Should Coercive Control Abuse of Children Be Illegal?

My daughter wrote the poem below when she was fourteen, four months after moving into her father’s house. Between that move and when she posted this poem on Facebook, I had virtually no contact with her. If I called her father’s house, the phone went to an answering machine, but no one ever called back.

I think I’ve finally figured it out, everyone:

A beating heart that bleeds

Is worth less than the sum of its parts,

However,

It is never useless or wasted.

In the end, to give your life to someone

Is your highest and best purpose.

To bleed is to feel, 

To be alive.

It is only the broken heart,

A lifeless shell,

That is worthless.

Used and used again,

And then cast aside.

I think I’ve finally figured it out, everyone:

What do you think my daughter was feeling?

After she posted this poem, my daughter went to her father’s garage and tried to hang herself from the rafters. Her father was not at home, but fortunately, her stepsister was. My daughter had second thoughts as blood vessels began to burst in her face, and she started screaming. Her stepsister heard her and helped her down. At least, this was what my daughter told me when I could finally speak freely with her nine months later. Dad said that when he came home, he took her to the Emergency Room, but he did not call me. He did, however, tell the Emergency Room nurses that our daughter tried to kill herself after I tried to contact her. He also implied that I had emotionally and physically abused our daughter while offering few details about all the bad things I had done. His words are recorded in the ER notes that I ordered because I still shared legal custody of our daughter at the time.

That morning, after my daughter tried to hang herself, I received a recorded phone call from her school informing me that she was absent and asking me to call them to notify them of her attendance status. I did not call back. I had no idea what my daughter was doing, and I had virtually no way of finding out.

If I called my ex-husband, the phone went straight to voicemail and was never returned. If I e-mailed my ex-husband, inquiring as to how our daughter was and if she could please call me, I received a toxic e-mail from my ex-husband accusing me of abuse and extolling himself and his second wife for taking very good care of our daughter, but I never received a call or e-mail from my daughter. 

Our Parenting Coordinator, who had a Ph.D. in forensic psychology, had ordered Dad to facilitate contact between my daughter and me, but that contact never materialized. My ex-husband refused to agree to give the Coordinator enforcement mechanisms when we negotiated our legal agreement for a Coordinator, so my ex-husband treated his orders as recommendations he was free to disregard. Moreover, my ex-husband routinely sent me and our Coordinator emails accusing me of wrongdoing and abuse. These emails lacked details or evidence of whatever wrongdoing I may or may not have committed. The Parenting Coordinator, who had worked with my ex-husband and me for the three preceding years, heard so many of my ex-husband's unverified accusations of wrongdoing against me that he proceeded with caution. He seemed to know I was a sincere and good mother, but emergency room personnel who had never met me had to follow medical and legal protocols for abuse. They were more concerned about not forcing contact between a mother accused of abuse and her daughter than in determining whether or not these accusations were true. 

At least my daughter’s personal therapist, to whom I had taken my daughter for the preceding year, knew, in her own words, “I have seen love in your relationship.”

I could tell her how heartbroken I felt over having virtually no contact with my daughter for so many months.

When my son came home from school on January 7th, I asked him to log on to Facebook to look at my daughter’s screen. My daughter restricted my access to her Facebook, but my son was friends with one of her friends, so he could see her Facebook posts.

He saw the poem. It was dated on the evening of January 6.

I thought, “She looks suicidal,” and took a screenshot of my daughter’s Facebook page and e-mailed the post to my daughter’s therapist and the Parenting Coordinator.

On January 8th, my daughter’s therapist emailed me a response, “Thank you,” but nothing more.

Within minutes, Dad called. He said that our daughter had attempted to hang herself with a scarf but had been rescued by her stepsister. When he arrived home from his date with Stepmom, he took our daughter to the Emergency Room, and she was fine. He would not answer any questions, instead telling me to contact the therapist, who had responded to my e-mail so briefly. I later learned that the Parenting Coordinator had ordered Dad to call me to give me more information about our daughter, but he had complied minimally.

Months passed before I heard from my daughter again. At the end of May, her therapist emailed me, saying that my daughter missed her pet cat, and asked if I could bring the cat to therapy. She instructed me to sit downstairs so my daughter would not have to see me. I complied, and the therapist brought my daughter downstairs to see me, too. My daughter soon asked to see me again, but Dad did not comply with her request.

The next time I heard from my daughter was at the end of August. I was camping with my son in a yurt on the coast when my phone rang in the middle of the night. It was my daughter crying.

“I cannot kill myself; I cannot call you; I cannot do anything.” 

I listened with a mixture of joy, sadness, and frustration. 

I told her, “I love you forever, no matter what.”

My daughter asked to see me again. I promised we could see each other after I returned home from the coast. I was almost home the next day when I received another call from my daughter. This time, she was on an overnight hold at the Emergency Room. Dad and Stepmom had taken her there, claiming her call to me was a “Goodbye” call before she committed suicide.

I left for the ER as soon as I unpacked the car.

What was going on at Dad’s house? Was it parental alienation? Some say parental alienation is fake news because it isn’t in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Some call it Domestic Violence by Proxy because my ex-husband was using my daughter to hurt me. True, but I am OK. My daughter, on the other hand, ended up being diagnosed by three different therapists as having Borderline Personality Disorder after she lived with Dad for four years with minimal contact with me. Recently, a new term has been created that I think is accurate—Coercive Control. Unfortunately, few states recognize Coercive Control as illegal abuse. That needs to change. The damage caused by Coercive Control is as bad as that caused by child sex abuse, probably because coercive control is always present during child sex abuse.

I personally want to focus laws on parental and family mental health in part because mental health is always a problem in high-conflict families and in part because, over the long run, abusers tend not to comply with the advice of therapists. Thus, a focus on family mental health, along with requiring parents to communicate by email or a parenting app, provides evidence of coercive control abuse as well as some healing for the family members wise enough to embrace learning mental health skills,