Children and Coercive Control

When we talk about coercive control, we usually talk about adults. The victim. The perpetrator. The relationship. What we examine far less is what happens to the children inside it, and what that experience does to them long after the relationship itself has ended.

Children are not bystanders in coercive control. They are not witnesses. They are participants, targets, and instruments, often all three simultaneously. And the damage done to them does not stay in childhood.

Children as Direct Victims

The Domestic Abuse Act 2021 formally recognised children who see, hear, or experience the effects of domestic abuse as victims in their own right. This legal recognition reflects what research has long shown: the impact on children is not indirect. It is direct and profound.

Research demonstrates that children are harmed by coercive control directly, not simply as collateral damage to an adult relationship. The use of non-physical forms of violence such as intimidation and control, which are often considered as not directly affecting children, play a critical role in shaping their long-term wellbeing outcomes.

Children and young people can be direct victims of coercive control and they can experience it in much the same ways as adults do: feeling confused and afraid, living constrained lives, and being entrapped and harmed by the perpetrator. Coercive control can harm children and young people emotionally, psychologically, physically, socially and educationally. 

Research indicates that children living with severe and prolonged abuse are more likely to have significant social, emotional and mental health needs, develop challenging behaviour and struggle with learning. Chronic fear is not just a by-product of domestic abuse. It is a key element that keeps it going.

This matters because the legal and professional frameworks around children in these situations have historically treated them as secondary. They are not secondary. They are primary victims who happen to be smaller, less articulate about what is happening to them, and far more dependent on the adults who are supposed to protect them, one of whom may be causing the harm. 

What It Looks Like in Child Arrangement Cases

Post-separation abuse must be treated as seriously as abuse that occurs during a relationship. Separation does not end coercive control. For many victims, it begins a new phase of it, one where the child becomes the primary mechanism of ongoing abuse.

Research has consistently shown that separation often produces neither safety nor freedom, with perpetrators continuing and intensifying their coercive control post-separation.

Research has documented a number of ways that abusers attempt to control the resident parent through childcare arrangements: physical violence or threats of violence, emotional abuse, financial abuse, threatening to abduct the children, undermining the other parent’s authority, using the children to find out confidential contact information, and using childcare arrangements to track and control the resident parent’s schedule.

In practice, this looks like the following.

Financial sabotage through child maintenance. The Child Maintenance Service process can be exploited by controlling ex-partners. Earnings are concealed, varied employment arrangements are used to reduce reported income, and payments are withheld, delayed, or made irregularly to maintain financial dependency and punish the resident parent. Some structural features of the CMS system can make this form of financial abuse difficult to prevent over extended periods. 

Litigation abuse. Repeated applications to the family court by an abusive ex-partner can be a form of post-separation coercive control. In some cases, courts have labelled a resident parent as “implacably hostile” if they do not cooperate with directions regarding child arrangements, without always fully considering the reasons for their resistance. In a pattern consistent with DARVO, perpetrators frequently counter-allege that the protective parent is themselves the controlling or abusive party. These allegations are sometimes accepted by courts and professionals at face value, leaving the victim not only disbelieved but formally designated as the problem. False reports to Children’s Services serve the same purpose: not only can the other parent’s parenting capabilities be denigrated in the eyes of the child, but the child may also be placed in the abuser’s care whilst the false allegations are investigated.

Coercive tactics often continue after a relationship ends through systems abuse, financial pressure, and the weaponisation of children in custody disputes. These tactics often include pressuring children to provide information about the other parent, withholding child support, and using legal processes to maintain control. For workplaces, this matters because employees navigating abusive relationships are often also parenting inside them, carrying the psychological and practical consequences of coercive control into their working lives.

Emotional and psychological abuse of the child directly. The child is asked to carry messages. They are questioned about the other parent’s life: who they are seeing, where they go, what they earn, whether there is a new partner. They are told the other parent is unstable, untrustworthy, or dangerous. They are asked to keep secrets. They are told not to mention things that happened during contact: “Mummy gets too fussy.” “Daddy will be upset if you tell him.” They are rewarded for alliance and punished, subtly, for loyalty to the other parent.

Perpetrators directly target and undermine the relationship between the resident parent and their children. A conspiracy of silence can surround the abuse, with parents and children not speaking to each other about what has happened.

The creation of a false narrative. The abusive parent constructs a version of events that positions the other parent as the problem. This narrative is presented to children consistently and repeatedly, across visits, messages, and interactions, until the child absorbs it as fact. What makes this particularly destructive is that it asks the child to hold two contradictory experiences simultaneously: the parent they know in one home, and the parent they are told about in the other.

DARVO: The Perpetrator Who Appears as the Victim

One of the most disorienting features of coercive control in child arrangement cases is how the perpetrator presents to the outside world.

This pattern is known as DARVO: Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender. Research into coercive control perpetrators documents how they display what seems to be love and care as part of the abuse pattern. Post-separation, coercive control-perpetrating parents can appear as caring, concerned, indulgent, and even as vulnerable victims. Perpetrators direct these performances of admirable parenting at professionals and communities in ways that obscure their coercive control.

This is the experience that many victims describe as more destabilising than the abuse itself: watching the person who controlled and harmed them be described by teachers, family members, lawyers, and Cafcass officers as thoughtful, engaged, reasonable. A wonderful parent. The concerned one.

When survivors of domestic abuse turn to the family courts for protection, they often find themselves facing not only absolute denial but also counter-attacks and allegations that they are the aggressor. The Domestic Abuse Commissioner’s 2023 report on family courts found survivors often felt disbelieved when their ex-partner denied abuse and counter-alleged that they were the controlling one. This role reversal left victims retraumatised and fighting to be heard.

The same report found that 87% of reviewed family court case files contained evidence of abuse, and survivors consistently reported experiencing DARVO-type tactics during proceedings.

The child is caught inside this. They may be told the parent seeking protection is the dangerous one. They may be presented with a version of their own family history that is unrecognisable. They may be used, consciously or otherwise, as evidence in a narrative designed not to protect them, but to protect the perpetrator.

The Long-Term Evidence

The immediate harm to children is visible. The longer-term consequences are now well documented in research.

A large study of more than 16,000 participants in the Australian Child Maltreatment Study found that coercive control in childhood was associated with significantly higher rates of PTSD, depression, and self-harm in adulthood, while male participants were more likely to develop substance use problems and engage in harmful behaviours including binge drinking.

Intimidation and control occurred more often and over more years compared to other forms of domestic violence. It also extended later into childhood compared to other forms. Two thirds of individuals who reported a caregiver using intimidation and control said it was still occurring when they were fifteen years of age, despite the high overlap with parental separation.

Research evidence suggests that the psychosocial impact on young people of experiencing domestic abuse can be severe, including higher risk of mental health difficulties throughout their lives, greater vulnerability to sexual abuse and sexual exploitation, involvement in violent relationships themselves, and lasting neurological and developmental impacts with far-reaching implications for lifelong wellbeing. Research indicates that children experiencing domestic abuse is at least as impactful as being directly physically abused.

The specific long-term effects documented in children exposed to coercive control include the following.

Chronic self-doubt and difficulty trusting their own perception. Children who have grown up in environments where reality is routinely distorted, where what they experienced is denied, where their feelings are weaponised or dismissed, learn to mistrust themselves. This manifests in adulthood as difficulty making decisions, second-guessing, an inability to trust their own judgement, and vulnerability to further manipulative relationships.

Anxiety, depression, and PTSD. Researchers have documented that intimidation, surveillance, and economic abuse in the home significantly increase the likelihood of depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, and substance misuse in adulthood.

Substance use. The link between childhood coercive control exposure and later substance use is well documented, particularly in male children. Substance use is understood as a coping mechanism for unprocessed trauma, one that often emerges in adolescence or early adulthood when the individual is finally away from the environment but has no framework for processing what happened in it.

Relationship difficulties and cycles of abuse. Children who normalise control as love, who learn that monitoring, jealousy, and restriction are expressions of care, are at heightened risk of entering abusive relationships as adults, either as victims or as perpetrators. The patterns absorbed in childhood become the template for what intimacy feels like.

Educational and social difficulties. Children living with chronic fear show serious impacts on physical and mental health. Living with a pattern of fear as a constant affects concentration, memory, social engagement, and the capacity to form trusting relationships with adults, including teachers.

 What Professionals Need to Understand

Protecting children requires post-separation abuse to be taken just as seriously as abuse during a relationship. Coercive control is often perpetrated through the weaponisation of children, particularly through the family courts. Unlike physical violence, coercive control by a parent can persist long after an abusive relationship ends.

A recurring challenge is the inadequate training and lack of trauma-informed awareness among professionals, particularly regarding the complex, long-term dynamics of domestic violence and abuse. Child protection workers sometimes assume that disclosures are motivated by malice, rather than genuine concern for the child.

The child who does not want to go to contact. The child who comes home quiet and withdrawn. The child who repeats phrases that sound like they belong to an adult. The child who flinches before saying something positive about the resident parent. The child who says “I am not supposed to tell you that.” These are not signs of a “difficult child” or a high-conflict co-parenting situation. They are signs of a child inside a system of control, trying to navigate it with no map and no language for what is happening to them.

Those signs deserve a professional response that goes beyond managing the immediate incident. They deserve a framework that asks: what is the pattern? Who is afraid of what? And who, in this family, benefits from this child’s silence?

What makes coercive control particularly dangerous for children is not only the abuse itself, but how easily it disappears inside systems that are not trained to recognise it. A child living inside coercive control can appear quiet, compliant, well behaved or even aligned with the abusive parent. Without an understanding of coercive control, those behaviours can be misread as stability or adjustment. In reality, they may be the survival strategies of a child managing fear, divided loyalties, and pressure to remain silent. Protecting children in these situations requires professionals to look beyond isolated incidents and ask harder questions about patterns of control, power, and who benefits from the child’s silence.

© Safe Haven Education. This article is part of a domestic abuse awareness and professional development series. All statistics are drawn from published UK and international research, statutory reports, and domestic abuse sector publications. For training, consultancy, or speaking enquiries, contact Deniz Erdem, Founder, Safe Haven Education: deniz@safehaveneducation.org

If you are in crisis or need support, the National Domestic Abuse Helpline is available 24 hours a day on 0808 2000 247.