Jess Hill

Biderman established that three primary elements were at the heart of coercive control: dependency, debility and dread. To achieve this effect, the captors used eight techniques: isolation, monopolisation of perception, induced debility or exhaustion, cultivation of anxiety and despair, alternation of punishment and reward, demonstrations of omnipotence, degradation, and the enforcement of trivial demands.

At the highest end, perpetrators micromanage the lives of their victims, prevent them from seeing friends and family, track their movements and force them to obey a unique set of rules. This abuse is called ‘coercive control’ (and sometimes ‘intimate terrorism’) – the type of oppression Biderman first identified. Here, two types of intimate abuser are commonly identified: the calculating abuser who knowingly manipulates and degrades his partner so he can dominate her; and the paranoid, emotionally dependent abuser who becomes more controlling over time because he’s afraid his partner will leave. They both fit under the title of coercive controllers. At the lower end of the power and control spectrum, we have abusers who are not so intent on dominating their partners, who better suit the term ‘insecure reactors’.

The key to coercive control is to alternate punishments with rewards.

For centuries, this was just a basic expectation held by men in patriarchal societies. In 1869, the English philosopher and feminist John Stuart Mill described the despotic mindset. ‘Men do not want solely the obedience of women, they want their sentiments,’ he wrote in The Subjection of Women. ‘All men, except the most brutish, desire to have, in the woman most nearly connected with them, not a forced slave but a willing one, not a slave merely, but a favourite. They have therefore put everything in practice to enslave their minds.’ Orwell gave this same animating desire to Big Brother in Nineteen Eighty-Four: ‘We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission. When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us … We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul.’

But Stockholm syndrome – a dubious pathology with no diagnostic criteria – is riddled with misogyny and founded on a lie.16 The psychiatrist who invented it, Nils Bejerot, never spoke to the woman he based it on; never bothered to ask her why she trusted her captors more than the authorities.

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In 2008, a review of the literature on Stockholm syndrome found that most diagnoses were made by the media, not psychologists or psychiatrists; that it was poorly researched, and that the scant academic research on it could not even agree on what the syndrome was, let alone how to diagnose it.20 Allan Wade, who has consulted closely with Enmark, says Stockholm syndrome is ‘a myth invented to discredit women victims of violence’ by a psychiatrist with an obvious conflict of interest, whose first instinct was to silence the woman questioning his authority.21

Psychoanalyst Erich Fromm is more direct: ‘The passion to have absolute and unrestricted control over a living being … is [the] transformation of impotence into omnipotence.

While men are powerful as a group, they do not necessarily feel powerful as individuals. In fact, many individual men feel powerless (whether they actually are or not). The essence of patriarchal masculinity, says Kimmel, is not that individual men feel powerful – it’s that they feel entitled to power.
This one statement, to me, makes sense of men’s violence. When men feel powerless and ashamed, it’s their entitlement to power that fuels their humiliated fury, and drives them to commit twisted, violent acts. That ‘entitlement to power’ is the key to understanding why men and women generally respond so differently to shame and humiliation. ‘Women are humiliated and shamed as well, and they don’t go off on shooting sprees,’ says Kimmel. ‘Why not? Because they don’t feel entitled to be in power. [For men], it’s humiliation plus entitlement. It’s the idea that “I don’t feel empowered, but I should.”’

As children seek to protect themselves in a violent home, they become behavioural detectives. ‘Children in an abusive environment develop extraordinary abilities to scan for warning signs of attack,’ writes Judith Herman. ‘They become minutely attuned to their abusers’ inner states. They learn to recognize subtle changes in facial expression, voice, and body language as signals of anger, sexual arousal, intoxication, or dissociation.

As we read in Chapter 5, Nordic countries – world leaders on gender equality – still have shocking rates of domestic abuse. In Iceland – ‘the best place to be a woman’14 – domestic abuse seems to be growing, according to Icelandic feminist and anthropology professor Sigríður Dúna Kristmundsdóttir. ‘Maybe [it’s] the anxiety that men are feeling, which can increase violence in the home.’