Domestic and Family Violence: Understanding Coercive Control
Develop an understanding of coercive control within the context of intimate partner violence so you can better support the peoples you work with, and help to shape a safer community for all.
- Wednesday 2nd April, 2025
- No prior knowledge required
- 7 Hour course
- for service providers working with families to learn how to recognise and identify coercive control
As a primary responder to domestic and family violence, or someone who otherwise works directly with families, you will almost certainly encounter situations where a person is subjecting their partner or former partner to coercive control. Coercive control might be more difficult to recognise than physical violence, but it can be just as dangerous for those subjected to it.
This course will develop your understanding of what coercive control is, what behaviours it can involve, why it is so harmful to victims, and what the key elements in providing a helpful response to people subjected to coercive control.
What will you learn
- Explore definitional concepts connected to coercive control
- Understand the range, type, and nature of the behaviours/tactics someone uses to control and entrap adult and children victim-survivors
- Understand how a person's use of coercive controlling behaviour impacts on victim-survivor safety, dignity and responses
- Understand how inequality, imbalances of power, and other situational factors intersect to shape the perpetration of coercive control and responses to this
- Understand the link between the perpetration of coercive control and intimate partner homicide
- Identify key factors that contribute to a helpful response for victim-survivors of coercive control
- Understand why a pattern-based lens is important to identifying coercive control and the correct identification of the person most in need of protection
- Identify key features of pattern-based risk assessment to identify coercive control
- Understand how to ask questions that support pattern-based assessments
