Evan Stark, who studied domestic violence with his wife and later pioneered a concept called “coercive control,” which describes the psychological and physical domination that abusers use to punish their partners, died March 18 at his home in Woodbridge, Conn. 82.
His wife, Dr. Anne Flitcraft, said the cause was most likely a heart attack that occurred while he was on a Zoom call with women’s advocates in British Columbia.
Through studies that began in 1979, Drs. Stark and Flitcraft became experts on intimate partner violence, sounding the alarm that beatings (not car accidents or sexual assaults) were the leading cause of injuries sending women to emergency rooms.
But in speaking with battered women and with veterans who had experienced post-traumatic stress disorder due to their treatment in the military, Dr. Stark began to understand that coercive control was a strategy that included violence but also involved threats of beatings, isolation of women victimized by friends and family and cutting off their access to money, food, communications and transportation.
“Like assault, coercive control undermines the physical and psychological integrity of the victim,” she wrote in “Coercive Control: The Entrapment of Women in Personal Lives” (2007). “But the primary means used to establish control is the microregulation of everyday behaviors associated with stereotypical feminine roles, such as how women dress, cook, clean, socialize, care for their children, or act sexually.”
Dr. Stark began practicing forensic social work in 1990 (a year later, he earned a master’s degree in social work from Fordham University) and began testifying on behalf of victims in court.
In 2002, she was the star witness for 15 women whose children had been placed in foster care by the New York City Administration for Children’s Services because they had witnessed their mothers’ abuse at home. A federal judge ruled in favor of the women, concluding that the city had violated their constitutional rights by separating them from their children.
In 2019, Dr. Stark testified in London in an appeal of the murder conviction of a domestic abuse victim, Sally Challen, who had beaten her husband to death with a hammer; She was released from prison.
“Coercive control,” he told the court, “is designed to subjugate and dominate, not simply to injure.”
Her research on coercive control has helped revolutionize the field of domestic abuse.
“What sets it apart from everyone else is that it took this pretty dark concept that up until that point was in the POW and cult literature and transported it into the world of domestic violence,” said Lisa Fontes, author of “Invisible Chains.” : Overcoming coercive control in your intimate relationship” (2015).
Evan David Stark was born on March 10, 1942 in Manhattan and grew up in Queens, the Bronx and Yonkers, New York. His father, Irwin, was a poet who taught narrative writing at the City College of New York. His mother, Alice (Fox) Stark, was secretary of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a black labor union led by civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph.
Dr. Stark received a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Brandeis University in 1963 and a master’s degree in the same subject in 1967 from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. As a doctoral student, he helped organize a protest in late October 1967 against the recruitment of students on campus by Dow Chemical, which manufactured napalm for the U.S. military during the Vietnam War. The demonstration turned bloody when police officers with riot batons forcibly removed students from a campus building where Dow’s interviews were taking place.
After the protests, an FBI agent visited a university official, Dr. Flitcraft said, and Dr. Stark’s graduate fellowship was soon rescinded. (He later received his doctorate in sociology in 1984 from the State University of New York at Binghamton.) He fled to Canada with his future first wife, Sally Connolly, where he found work as a senior planner for the Department of Agricultural and Rural Development. He agency in Ottawa in 1967.
After returning to the United States, he spent a year, starting in 1968, as administrator of an anti-poverty program in Minneapolis.
In 1970, Dr. Stark helped organize Project Honeywell, which campaigned to persuade Honeywell Inc. to stop its weapons manufacturing.
He then taught sociology at Quinnipiac College (now Quinnipiac University) in Hamden, Connecticut, from 1971 to 1975. He married Dr. Flitcraft in 1977, when she was working on her thesis at Yale School of Medicine. He examined the injuries of 481 women over a month in the emergency room at Yale New Haven Hospital and found that they had been victims of physical abuse at a rate 10 times higher than the hospital had identified.
Dr. Flitcraft and Dr. Stark together expanded on the study, which was published in the International Journal of Health Services in 1979. They wrote: “In short, when doctors saw one in 35 of their patients mistreated, a closer approach precise is one of four; “where they recognized that one in 20 injuries was due to domestic abuse, the real figure was closer to one in four.”
They added: “What they described as a rare event was actually an event of epidemic proportions.”
Dr. Stark was a research associate at the Yale Institution of Social and Political Studies from 1978 to 1984. He was hired the following year by Rutgers University and taught at its School of Social Work as a professor of women’s and gender studies until He retired in 2012.
In 1985, he and Dr. Flitcraft chaired the United States Surgeon General’s Special Task Force on Domestic Violence Prevention.
In later studies, they replicated their initial findings on a broader scale, showing that of the 3,600 women treated for injuries in the Yale New Haven emergency room in one year, 20 percent had been beaten by their husbands or other male intimates. .
He and Dr. Flitcraft co-authored “Women at Risk: Domestic Violence and Women’s Health” (1996). On his behalf, Dr. Stark wrote “Children of Coercive Control” (2023).
In addition to his wife, he is survived by his sons Sam, Daniel and Eli; another son, Aaron, from his marriage to Mrs. Connolly, which ended in divorce in 1975; three grandchildren; and a sister, Joyce Duncan.
Dr Stark’s work on coercive control has resonated in the UK, where he taught sociology at the University of Essex in the early 1980s, held a fellowship at the University of Bristol in 2006, and was a visiting professor at the University of Edinburgh in 2013. .
In a speech to Scottish Women’s Aid in 2006, she “first convinced campaigners that a new approach to the criminalization of domestic abuse was needed,” The Guardian wrote in her obituary.
Cassandra Wiener, a legal academic at City Law School in London who wrote the obituary, said by phone that Dr. Stark’s enactment of coercive control helped lead to his criminalization in England and Wales, as well as similar laws in Scotland. , Northern Ireland and Ireland.
Last year, Wiener said, he was with Dr. Stark when he spoke to a delegation of French government officials who were considering criminalizing coercive control in their country.
“You could hear a pin drop,” he said, “and the head of the delegation, a judge, said, ‘I get it, we have to move forward on it.’”
