Evan Stark

Evan David Stark (March 10, 1942 – March 18, 2024) was an American sociologist, forensic social worker, and one of the most consequential researchers in the history of domestic violence scholarship. He is the person who named, defined, and built the evidentiary architecture for coercive control — a contribution that has shaped legislation across the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, Canada, and an expanding number of jurisdictions in the United States and beyond.

Stark was born in Manhattan and educated at Brandeis University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Binghamton University — where he earned his doctorate in 1984 — and Fordham University, where he later completed a master’s degree in social work. With his wife, Dr. Anne Flitcraft, he co-founded one of the earliest battered women’s shelters in the United States, co-directed the pioneering Yale Trauma Studies documenting the significance of domestic violence for women’s health, and co-chaired a U.S. Surgeon General’s Task Force on Domestic Violence and Women’s Health. He served as Professor Emeritus at the Rutgers University School of Public Affairs and Administration.

It was Susan Schechter — a founding mother of the battered women’s movement — who introduced Stark to the concept of coercive control, as he acknowledges directly in his landmark work. Stark took that concept and built it into a framework that changed the law. Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life (Oxford University Press, 2007) was named the outstanding book in the social sciences for 2007 by the American Publishers’ Association and received the American Library Association’s award for outstanding academic book reviewed in 2008. It became the foundational reference for the United Kingdom’s Home Office when it widened the definition of domestic violence in 2015, and for Scotland’s Domestic Abuse Act 2018 — widely regarded as the most comprehensive coercive control legislation in the world.

Stark also authored Women at Risk: Domestic Violence and Women’s Health (with Anne Flitcraft, 1996), Children of Coercive Control (Oxford University Press), and served as an expert witness in over 100 criminal, family, civil, and child welfare cases throughout the United States and Canada. His work on the coercive control of children — establishing that coercive control is the most important cause and context of child abuse and child homicide outside a war zone — directly informs the TENEL™ framework developed at Narcissistic Abuse Rehab.

Evan Stark died on March 18, 2024. The legislation his work made possible is his monument.