Coercive Control is the term conceptualized by forensic expert Evan Stark, MSW Ph.D., to describe the pattern of behaviors that abuse and dominate through violence or threatened violence.
This construct is often used to depict a violent person in domestic abuse who uses control for psychological, emotional, physical, sexual, and/or financial abuse of his or her domestic partner. Violence based in coercive control is inescapable, irrational, and sadistic.
Domestic abusers are not the only ones using authority to isolate vulnerable subjects from the sources of support and/or rescue. Tragically, that same behavior is all too common among judges and court-appointed actors associated with the legal proceedings of family court.
Judges, with both authority and immunity, have the ability to isolate and render helpless litigants under the authority of their jurisdiction. As such, they have the ability to exploit their resources, to prey upon marital assets as well as personal and professional profits, for their own personal gain. In this process, judges deprive the litigants of their control of the means to be independent and escape harm being done to them. When judges regulate a litigant’s everyday behavior they interfere with the litigant’s due-process rights.
Judges in their capacity as authorities imbued with immunity may act to perpetuate patterns of abuse where assault, threats, humiliation, intimidations, or even murder can take place.
The overall threat environment implicit in the authority of the court perpetuates an atmosphere of punishment and fear in litigants.
Judges and officers of the court have the capacity to either protect litigants from or subject litigants to behaviors that can cause ongoing harm. Judges and court actors who are free to exploit litigants without thought of personal repercussions for their behavior are positioned to perpetuate atrocities.
Study needs to be applied to judges in family courts across the country who have glommed onto the concept of parental alienation and thus embrace the perverted underlying concepts that are entirely contrary to the facts established by science and by core ethical precepts.
The capacity to exert unconscionable harm against a vulnerable population is a topic that is imperative to consider on a case-by-case basis in each court system attending to each judge and to the judicial actors whose behavior can only be described as cruel, sadistic, and consciously harmful to vulnerable subjects.
We are at a critical tipping point. The harms have been mounting while there has been a lack of oversight, insight, and accountability for coercive controlling judges and court actors. The time has come for a new paradigm that evaluates the limits of immunity so that those causing harm lose their cloak of immunity and are held accountable for the crime they are committing.
The work of the Foundation for Child Victims of the Family Courts includes the evaluation, assessment, and implementation of accountability to all who attempt to incentivize coercive control in an attempt to force litigants to act against their own self-interest and against the good of their children. This misuse of judicial authority goes against the very tenets of the US Constitution and the due-process protections afforded to citizens of the United States.
The tenets of 18 U.S. Code § 1512 criminalize behavior such as threatening and intimidating witnesses and suppressing evidence vital to the protection of litigants. Those who continue this criminal behavior should be aware that the law will be invoked at every level in which there are appearances of threats and intimidation against litigants, witnesses, and advocates.
The offenses of judges and court actors who engage in this behavior will be exposed by this Foundation because we have a profound concern to protect the rights and survival of the vulnerable children and protective parents whom we serve.
