining persons. Coercive control adds a
burden of “safety”and “protective”work to maternal responsibilities that keeps mothers chronically too exhausted
to attend to their own needs. When the children are not harmed, police rarely reported their presence to children's
services and social work involvement in the case is minimal. So long as a mother copes, whatever the effort expe-
nded in so doing, the children were considered her problem, not theirs. Only when her capacity had demonstrably
broken down, will they move in. I would change the balance of responsibility here in favor of social work intervention
on behalf of the children early on. Enhanced advocacy in this instance means garnering effective protection from the
abuser via arrest and prosecution if appropriate.
7|COERCIVE CONTROL BY MK
Early in her relationship with MK, ML and DP were treated for injuries that should have raised suspicion with trained
healthcare professionals. However, instead, she was diagnosed as “depressed,”prescribed anti-depressants, and
given no follow up. Soon thereafter MK strangled ML, a high lethality episode, which caused a loss of consciousness
(at the least as some women experience brain damage). He also cut her with a knife. She also reported numerous
rapes. The children were present, and he was arrested but not charged and returned home. The professional services
in England that ML encountered in 2010 (when domestic violence was officially considered a public problem for
which offenders were responsible) were widely available. Every health and social worker in England received profes-
sional education on how to identify the problem, and abuse offenses were widely publicized and often resulted in
prosecution and imprisonment. Readers should know this fact to appreciate how retrograde was both the profes-
sional response in this case and the response by the SCR, starting with the absence of domestic violence expertise
from the SCR. In its summary, the SCR described domestic abuse as a “major pattern of this family's lifestyle”and
attributed the fact that she was abused by three partners not to any failure in the protective response, let alone to
the criminality of the men involved, but to ML's inability “to detect abusive relationships”and not “learn”from “previ-
ous experiences”so that “her own behaviors”(e.g., her violence) helped “fuel altercations.”By contrast with this
assessment, the record indicates that the “altercations”were almost always assaults, beating, and rapes; that far from
simply “detecting the abuse,”she called police numerous times, for help, frankly discussed abuse with home visitors,
her GP, visiting nurses, and probably anyone else who cared to listen. If she and her children became ready targets
for abusive men, it was because those to whom she turned for help never took her ongoing freedom and safety as
their primary concern. Be clear. I am talking here not from the perspective of my expertise on coercive control, but
from the perspective of what the Government thought was best practice at the time. I remain agnostic as to whether
the failure was endemic to social care in Britain or the result of myopia imposed by the narrow paradigm in hand.
270 STARK
Many of our cases end in this period with one party, most often the woman but sometimes the abusive man,
being killed. Had ML refused to be oppressed and killed MK in either self-defense or proactively in our case, our
approach would emphasize how she had exercised optimal strategic intelligence within the constraints he had
imposed, “control within the context of no control.”If the killing had not been in response to an immediate assault,
we would accept the burden of showing the many other ways she had previously tried (and failed) to lift the yoke of
oppression off her back. In this case, I would have had an extensive list of attempts by ML to illustrate the point. At
every moment when entrapment was experienced, even if no “acts”of violence occurred, I would want to know:
What did you fear might happen? What did you see as your options? What did you do? Did it help? So, for example,
ML's decisions –not to call police or to deny abuse –appear to make tactical sense when we put them in the context
of past frustrations when she had had MK arrested. He was returned and hurt her even more severely. Women often
blame themselves for “bad choices”when things do not work out, considering it “my fault.”Advocates should not be
too quick to correct them. In our experience, these are actually ways abuse victims assume responsibility for choos-
ing in the only way they are allowed, as if they are saying “This time I choose badly' next time, I won't make that
mistake,”that is, “control in the context of no control.”Safety planning entails starting from the few options women
have given the scope to which they are controlled. It also means expanding the ground over which they can walk. In
this instance, ML had a friend staying at the house for several nights. MK was persistent, unpredictable, and danger-
ous, and this tactic did not afford long-term protection.
During the next year, both ML and DP were seen for injuries that even without this context should have raised
alarms. As MK's control over the family was escalating, an assessment concluded abuse was no longer an issue
because the couple had stopped drinking, ostensibly because ML was pregnant. Pregnancy is the highest risk point
for physical violence and control in abusive relationships both because many narcissistic abusers interpret the
impending birth as a competitor for the woman's attention and because she is physically more dependent and vul-
nerable, a condition which abusive men exploit. Instead, the assessment “considered that all of the domestic abuse in
the past had been closely related to alcohol misuse.”The case was closed.
There was never any evidence the abuse was alcohol related. ML undoubtedly drank in excess, as police reports
made clear. But our early research at Yale and case studies show that battered women typically “abuse”alcohol
when they supplement their normal drinking to medicate the alternating currents of chronic and unpredictable stress
associated with coercive control. If providers believed alcoholism was an underlying issue, why was rehabilitation
never prescribed or even recommended? More likely, health providers and social work, like police, viewed “alcohol
on breath”as yet another stigmata that disqualified ML from being treated as a full person. With a coercive control
perspective, the “ongoing”nature of the violence would have signaled a heightened level of entrapment and risk of
homicide for all family members. Even if the violence had temporarily ended, an assessor would suspect a shift to
other means of coercion and control.
In a visit to the antenatal clinic, ML told the midwife and the consultant obstetrician that her partner was
pressuring her to get a termination. Forced abortions, like unwanted pregnancies, are common forms of reproductive
coercion that accompany coercive control. In addition, because a female partner may be more physically vulnerable
or dependent during a pregnancy, abusers often shift to non-physical forms of control. ML explained the change in
her partner's tactics to the clinicians as best she could, but they misinterpreted her account as an attempt to mini-
mize the violence. She recounted an implied threat that included the fetus. But again, they shared concerns only for
her own physical safety. But, in the context of ongoing coercive control, it should have set off alarms about the
safety of all current and future family members.
Soon thereafter, ML developed a kidney infection requiring hospitalization. MK came to the hospital, pulled out
her IV, and insisted on her discharge against medical advice. Even if our index of suspicion was not raised until now,
here was a transparent enactment of coercive control of the woman and fetus, the only such act in the case history.
Pleas for help were everywhere. By forcibly kidnaping her from her hospital bed on their watch, MK resolved any
ambiguity about his demand for her services. The hospital attack is a criminal assault. The midwife for safeguarding
did her job or appeared to until she ran into a wall. It is hard to contemplate the cynicism needed to turn away at this
STARK 271
point: A hospital visit is a rare escape opportunity from coercive control, but ML's time was limited, she was desper-
ate and before they could respond, MK is there, snatching her back.
As we might expect from the finality of MK's hospital grab, ML and the children were invisible to the community
over the next few months. Since there was no open case, she was not missed.
I trust that we have laid to rest the claim that ML conspired to conceal or even to minimize MK's abusive behav-
ior. In any case, as notes throughout the record indicate, by this time, MK's abusive behavior was well known to the
range of providers involved with the family, even if MK was never himself identified for assessment, interdiction, or
management. After the extreme incident, where he kidnapped ML by force in front of hospital staff so she could be
home to care for the children, there could be no issue of deception with respect to what MK was capable of. Or even
frankly, of the ways he would use ML's relationship to the children to control her. In fact, ML called the community
midwife to report that MK strangled her (again) and pulled her hair. She requested help finding safe accommoda-
tions. She said the relationship was over. The fact that she was again reporting a physical incident in this case –what
may have been an attempt at murder –suggests that a combination of fear and not having a place to go inhibited
her in the past. Nothing was done.
The fetus is an animus of intense jealousy and competition in coercive control as well as an object through which
to control the pregnant woman. By contrast, a baby's birth often precipitates a crisis in relationships characterized by
coercive control if for no other reason than the unpredictable demands of maternal caretaking wreak havoc on
authoritarian regimes of time regulation and exclusive possessiveness. MK had demanded ML terminate the preg-
nancy in April and had strangled ML in July, in her last trimester, when she reached out for help to leave him. Baby
Adam's birth and the arrival of MK's mother from Poland presented the ideal time to for a global assessment of the
safety situation in the home. In a global assessment, the well-being (safety, but not only) of all members of the family
is assumed to be a function of the absolute level of violence and coercive control in the home, regardless of whether
each person has been separately targeted. Had this occurred, DP and ML would not be dead.
8|LA FIN: FROM TANGENTIAL SPOUSE ABUSE TO HOMICIDE
OF A CHILD
DP started school that fall. When DP entered school, the end game began. From then on, MK depended on ML to
extend his coercive control of DP through social space as well as to prepare DP for public visibility. There was no
way he could keep DP from being seen. It was essential, therefore, that he not be “heard”and that ML respond to
any concerns about his appearance without revealing her own predicament. With the 4-year-old boy, MK now sup-
plemented nutritional restriction with daily interrogations and indoctrination sessions designed to instill strict adher-
ence about what could or could not be said. He was beaten, tied to a chair, left alone to prolonged periods of time in
a room with only a mattress, and denied access to toileting. ML was to clean him up, dress him for school, get his bis-
cuit for breakfast, and pack his hunk of bread and piece of cheese for lunch. DP's “success,”at each evening's interro-
gation, determined what would happen to ML as well, whether she would be allowed to sleep lying down, for
example, or raped, or beaten, or starved. This was way too much for DP and he became so emotionally confounded
that speech itself became fraught.
The passage of an imprisoned child from home to school precipitates a crisis in command in cases of coercive
control. The case opened up because, when DP began school, MK's system threatened to implode. In the home, DP
served as a pawn through whom MK could control ML, using her as a surrogate disciplinarian and enforcer and all-
owing for just enough flexibility in the rules of eating, personal hygiene, or toileting so that she could cling to a glim-
mer of self-esteem. Sexual service, household service, and obedience to much the same regimen as the boy's were
the price she paid for his leniency. Once ML brought DP to school, the effects of the crimes against them were pub-
licly visible for assessment on a regular basis to a range of education and health professionals and para-professionals
with varying degrees of training in how to recognize and manage children and women who were suffering
272 STARK
mistreatment or abuse. Day after day, a mother would present a cleanly dressed, well-groomed child in an ever more
desperate state of physical and emotional disrepair. Did everyone at the school really think possible this “immature,
self-involved and semi-literate woman”was simply too naive to appreciate how being identified as the mother of
such a child would make her appear? The woman was desperate, not naive, and extremely brave to be pleading for
help in the face of tyrannous odds. Presenting her son as living contradiction of her making took guts.
The anxiety created by having to produce DP at school grew too much for MK to bear. Fearful that even the
smallest unchecked impulse would produce open rebellion during the day, he tried to close the loopholes in his author-
ity each evening, no longer allowing ML to sneak DP illegal foods, or to remove him off schedule from the “cold bath”
or feed him in the tub. DP had been his conduit to controlling ML. Now, he depended on ML to control DP during a
time and in a space where he had no direct control over her and where betrayal was a constant threat. Tightening the
reigns on her at home—depriving ML of food alongside DP, using rape as a weapon—merely made the morning contra-
diction more glaring, when, under his screaming gaze, she applied concealing creams to herself and DP to hide the
bruises. Where ML had been his surrogate with DP, he now stepped in to exert direct control over the boy's physical
and psychological being, making him the “primary victim”of his coercive control. Ironically, this choice made MK vul-
nerable to detection and interdiction. DP no longer saw ML as an intermediary, but a fellow captor.
The experience of victimization was mutual. ML's role had changed as well. ML initially colluded in DP's suffer-
ing, primarily to minimize her own. She rationalized her behavior when she did so by assuming MK would only make
things worse if she did nothing. Pushing the boundaries of MK's regulation of DP also allowed her to test her mettle
against the limits of his authority in ways she was terrified to do where his rules concerning her behavior applied.
ML's transgressions went only so far, however, and she was aware that DP's deterioration had been only slowed by
the little extra food she got him and the few blows she prevented, not stalled, and that his overall downward trajec-
tory would be transparent.
It was from the perspective of prisoners on work release that ML and DP approached the school. No surveillance
was in place. But the nightly interrogation sessions meant MK might as well have been listening in. The gambit ML
chose was to plead by rote imitation, the strategy Beckett parodied so well in Waiting for Godot: By making the food
limit rule itself explicit to his teachers, she hoped to make its cruelty evident. When ML told the teachers not to give
the obviously hungry boy anything more than the lunch she provided, ML transferred the agonizing dilemma she felt
at home to them. Now, they too would have to choose between what was “safe”and what was best for the child.
The teachers chose not to be distracted from their primary charge and saw the mother as capricious rather than stra-
tegic. Since the scars of healing often appeared hours after the morning cream was applied, simply taking DP to
school as she was told was an act of rebellion against MK that could expose him. It should have done so.
Entering school was also a crossroads for DP. Now, if he needed more food, he had to secure it himself, by bor-
rowing stealing or “dumpster diving.”These activities were strictly forbidden at home, MK interrogated DP nightly
and when DP confessed, it elicited nightly punishment. Thus, the consequence of limiting his diet was to set off a
downward spiral of begging, stealing, interrogation, punishment, and further deterioration. When MK realized that
DP was losing his grasp, he told the boy to remain silent at school. The result was the “voice lessness”that was mis-
taken for the diffidence of an immigrant child. But if he was not speaking directly about what was being done to him
at home, DP was begging others for food, and even his stealing was a form of talking. Then there were the visible
bruises for which he was as guileless as guiltless. These were observed, recorded by the young teaching assistants in
the classroom, and the information was conveyed to the Head. The school was the penultimate point of rescue. The
pediatric visit was the last.
9|CHILD ABUSE AS TANGENTIAL SPOUSE ABUSE
At this point, only emergent rescue would have prevented DP's death. I have briefly recounted the pediatric visit ear-
lier in the story. But the primary goal of adapting a forensic understanding of coercive control is to comprehend
STARK 273
abuse before it reaches the school or pediatrician, before it has encompassed children, by recognizing the implied
threat posed by the range of liberty harms to adults when they first take hold in the insults, injuries, and indignities
of personal life.
Once DP entered school, it was too late to prevent MK from seriously hurting him or ML. Up until this point, the
case involved routine police work, social work, and advocacy. Routine, but ineffective. It need not have gone this
way. Dozens of physical assaults, sexual assaults, and incidents of stalking, destruction of property threats, including
threats to kill, instances of isolation, stalking, psychological terrorism, financial manipulation, and psychological abuse
extending to all areas of ML life—all were gleaned from the parties, neighbors, witnesses, family members, and ser-
vice professionals. Much of the information about these events emerged from the normal course of intervention,
some were gleaned by happenstance, from the margins. Though the available information was only a small sample of
what was truly going on in the family, no extraordinary skill or insight was needed to gather or interpret it beyond
perhaps the suspension of disbelief that a comprehensive form of enslavement might be widespread in our midst.
Had the coercive control framework been available, accepted, and applied, and the data abstracted at least, in part,
in anticipation of what we would find, it would have been simple to build a powerful criminal case against MK.
Starting with a child's death, a forensic analysis, based on coercive control, reframed this case of child abuse as
an expression of the tyranny exerted over the woman in this family (i.e., “tangential spouse abuse”) and of the strug-
gle of all victimized family members against this tyranny. However insane or impulse-ridden his behavior may have
been, once MK usurped command over ML's life, his strategy evolved logically in response to challenges or dilemma
she posed to his singular interest in “dominance”as well as to challenges posed by DP. Thus, MK attempted to man-
age the threat of exposure when DP entered school by escalating his coercive control of both parties, taking DP and
ML's direct targets of binding, isolation, starvation, and physical abuse rather than playing them off against each
other as he had done in the past.
But what if the tragic consequence was not yet “known?”I have also entered the case at various points to illus-
trate how the model could have been used to decipher the logic of coercive control and elicit a vocabulary of
motives consistent with early intervention. The utility of the model as a heuristic ended when it became clear that
two options that would have prevented the tragedies had been effectively foreclosed, meaning MK's incarceration
and ML's escape with the children. From then on, we are in forensic mode: I interpret ML's action and DP's actions
dialectically, as simultaneously expressing diminished autonomy and the struggle to resist diminishment, an example
of “control in the context of no control.”They do not collude in their own demise.
To seriously consider the sort of reframing process, I propose here, even in hindsight, requires we imagine our
subjects as fully entitled persons to start, as citizen children and adults, as having equal claims to rights and liberties
when they are young, female, or immigrant as older, male, and native born. I cannot fully explain why so many of the
“good”people in this case did so many “bad”things. Nor can we guarantee having a coercive control model in hand
will thwart the urge among many otherwise well-intentioned professionals to retreat in the face of fear and to
instead, victim blame. If the same events were unfolding in England today, I would expect a batterer would be
charged with “coercive control”along with other offenses. Much of the exhaustion that drove ML to seek refuge
from one man to the next resulted from the sheer energy taken up with “safety work”in a community that was more
keen to provide checkups and mark milestones in a child developmental progress than provide food, housing, or gain-
ful employment. ML's testimony to her predicament –remember, at this period she was reporting to everyone –
could have comprised a key element in a trial and conviction, a marked contrast to the victim-blaming denigration
meted out at trial by the legal system.
There is no similar offense in the U.S. to the coercive control laws in Great Britain. I have no reason to think pro-
fessionals in the U.S. today would respond to a fact set similar to ML any differently than their counterparts did a
decade ago. But I do not place the major blame on the level of professionalism involved. Rather, I insist that the fail-
ure to recognize the danger posed to ML and her children early on arose primarily from the lack of understanding
about and an unwillingness to confront the role of male dominance in conjoining woman abuse and child abuse, not
the lack of commitment to address domestic violence as an issue relevant to child protection or of skill on how to do
274 STARK
so. Not from what to look at, or even how but whom to target. Everything relevant that was happening was seen, or
almost everything. ML was “well known”and highly visible to the service infrastructure in her town. Even DP was
well known for his age. The public was justifiably shocked by what it found out at trail. But the truth is that even the
most intrusive surveillance apprehends only a tiny portion of family drama. The question in abuse cases is not “how
much is unknown?”but is always whether we have seen enough to act or whether the emphasis should be on more
discovery. This is not merely a temporal question of whether what is needed is “more time”The case of shifting para-
digms involves learning to recognize behavioral information you are already receiving as new knowledge, as an
important part of the “known known”that is sufficient to act. With children as with climate change, there comes a
point when we stop bemoaning being “shut out”and learn to look more closely at what we see, to “know what we
know.”This means giving an ineffable process like “isolation”or “loss of autonomy”–a status in assessments similar
to violence or physical injury say.
Coercive control is about describing the rich texture of lived experience, albeit in a somewhat new way, not
teasing out secrets hidden in family closets. The judge and the SCR repeat the conventional conceit, that we missed
the real truth here because it was hidden from us, “concealed,”and that DP and ML were responsible for the con-
cealment, and the one victim hapless enough to remain alive at trial should be punished. I have taken up the forensic
challenge of showing that everything that needed to be known was in plain sight, albeit invisible from the vantage of
tunnel vision inherited with the prevailing perspective. Framed as coercive control, the same events that shared into
fragments fall seamlessly into place along a continuum of coercion and control that marks a clear pathway for child
saving and woman saving.
ENDNOTES
1
The substance for this analysis s drawn from news reports of the killing, transcripts, and reports from the trial of ML who
was also tried and convicted of the killing in 2013 and on a serious case review (SCR) of the professional involvement in
the Pelka case completed during the Luczak–Krezolek trial.
2
There is no greater opening for analysis, forensically, than uncovering, documenting, and then revealing the numerous
opportunities when key professional actors encountered men engaging in coercive control and took no notice.
3
This no academic turn of phrase. There is an actual moment in time in many narratives when women combatting coercive
control have told me they recognized the degree of unfreedom in their lives was such that to continue as if they were
freely choosing their daily routines perpetuated an intolerable illusion for themselves and/or their children. Within the
context of coercive control, the “choice to choose”is always fraught.
4
Note, my account contrasts to two others, one which holds that victimization entails a total relegation of purposeful action
and a second which holds that victimization is a temporary incapacitation related to what is on the table or perceived to
be available as an option at a given time. In the context of coercive control, victimization is neither a state-of-being (as is
implied by terms like “the battered woman”or “the rape trauma victim”) nor an “event,”but an unfolding process of inca-
pacitation and resistance in which the power to shape self and other is being appropriated.
5
To this extent that the institutional response further entraps abused women, it serves as part of what I call “the extended
patriarchy.”We confronted a similar dilemma in Nicholson V. Williams, a successful class action in which I was the lead
expert for plaintiff mothers. In Nicholson, Federal Judge Jack Weinstein found that NYC's Administration for Children's
Services had violated the fourth, fifth, ninth, and 14th Amendments (“indentured servitude”) when it removed children
and placed them in foster care solely because their mother had been victims of domestic violence.
6
Narrative comments often contain observations, evaluative comments, and comparative judgments that have probative
value over the above formal assessments, which tend to reflect resource allocations rather than actual client need. While
such assessments need not be used to impeach a service provider, they can often help remind them of their better self.
REFERENCES
Home Office of the United Kingdom. (2015). Controlling or Coercive Behaviour in an Intimate or Family Relationship: Statu-
tory Guidance Framework. Retrieved from https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/statutory-guidance-
framework-controlling-or-coercive-behaviour-in-an-intimate-or-family-relationship
Stark, E. (2007). Coercive control: How men entrap women in personal life, New York: Oxford University Press.
Stark, E., & Flitcraft, A. (1996). Women at risk: Domestic violence and Women's health, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
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How to cite this article: Stark E. The coercive control of Daniel and Magdalena Lucek: A case of child abuse
as tangential spouse abuse. Int J Appl Psychoanal Studies. 2020;17:262–276. https://doi.org/10.1002/
aps.1672
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