Coercive

I’m having a horrible morning.

There was a public meeting I was going to attend online. I had two comments written, and they never opened the meeting up. I’m a little disappointed.

I got a response from Vermont that basically said they weren’t going to answer, and everything is sealed now because I dropped the lawsuit.

I don’t know if that job is real or not. It dawned on me that I have no control over what is on my computer, and the thing I was using that found it locked me out of all of my data I’ve done with them through the years, so it was probably put there to make me freak out.

I’m sure the rehab bit was a scam too.

He’s just living happily ever after, and it doesn’t matter how much I fight. I can’t win.

God, if you don’t see what I’ve gone through over the last couple of years and look at what happened that night, it’s just a continuation of the same thing.

I’m crying and begging and fighting as best I can. People are standing around watching, and no one helps me. Dave is just allowed to do whatever he wants to me.

No remorse.

No repercussions.

Nothing.

That’s what my pain and my suffering are worth.

Nothing.

Not even a response.

And in the meantime, Dave is telling me he loves me on my computer.

This is coercive control, and everyone is allowing it to happen.

This was my five-minute class on coercive control I was going to present today.

But I’m silenced there too.

Coercive Control

I want to explain coercive control to you in very simple terms because I think it is something that is often misunderstood when we talk about sexual assault.

I used to tell my rapist, Dave:

“You don’t have to hit a dog with a rolled-up newspaper too many times before the dog stops just because you reach for the paper.”

Eventually, the dog learns.

You have created compliance without having to be physical.

That is coercive control.

It is the mental state of abuse.

One person learns that there are consequences for saying no, disagreeing, refusing, or not doing what the other person wants.

Eventually, the threat doesn’t even have to be made.

The victim already knows.

Dave once told me that ropes were kabuki.

He said he didn’t need ropes.

He had complete control over me without them.

You don’t have to physically restrain someone if they have already been taught what will happen when they resist.

It is basic human behavior.

We all learn from consequences.

If you touch a hot stove, you learn not to touch it again.

If every time you told someone no, they punished you in some way, you would learn either that saying no has a price or that it doesn’t matter what you say.

And you learn what you are willing to accept to avoid that punishment.

I used to say pain doesn’t last, and if it does, you get used to it.

And that is what happened in my relationship.

I had already grown up with violence and sexual abuse for as long as I can remember.

I am not somebody who reacts to fear the way people apparently expect women to react to fear.

I blow up like a puffer fish and pretend to be bigger and badder than I am.

I don’t show fear.

That bothered Dave.

So he changed tactics.

He berated me.

Every human being has something that matters to them.

Maybe it is their children.

Money.

Their home.

Affection.

Research on coercive control describes it as a pattern, not simply one isolated violent incident. The effects can accumulate over time through repeated intimidation, humiliation, threats, isolation, monitoring, economic control, emotional abuse, and sexual abuse.

The important thing is the pattern of domination.

That pattern is your crime scene.

So:

Why did I stay?

Why did I continue talking to him for months after I reported him?

Why did it take Mr. Wolfson making me so angry for me to finally cut Dave off?

If someone has spent months or years teaching you what happens when you resist them, your behavior cannot be understood simply by looking at a single incident.

The entire relationship itself is the crime scene.

Somehow, when the violence is sexual, people start treating the relationship itself as evidence of consent.

I want you to think about that logic for a moment.

I never consented to my ex-husband breaking my ribs, my nose, my shoulder, or my eye socket.

Nobody looks at those injuries and says:

“Well, she stayed married to him, so maybe she consented to being beaten.”

So apply the same principle to sexual violence.

A relationship does not create permanent consent.

That is the law.

New consent doesn’t create retroactive consent because that isn’t real.

Because when someone says no, the response from the other person is actually the answer to whether it is a crime.

They either stop immediately, or it’s sexual assault.

It’s their action, not the victim’s reaction, that determines rape.

In my case, I revoked my consent loudly.

I was injured.

It took approximately two months for me to heal.

That injury does not become consensual because I stayed with him.

And that wasn’t the last rape with him in that video.

Not by a long shot.

The coercive control surrounding an assault does not make the assault less real.

It explains how compliance was being produced.

Because sometimes the most important evidence of coercion is not what the perpetrator had to do in that moment.

It’s what he didn’t have to do.

That’s your crime scene.

You don’t have to hit the dog every time.

That is coercive control.