Arizona HB 2995, the Alec and Lydia Act, would force family courts to weigh domestic violence and coercive control before parenting time.
Coercive Control
Coercive control is a pattern of behavior used to strip away a person’s freedom and autonomy through psychological manipulation, financial exploitation, isolation, surveillance, and intimidation. Unlike physical violence, which occurs in episodes, coercive control is a sustained condition of subjugation — a deliberately constructed environment in which the targeted person’s daily life, perception of reality, and access to resources are systematically controlled by another.
The concept was introduced to Evan Stark by Susan Schechter — a founding mother of the battered women’s movement, its political conscience and historian, and Clinical Professor at the University of Iowa School of Social Work until her death in 2004. Stark credits Schechter directly in Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life(Oxford University Press, 2007), the landmark work in which he developed and named the coercive control framework. The Davies and Edleson memorial published in Violence Against Women (Volume 10, Number 9, September 2004) further documents Schechter’s foundational role in shaping the field that produced this framework.
Coercive control is now criminalized in the United Kingdom — first under the Serious Crime Act 2015 — as well as in Ireland, Scotland, Australia, and an expanding number of jurisdictions worldwide. Signs of coercive control include monitoring communications and movements, isolation from support networks, financial abuse, obstruction of employment, threats, rules and regulations imposed on daily life, deprivation of basic needs, surveillance, devaluation, criminal damage, and sexual assault. Love-bombing — the idealization phase in which the targeted person is overwhelmed with attention — is frequently the entry point of coercive control, disarming the target before the control pattern is established.
Narcissistic Abuse Rehab maintains the Global Coercive Control Legislation Index, the first systematic legal reference of its kind, alongside research, educational resources, and specialist recovery support for survivors of coercive control relationships.
If you have spent any time inside the legal system as a survivor of coercive control, you know what it is to watch a piece of legislation move. You know the years between a bill arriving in committee and a bill reaching enforcement. You know the difference a statute makes when it names what happened to you. You also know…
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