Coercive Control Law Proposal

Coercive Control is Damaging Emotional Abuse; It Should Be Illegal

by Virginia Jones

People know that military combat leads to trauma, which we now call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). I am old, so I remember the delayed reckoning with the damage the Vietnam War inflicted on so many young American men, but my parents talked about the shell-shocked soldiers who came back from the front line of World War I and World War II. These men struggled to cope with normal lives after the war and became alcoholics or committed suicide.

Since the reckoning with Vietnam soldiers coming home with PTSD, our society has come to recognize that trauma is also caused by rape and child sex abuse. I know about child sex abuse. When I was four years old, I was sexually abused in a neighbor's basement by two teenage neighbor boys while my mother was so depressed she did not know or care where I was. A few weeks later, she spent a couple of months in a psychiatric hospital. I perceived this loss as her not wanting me as a child. She died of cirrhosis of the liver, emphysema, and congestive heart failure when I was 28. When I was 43, my cousin revealed to me that both our mothers had been sexually abused by our grandfather. 

What I went through is now called generational trauma. I lived the consequences. For decades, I struggled with chronic depression, low self-esteem, and anxiety. Fortunately, I learned how to heal trauma by going through more trauma, but this time with the help of therapists…except they were mostly therapists for my children. I followed the therapist’s advice for me as a mother on how to support my children, and ultimately healed myself. Therapy is valuable because therapists learn how to help people struggling with their mental health. Unfortunately, many people can’t afford the therapy they need. 

The trauma my children and I went through was an eight-year-long, high-conflict child custody battle between their father and his second wife against me.

The incident that sparked this battle occurred when my son was 10 years old. My children stayed with their father one week in January 2007, when I was on retreat with The Compassionate Listening Project to learn Compassionate Listening. When I arrived home, my son, who is on the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum, told me what happened while I was gone. One day, his stepmother ordered him to look her in the eyes and repeat her criticism of me, his mother, back to her.

“Your mother is nothing but a leech on your father,” she said.

“Stop criticizing my mother,” my son said.

“I have a right to criticize your mother,” she said.

Since asking his stepmother to stop criticizing his mother wasn’t working, my son tried another way to get away from her.

“I’m tired; I need to take a nap,” he said.

“Come sleep on my bed,” said his stepmother, and she made him move to her bed while she continued criticizing me.

Many years later, when my daughter was an adult, she told me about the time her stepmother called her father “stupid” and spent several minutes berating him for missing a turn they needed to take while walking through Montreal, Canada.

Then Stepmom turned to my daughter and said, “Isn’t your father stupid?”

My daughter confided to me that she was afraid her stepmother would start criticizing her if she did not say that her father was stupid, so she said, “Yes, my father is stupid.

If these two incidents were isolated, maybe they would not be so bad, but both my children and I had to endure years of such incidents nearly every week for almost ten years.

Because emotional abuse, now called coercive control, is legal.

My son, who chose to stay with me and was allowed by his therapists to stop visiting his father at age 16, was eventually diagnosed with Irritable Bowel Syndrome

My daughter, who chose to live with her father and whom I rarely saw for 18 months until I won a child custody battle to be able to see her, was eventually diagnosed by three different therapists with Borderline Personality Disorder, which is a serious mental health disorder commonly experienced by survivors of long-term child sex abuse. If serious and prolonged emotional abuse can cause the same mental health problems as serious and prolonged child sex abuse, why is it legal?

If you want to know more about my family’s story and how I won my child custody battle so you can win your battle too, you can buy my book, Losing My Daughter, Finding Myself: A Memoir and Workbook About Healing Childhood Trauma While Winning a Child Custody Battle by V. Jones on Amazon.com.

About fifteen years ago, I founded a very small non-profit called Compassionate Gathering to train Catholics to listen compassionately to clergy abuse survivors. That worked very well with the very few Catholics and clergy abuse survivors who participated. Soon, ordinary child sex abuse survivors came to me for help. Among these survivors, I met three women who lost their children to the men who abused them. They did not have my resources for therapy and lawyers. I know that these women were not alone, so I have been traveling around Oregon giving Domestic Violence agencies copies of my book as well as visiting county fairs and farmers’ markets while wearing a t-shirt that reads Emotional Abuse (coercive control) is Very Damaging. 

During these travels, I asked the domestic violence agencies how many of their clients were involved in high-conflict child custody battles. The Executive Director of The Safe Project in Coos Bay told me she encountered such survivors at least once a week. In Florence, Oregon, at the Siuslaw Outreach Services, the advocates who worked directly with domestic violence survivors told me they encountered survivors struggling with child custody battles more than once a week. In Lake County, Oregon, the domestic violence agency advocates told me they see such cases only about once a month, but they serve a much smaller population. I have also learned that many agencies have been experiencing funding cuts, and some have closed permanently, including those in Curry County and Newport, Oregon.

I have some ideas to address both coercive control and family violence. My son, who works in horticulture but is interested in the legal issues related to child abuse and child custody, is working with me. We want to propose a law to the Oregon State Legislature.

Coercive Control Family Violence Prevention and Treatment Act

Section One: Require parents who are divorcing or living separately to communicate through a co-parenting app or emails.

County governments are most likely to encounter coercive control in co-parenting conflicts during and after divorce. Sometimes, both parents may have poor mental health coping and communication skills, but with the right data, such as a law requiring separated and divorcing parents to communicate by email or through a co-parenting app, third parties such as judges, lawyers, child abuse advocates, and therapists can discern which parent is more responsible for conflict in the family. 

Section 2: Prevention and Detection

#1. Require all schools, both public and private, to teach Nonviolent Communication and basic listening skills in one class each year, starting in kindergarten and continuing through high school. This also doubles as an anti-bullying program. 

#2 Require people who apply for a marriage license and those who are new parents to take classes in Nonviolent Communication and listening skills. Can domestic violence agency personnel teach these skills with appropriate training as a way of helping these agencies with funding issues? Can this provision help agencies retain part-time employees or give them full-time jobs? Individuals who are getting married or planning to have children can attend these classes at a sliding-scale fee, ranging from $5 to $30. I would also allow families who have money enough to pay higher prices and who have a desire for privacy to take more expensive private classes, but I would also tax these private classes 5% to provide funding for domestic violence agencies.

#3 Require new parents, and divorcing or separating parents to take classes in self-care skills, such as, but not exclusively, mindfulness meditation. I personally used Centering Prayer, which I learned in the Catholic Church. Both practices have been scientifically documented to calm conflict as well as heal the wounds caused by trauma, commonly known as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Unhealed trauma often causes more conflict because survivors often experience intense and prolonged outbursts of emotion, and they lose the ability to communicate their needs at all. In other words, generational trauma. So we also need to help heal family trauma, which is such a problem in our society.

Mindfulness meditation, as taught today, is a secularized Buddhist practice, and it is the most studied and scientifically validated practice known to heal trauma-related mental health issues. However, many religious practices have been studied and found to have healing effects, including yoga, which is rooted in Hinduism, Christian Centering, and contemplative prayer. Native American sacred practices, such as the sweat lodge and sacred dancing, can also help heal trauma.

Additionally, schools should be required to incorporate healing self-care practices into the school day. What if every day of school began with five minutes of jumping jacks and five minutes of silent meditation, prayer, or another quiet activity of the child’s family’s choosing? Children need to be active, but they also need quiet time.

High schools could offer yoga, meditation, centering prayer, and dancing as alternatives to conventional physical education. Exercise and sports help people heal from trauma, too, but I was always so lousy at them; they caused me anxiety instead. In high school, I was a hardcore agnostic, so I would not have engaged in Centering Prayer, but I would have been open to yoga or meditation. When people are forced to participate in a religious practice, they may become alienated from that religion. Nobody should be forced to engage in a religious practice, but families should have the option for their children to engage in a healing religious practice to cope with, heal from, and prevent wounds from trauma.

Section 3: High Conflict Divorce and Child Custody Battles

1. Parents who criminally abused their spouse or children should automatically see their children in supervised visitation only. Child support should be adjusted accordingly.

2.  If parents are struggling with a contentious separation, divorce, or child custody battle, both parents will be automatically required to:

• Take more classes or workshops on and demonstrate the use of Nonviolent Communication and listening skills in written and verbal communications., 
• Take additional classes or workshops to demonstrate the use of self-care skills, such as meditation, prayer, yoga, or similar practices.
• Take more classes or workshops on and demonstrate the use of listening skills in written and verbal communications.

3.  If coercive control and parenting problems continue, the parents should automatically be required to work with a Court-Ordered Parenting Time Coordinator and a Family Systems Therapist instead of fighting through years of mediation, arbitration, and legal wrangling between lawyers that I had to go through. This type of court order can be obtained by a parent submitting parenting app or email communications to the appropriate court officer that demonstrate challenges in communication, visitation, holiday arrangements, and the pick-up and drop-off of children between co-parents. The purpose of this automatic court order is to speed up our extremely slow judicial system because children are being harmed when our society takes years to stop a child’s exposure to coercive control.

4. Another mental health treatment that offers help for this issue is Dialectical Behavior Therapy, which offers modules on Effective Communication, Distress Tolerance, Mindfulness (meditation), and Emotion Regulation. My son and I met a woman at a farmer’s market who had parents who were preoccupied with their own problems. She left home as a teenager and became a homeless street kid and then a homeless adult. She used drugs to dull her pain and eventually went to prison for selling drugs. There she was given Dialectical. Behavior Therapy. She recovered, attended college, and now holds two full-time jobs. She is a Republican because the best thing that ever happened to her was being held accountable for her criminal behavior. So we need the Republican value of expecting people to be responsible, but we also need the Democratic value of providing mental healthcare to people who need help.

A little more about me: I had a brief career as a registered nurse in a psychiatric hospital while I was pregnant with my son. This gave me the opportunity to see a range of people with various mental illnesses and helped me become more familiar with mental illness and mental health treatments.

Who is your state legislator, and how do you contact them?  Put this address in your search engine:

https://sos.oregon.gov/blue-book/Pages/state/legislative/house-district.aspx