Guest Editor’s Introduction

As soon as I finished reading Evan Stark’s (2007) book Coercive Control, I called Claire Renzetti to suggest that Violence Against Women publish a special issue of essays on the book and the challenging ideas at its core. She suggested that as I was a member of the VAW editorial board, I ought to submit a proposal. I envisioned the special issue as an opportunity for researchers and theorists in a variety of disciplines and specialty areas to grapple critically and appreciatively with two of the Big Questions that drive Stark’s book: What happened to the feminist revolution to stop violence against women? and, How can we best “represent” battered women? In Coercive Control, Stark seeks to answer both questions simultaneously. The feminist revolution to stop violence against women has stalled in large part because of strategic choices for how to count, comprehend, serve, protect, and otherwise represent abused women. Coercive Control is a broad piece of activist research explicitly intended—and likely—to change fundamentally the way researchers, activists, advocates, policy makers, family members, and concerned citizens think about and respond to partner-perpetrated abuse. Using intensive clinical interviews with women on trial for killing their husbands or boyfriends, Stark thoroughly rethinks “domestic violence.” He argues persuasively that it is “neither ‘domestic’ nor primarily about ‘violence’” (p. 10), but instead constitutes a criminal violation of women’s fundamental right to self-determination. “[C]oercive control is a liberty crime rather than a crime of assault” (p. 13), Stark claims, which partly explains why the “no hitting” rhetoric of antiviolence campaigns is ultimately a blind alley. Moreover, killing to escape coercive control, Stark avers, is a sane, powerful, and proportionate response to the systematic patterns of violation of personhood—of women’s dignity, autonomy, and integrity—that constitute individually devised regimes of men’s coercive control. Seeing partner-perpetrated abuse as a human rights violation requires shifts in data, counts, concepts, theory, morals, politics, and narrative—in short, a scientific as well as a political revolution (p. 10). The contributions to this special issue address various aspects of the massive paradigm shift Stark provokes and provides. Stark’s book has numerous strengths, which the contributors to this special issue extol and explore. They merit summary commendation by way of introduction. His approach to understanding partner-perpetrated abuse is pragmatic and rooted in his empirical understandings of the everyday practices of everyone from coercive and controlling men and the women who cope with them to activists, researchers, and law