“It was going to be me, or him”

Survivor reflection

Coercive control is not a one-off incident. It is not caused by football matches or alcohol. It is not grounded in race or ethnicity, but in gender. It comes from unequal power relationships and what is expected of men and women and gender non-conforming people. Is it a pattern of abuse that has a purpose, to entirely control another person’s life.

Men seeking control may use many instruments; sometimes physical, sometimes sexual, sometimes emotional, sometimes through structures and institutions. It is always threatening and always destabilising.

Women are isolated from support networks, disbelieved, gaslighted, and threatened. Popular culture and services ask, “why doesn’t she leave?”, yet we know that in staying, she may be keeping herself safe.

Post-separation, the tools used might change and include child contact arrangements, keeping women stuck in long and ongoing court cases, stalking, sabotaging rental and mortgage agreements, engaging with services such as social work and education as the “good dad”, isolation and gaslighting, social media harassment, threats of rape and murder.

Women are told that they are bad mothers and bad women, using whatever tools necessary, often times using the community as proxies of his ongoing abuse.

Men using these tactics are using them to control and to shrink women’s sense of self and reality. When perpetrating men use suicide as a form of coercive control, we may see it as an event, where the suicide is the crisis point. But it is not.

Coercive control is a chronic crisis and women and their children have been living through this before and after his death.

He may have threatened suicide if the woman leaves, or when she does, he may have told friends, family members, workplaces, mental health supports, social workers and children that if he dies, it is her fault.

He may be using services as tools of his abuse against her. He may have changed his next of kin, his insurance, his will to cut her out of financial support. He may have used his notes as permanent records to gaslight her and frame himself as the victim.

The impact is monumental. Every part of her life is affected. She may have been living with chronic trauma, isolated from supports and networks; she may have changed jobs or stopped working, she may have been forced to move, to terminate or maintain pregnancies, he may have used children as tools of abuse, she may have had the children removed from her. She may be using a variety of coping mechanisms to survive. She may be living in deep shame and harm.

When he uses suicide as a tool of coercive control, it may be after she has left. That she is trying to start life without him and attempting to navigate all the complexities that come with it, including the experiences of post-separation abuse.

We must understand that the harm he has caused doesn’t end because he has died. It continues in a different form.

Suicide notes may become permanent records of blame, shaping how others see her and embedding reputational harm that cannot be challenged. Public memorialisation such as vigils, funerals, and online tributes can rewrite history, recasting him as a tragic figure while silencing the abuse and isolating her further.

Children may absorb narratives of fault or responsibility, carrying confusion and guilt into their developing identities. Legal and financial arrangements can entrench instability or punishment, while hostility from extended family members can perpetuate surveillance, blame and social exclusion.

Death does not end coercive control - it can solidify it.

When we understand this, we can begin to understand how our services, practices, legislative responses, criminal justice pathways and funding pots are not able to respond to her needs as a survivor of perpetrator suicide.

We don’t yet know how many women are affected by perpetrator suicide as the research is still very new; what we do know is that in Kent and Medway, 30% of suicides were impacted by domestic abuse. Perpetrators were the largest cohort within the 30%.