Children of Coercive Control

By: Evan Stark

Narrated by: Mike Lenz

Children of Coercive Control extends Evan Stark's path-breaking analysis of interpersonal violence to children, showing that coercive control is the most important cause and context of child abuse and child homicide outside a war zone, as well as of the sexual abuse, denigration, exploitation, isolation, and subordination of children. The book provides a working model of the coercive control of children and illustrates its dynamics and consequences with dramatic cases drawn from the headlines and Dr. Stark's forensic practice. The cases include those in which the coercive control of children runs in tandem with the coercive control of women, where children are "weaponized" in the coercive control of their mother and cases where abused mothers harm their children to survive or protect them from worse.

By highlighting a criminal cause of child maltreatment and a plausible justice response, Evan Stark challenges the common assumptions that child abuse and neglect fall on a continuum of problems rooted in maternal deficits, immaturity, poverty, and environmental stressors as well as the combination of Child Welfare and Child Protection Services that currently provide the ameliorative response.

©2023 Oxford University Press (P)2024 Tantor

Misleading Title. Biased, on the verge of sexist

The title was misleading for me. I didn’t expect for it to be entirely focused on male aggressors. Abuse knows no genders, no ages and no races. In my opinion, the author loses a good portion of readers very early, when it becomes evident that they can not relate.