"Another deadly mass shooting" has become part of our daily headlines in the United States. However, the connection between coercive control, domestic violence and mass shootings is often ignored. The media often sweeps the connections between mass shooters and domestic violence abusers, especially those who use coercive control, under the proverbial rug. Shootings are news, but domestic violence and coercive control do not receive nearly the same press.
So, keeping weapons out of the hands of domestic violence perpetrators may play a big part in reducing mass shootings. And, I am all for stronger laws that do that. But I prefer to focus most of my energy on something that is rarely utilized in the domestic violence arena... PREVENTION. Sure, lots of organizations claim to be focused on domestic violence prevention, but what most of them are referring to when they talk about domestic violence prevention is secondary prevention. Secondary prevention of domestic violence is mainly focused on recidivism... or stopping the perpetrator from committing domestic violence AGAIN. And, in my book, that does not prevent domestic violence.
What I mean when I say prevention is primary prevention... preventing domestic violence before it ever happens. And hardly anyone is focusing on primary prevention. Why? Because it is a lot harder to stop domestic violence from happening than it is to "prevent" it after the fact. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. We try to prevent lots of other bad things from happening... plane crashes, mass deaths from natural disasters, bank robberies, drug and alcohol addiction, teen pregnancy (yes, some people think teen pregnancy is bad) etc. We pour billions of dollars every year into preventing these and other undesirable outcomes.
So, why don't we focus more on preventing domestic violence? Well, it's expensive, it's time-consuming and it's complicated. But so is preventing plane crashes and terrorist attacks. But the main reason we aren't focusing on primary prevention for domestic violence is that we are still using an outdated definition of what domestic violence really is.
The majority of domestic violence actually begins as coercive control. Coercive control is a pattern of coercive and controlling tactics that are designed to completely dominate the target. And, if the perpetrator can do that without physical violence, they often will. However, if non-physical forms of violence are not enough to keep a targeted person under the abusers control, they may escalate to physical violence. Coercive control has been found in 99% of domestic homicide cases. This means that identifying coercive control is the key to preventing intimate partner homicide and filicide... not to mention playing a part in preventing mass shootings. Not only can the identification of coercive control early on prevent murders, it can prevent less harmful forms of domestic violence, and it can help millions of victims trapped in non-physical violence escape as well.
But we aren't assessing for coercive control in the US. Coercive control, with the exception of two states, California and Hawaii, is not illegal in the US. And we cannot prevent what we don't assess for. We cannot prevent what we don't arrest and prosecute offenders for. Currently in the US we are WAITING for coercive control to escalate to physical violence before we do anything about it. This puts the targets at much greater risk of harm and/or death. It also puts perpetrators at greater risk of becoming more dangerous, because they continue their egregious behavior unabated and unaccountable. Human beings who benefit from something that makes them feel powerful and superior and get away with it will often continue to escalate those behaviors. And coercive control almost always gets worse over time.
It is time to pass laws to #CriminalizeCoerciveControl in every state in the US. Until and unless we do, domestic violence will only get worse, as will mass shootings.
