CCChat-Magazine_Issue-16

T: I’ve been attending since 2008. I was
first informed by Nancy Erickson, who
has now become a friend. She is a
domestic violence adviser to attorneys
and she was an adviser in my case. She
informed me that there was not just this
conference but there was this battered
women and protective mothers
movement and that there were going to
be survivors, advocates and practitioners
in that space, where I could learn from.
I’ve been going almost every year because
it is the only place where I can, in one
space, access information around what is
happening in the law and what people are
working on to make changes in policy and
to include my voice in that process.
M: I think that even if the intention isn’t
there, it happens by default
T: Yes, reproductive justice is one of the
ways they are doing so and I think this is
just one form of reproductive justice that
is being denied.
M: Could you expand on that?
T: Sure. My definition of reproductive
justice is having the access and freedom
to the healthcare you need, to make
decisions around whether and if and
when you want to become pregnant.
Sexual coercion is something that
happens a lot in intimate partner violence
relationships and to the extent that you
may want to have a child but you don’t
want to parent with your abuser, that’s a
restriction on reproductive justice and
also on the freedoms of both the victims,
survivor and the children because they
are not able to live a life free from power
and control and coercive control.
M: So what made you decide to attend the
conference?
I subscribe to Evan Stark’s definition of
coercive control as a gendered liberty
crime and the idea is that under
patriarchy men use coercive control as a
tactic to maintain their male privilege and
supremacy and engage in tactics that
limit the freedoms of their victims, mainly
women, from exercising agency, so
agency over their bodies, over their daily
lives, over whether or not they can have
joy in the world and certainly one of the
ways they do so is through their children.
I want to add that, for you and I and those
of us in the community who subscribe to
this definition that there is a global
pandemic against violence against
women. It shows up mainly in femicide
but there are a whole host of other ways
in which sexism, exploitation, oppression
and violence show up in our lives and
coercive control is a way to capture all of
the different tactics that de-centre the
physical aspects of the harm and
centralise the liberty – human rights –
aspects, to the point where physical harm
and threats of physical harm are not even
needed.
Victims of coercive control engage in selfpolicing
or self-surveillance tactics
because of the fear or the threat of, not
necessarily physical harm, but other
forms of restrictions on their lives and so
Making The Invisible Visible