When murder leaves a body, the media reacts, and the legal system might. But when coercive control leaves a living human soul in ruins, the system shrugs.
While advocacy groups and law enforcement acknowledge the existence of coercive control, their inability to provide protection or justice for survivors of pathologically predatory torture reveals a deeper systemic collapse. As a result, law enforcement is simply unable, or unwilling, to intervene in these silent but deadly forms of abuse.
Though coercive control dismantles brains, destroys nervous systems and terrorizes every area of the target’s lives, victims remain legally unrecognized. The legal system enables abusers with dangerously inadequate, willful ignorance.
* * *
The Invisible Cage
Beyond a failure of intervention, victims endure systemic erasure of their agency, autonomy, safety and continued trauma of invalidation. Coercive control constructs an invisible cage dismantling survivors’ lives while the true target is pathologized.
“There aren’t codified laws about some aspects of domestic violence, including isolation, coercive control, and psychological and emotional abuse, and therefore law enforcement is simply not able to pursue legal remedies to those dynamics,” said Caitrin Doyle, outreach coordinator at Helpmate, a domestic violence advocacy organization in Asheville.
Training in covert tactics involves recognizing trauma bonding, exploitation, gaslighting, intermittent reinforcement, smear campaigns, financial abuse, stalking and legal retaliation. Throughout the abuse cycle, the victim is consistently framed as the perpetrator through DARVO (deny, attack and reverse victim and offender), a tactic used consistently, not occasionally, as the foundation of the relationship. Doyle acknowledges the gap between awareness and legal action.
Predatory pathology is the linchpin of domestic violence — a truth rarely acknowledged by legal systems still focused solely on physical evidence.
* * *
Coercive Control: A Lethal Reality
Criminal behavioral analyst Laura Richards, founder of Paladin and former head of the U.K.’s violent crime unit, reveals the lethal nature of unrecognized coercive control:
- 92% of domestic homicides are preceded by clear patterns of coercive control.
- Victims subjected to coercive control are twice as likely to experience suicidal ideation and complex trauma than those facing physical violence.
- 35% of abusers use coercive control before any physical violence begins.
- One in four survivors fails to recognize they are being abused due to the sophistication of psychological and emotional manipulation.
Legal protections for coercive control do not exist in the United States. Until predatory pathology is recognized as the root of domestic violence, victims will remain trapped in a system that mislabels abuse as dysfunction rather than intentional, strategic destruction.
* * *
Voices Silenced by Systems
Domestic abuse survivor Mindy K. experienced the devastating consequences of coercive control firsthand within the legal system.
“In my experience with family court and an ex who uses coercive control and other abusive behaviors and tactics, the ‘truth’ is what the violent perpetrator claims it to be. Facts and evidence didn’t matter,” Mindy said.
Despite presenting facts, evidence and education on these patterns to advocates and her lawyer, she watched as contradictions in his own testimony were ignored.
“Civil court treated me like I was in criminal court. False allegations and reversals of victim and offender got our children removed from my care,” Mindy said.
Without considering the best interest factors for the two children and mother under the reign of manipulative control of a dangerous abuser, the court seemed to focus on upholding the father’s access at all costs.
“It looked at the father being entitled to access to his children, and at me, the mother, as a barrier to his male privilege,” she said.
Mindy described how he continued executing DARVO tactics, rewriting history and appeals to patriarchal norms, allowing the abuser to claim victimhood.
“He denied his abuse, attacked my character with smear campaigns and projected his dangerous behaviors onto me. All to escape accountability,” Mindy said.
The courtroom becomes a threat for further harm to weaponize against the target to cause irreparable damage as the goal.
“His goal was to get the court and the public to see him as a ‘provably good dad,’ and me as a threat, a burden to our children’s lives,” she said.
She warns the American government’s lack of evolution is enabling total destruction. Survivors are re-traumatized by the very institutions meant to protect them, only to have their trust betrayed again at their expense.
“We need to protect our most vulnerable citizens, the ones who can’t speak for themselves yet. Children don’t have the language to describe their fears or trauma. Courts need to be educated on what protective parents look like and what traumatized victims look like when they’re trying to shield their children from the same abuse they’ve endured,” she said.
Abuse is a choice. The excuses for abusers abound, and there is no amount of trauma that creates an abuser. The pathology was already there in the first place, according to the most up-to-date research. Abusers know they are abusive.
“We all need to hold abusers accountable and stop punishing the women who are doing that job because no one else will,” Mindy said.
* * *
Psychological Assaults, Physical Costs
Doyle emphasized, “We do not operate under a ‘burden-of-proof’ model so we do not have to question the people we serve.”
“Many, many survivors of domestic violence suffer traumatic brain injury, which is fairly invisible to the untrained eye but causes massive and often irreversible damage to the body and its many functions. Many survivors have endured horrifying cruelty and psychological torture and do not and have never had a mark on them. Domestic violence is domestic violence,” Doyle said.
This hidden damage accumulates over years of perpetual assault and control. According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, victims who endure coercive control are at a significantly higher risk of suicide. Studies show that prolonged exposure to psychological abuse and legal retaliation increases the likelihood of suicidal ideation, especially when victims are ignored or disbelieved by the very systems meant to protect them.
“When abusers are enabled by legal systems, workplaces and communities, they escalate their tactics, often dragging out the abuse for years to break their victim psychologically, financially and emotionally,” a spokesperson for the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence said in a 2022 report. “This relentless pursuit can push survivors to the brink of suicide.”
* * *
The Broader Landscape of Coercive Control
These tactics are not limited to intimate partnerships and friendships. Political dynamics, families, churches and cults use the same patterns of coercive control, driven by conscience-free perpetrators who dominate while wearing the manipulative masks of hero, savior or victim to feign alignment with virtues they do not possess in personal character.
Advocates, therapists, social workers and case managers must be trained to recognize how manipulators weaponize language and plausible deniability while using every opportunity to bully their victims further through the very systems and communities meant to help.
Until the tactics of predatory pathology are recognized as the root of domestic violence, and their tactics are studied and obvious to a trained court of law, survivors will continue to face a system that not only fails to protect but actively enables their abusers.
* * *
Coercive Control Kills
We know the names Gabby Petito and Laci Peterson, as well as countless others who were dismissed, silenced and controlled until they were killed. We see vulnerable women bullied in churches, discredited in courts and erased from their own lives.
Even those who try to expose this truth are destroyed by it. Jackson MacKenzie, a survivor and the author of “Psychopath Free,” lost his life to the battle within after enduring prolonged psychological murder. He revealed the tactics of pathological psychological and emotional predators to help others break free, only to be failed by every system that had the opportunity to intervene but did not.
This is the reality of coercive control, and pretending it’s rare is the real crime.
