Dr. Christine Marie Cocchiola, DSW, LCSW is a Coercive Control Educator, Researcher & Survivor. She is a tenured college professor teaching social work for the last 20 years and has been a social justice advocate since the age of 19, volunteering for a local domestic violence/sexual assault agency.
She supports protective parents in strategizing how best to navigate the family court system including divorce proceedings and custody arrangements. Our family court system is often set up to further harm and betray adult victims-survivors and their children, unacknowledged child abuse victims.
Most importantly, Dr. Cocchiola is a protective parent. Through her own clinical expertise, research, and personal experiences, she understands the impact that coercive control has on children. She coaches victims and survivors as they navigate parenting their harmed children. She has created programming to educate Allies, including protective parents, clinicians, coaches, and court professionals on the experiences of children, victims of the coercive controller.
Dr. Cocchiola is a Founding Member of the International Coercive Control Conference and a Board Member of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. She has actively supported codifying coercive control, writing numerous policy briefs supporting these efforts.
*Even the most astute of us may miss the signs. It is never a victim’s fault.
To create a sea of trauma-informed Protective Parents & Allies to support children who are victims of coercive control, towards having a reignited or a deepened attachment with their protective parent while obtaining or regaining agency in their lives, thereby overcoming their own trauma from the coercive controller.
Empowering Protective Parents & their Allies, while also creating a sea of Allies through trauma-informed education that will elevate the protective parent in their child’s life, thereby ensuring the physical safety & psychological well being of our most vulnerable, child victims of coercive control.
The Protective Parenting Program is designed to assist and guide protective parents as they navigate the process of healing their children – victims of coercive control.
This program is close to my heart and aims to make a lasting impact in the lives of families affected by coercive control.
I am passionate about my work and dedicated to bringing about positive change in the lives of survivors and their families
I was honored to contribute to The Amici Brief for Amber Heard’s Appeal, supporting her case against her coercive controller. Among numerous candidates, only ten of us received this special invitation, and I felt privileged to be among them.
Additionally, I proudly endorsed the “Open Letter” Supporting Amber Heard, joining hundreds of others advocating for her cause. By aligning myself with this collective voice, I demonstrated my commitment to justice and support for survivors.
These efforts reflect my personal dedication to combating coercive control and advocating for those facing difficult circumstances. My involvement underscores my unwavering commitment to justice and empowering survivors for a better future.
History of the Movement
- The Battered Women’s Movement was instrumental in placing the realities of gender oppression at the forefront of social justice activism and it was soon thereafter in 1978, that the NCADV, the oldest grass roots organization in the United States, was founded.
- Although wife beating was made illegal in 1920’s, it wasn’t until the late 1970’s that states began to criminalize acts of violence by men against women. In 1984, the connection between “power and control” (the Duloth Project) and domestic abuse, was understood as the basis of most domestic abuse.
- The latest UN figures show that 137 women across the world are killed every day by a partner or member of their own family – a total of 50,000 women a year murdered by people they know and should be able to trust (UN Global Study on Homicide, 2017).
- Gender oppression and the impact this oppression has on women and children needs to be at the forefront of our prevention conversations. We see this Coercive Control played out in Post Separation Abuse (PSA), with psychological, financial, legal, and sexual abuse, and use of the children as pawns intensifying (Stark , 2007).
- The systems, judicial and legal, put in place to protect both adult and child victims, often dismiss or worse, deny domestic abuse, particularly when it is non-physical, as is often the case with Coercive Control.
- Research by Sharps-Jeff, et al. (2017) found that 90% of all domestic abuse victims suffer PSA. Unfortunately, more often than not, a history of domestic abuse is not seen as the primary factor in determining child custody.