Coercive Control

  What is “coercive control”? It can be defined as a pattern of abusive and controlling behavior that interferes with your ability to exercise freedom and liberty. Gender Based coercive control includes intentionally inflicted oppression, controlling your employment, housing, finances, in some cases what you eat and what size clothing you wear, who you talk to, and monitoring where you spend your time.  

 Coercive Control is comparative to being taken hostage. It happened to me when I was only 15 years old, I was taken literally hostage by an adult male who knew I was vulnerable and alone in the world. He started by lying to me about his age to gain my trust, then began professing his undying eternal love to secure the emotional attachment. He waited for me at the school bus stop each morning before school, holding an elaborately written lengthy love letter describing his promises of eternal feelings for me. 

  Of course you know where this story is going, the manipulation quickly became sexual abuse, i.e. rape, which naturally led to pregnancy. The very moment I told him I suspected I was pregnant, the violent physical, verbal and emotional abuse began, which turned into financial abuse. He suddenly began demanding to be paid whatever cash I had just to visit me, and after the birth, also the infant. I wasn’t even old enough to work. The physical violence included everything from punching me, to hitting me with his car (while I was pregnant) screaming at me at the top of his lungs that I was a “whore,” and “a stupid bitch,” "no one else was ever going to want me” and that me being pregnant was “my fault.” The moment I was reported I was pregnant he began openly cheating on me, pointing out the adult women he thought were physically perfect, and pointing out my flaws, my teeth, my weight, my skin, and the fact I never had enough money to give him.

  He made me beg him to love me. He deprived me of food, milk, shelter, a family, friends, an education, and medical care. He wanted me to be ashamed that I was not the perfect female he wanted, while he held me literally hostage and as a slave to raise the child I had been raped to carry and provide for while I was being forced to financially support him-him who was an adult while I myself was still a child.

  I was forbidden from engaging in social activities, or even talking to anyone on the phone. What I could not have known at the time, was the abuse and coercive control he was using to hold me as a hostage, as a part of his employment with a law enforcement agency. After the baby was born, he left us both in foster care.

  If anything like this is happening to you or someone you know, please contact your congressman's office and report it as “gender based domestic terrorism.”