Evan Stark, who studied domestic violence with his wife and then pioneered a concept called “coercive control,” which describes the psychological and physical dominance abusers use to punish their partners, died on 18 March at his home in Woodbridge, Conn. 82.
His wife, Dr. Anne Flitcraft, said the cause was likely a heart attack that occurred while 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 abuse—not car accidents or sexual assault—was the biggest cause of injury sending women to emergency rooms.
But by talking to abused women as well as veterans who had experienced PTSD from their treatment in the military, Dr. Stark began to understand that coercive control was a strategy that involved violence, but also included threats of beatings, isolating female victims from friends and relatives and cutting off their access to money, food, communication and transport.
“Like assault, coercive control undermines the physical and psychological integrity of the victim,” she wrote in “Coercive Control: The Entrapment of Women in Personal Life” (2007). “But the main means used to establish control is micro-regulating everyday behaviors associated with stereotypical female roles, such as how they dress, cook, clean, socialize, care for their children, or have sex.”
Dr. Stark began a forensic social work practice in 1990—a year later, she earned a master’s in social work from Fordham University—and began testifying for victims in court.
In 2002, he was the lead 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 being abused at home. A federal judge ruled in favor of the women, concluding that the city violated their constitutional rights by separating them from their children.
In 2019, Dr. Stark testified in London on an appeal of the murder conviction of domestic abuse victim Sally Challen, who had killed her husband with a hammer. he was released from prison.
“Coercive control,” he told the court, “is designed to subjugate and dominate, not merely to harm.”
His research on coercive control helped revolutionize the field of domestic abuse.
“What sets him apart is that he took this rather dark idea that had been in POW literature and cults and brought it into the world of domestic abuse,” said Lisa Fontes, author of “Invisible Chains: Overcoming Compulsive control in your intimate relationship’ (2015).
Evan David Stark was born on March 10, 1942 in Manhattan and raised 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 sociology 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 was making napalm for the US military during the Vietnam War. The demonstration turned bloody when police with riot batons removed students from the 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 fellowship was soon revoked. (He then 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, finding work there as a senior planner for the Agriculture and Rural Development Agency in Ottawa. in 1967.
After returning to the United States, he spent a year, beginning in 1968, as the administrator of an anti-poverty program in Minneapolis.
In 1970, Dr. Stark helped organize the Honeywell Project, which campaigned to convince Honeywell Inc. to stop its weapons production.
He went on to teach sociology at Quinnipiac College (now Quinnipiac University) in Hamden, Conn., from 1971 to 1975. He married Dr Flitcraft in 1977 while she was working on her dissertation at Yale School of Medicine. He looked at the injuries of 481 women over the course of a month in Yale New Haven Hospital’s emergency room and found that they had been victims of physical abuse at a rate 10 times higher than the hospital had detected.
Dr. Flitcraft and Dr. Stark together extended the study, which was published in the International Journal of Health Services in 1979. They wrote: “Overall, where doctors saw one in 35 of their patients as abused, a more accurate approximation is one in four; where they recognized that one in 20 injuries resulted from domestic abuse, the actual figure was closer to one in four.”
They added, “What they described as a rare occurrence was actually an event of epidemic proportions.”
Dr. Stark was a research fellow at the Yale Institute for Social and Political Studies from 1978 to 1984. He was hired the following year by Rutgers University and taught in its School of Social Work as a professor of women’s and gender studies until his retirement in 2012.
In 1985, he and Dr. Flitcraft co-chaired the United States Surgeon General’s Task Force on the Prevention of Domestic Violence.
In subsequent studies, they replicated their initial findings on a larger scale, showing that of the 3,600 women treated for injuries at Yale New Haven’s emergency room in one year, 20 percent had been beaten by their husbands or other men. relatives.
He and Dr. Flitcraft co-authored “Women at Risk: Domestic Violence and Women’s Health” (1996). On his own, Dr. Stark wrote Children of Coercive Control (2023).
In addition to his wife, he is survived by sons Sam, Daniel and Eli; another son, Aaron, from his marriage to Ms. Connolly, which ended in divorce in 1975. three grandchildren; and a sister, Joyce Duncan.
The work of Dr. Stark’s coercive control has resonance 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 visiting professor at the University of Edinburgh in 2013. .
In a speech to Scottish Women’s Aid in 2006, he “first convinced campaigners that a new approach to criminalizing domestic abuse was needed,” the Guardian wrote in its obituary.
Cassandra Wiener, a legal scholar at The City Law School in London, who wrote the obituary, said by phone that Dr. Stark helped criminalize it in England and Wales as well as similar laws in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Ireland.
Last year, Ms. Wiener said, she was with Dr. Stark when he spoke to a delegation of French government officials who were considering whether to criminalize coercive testing 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 make progress on this.’
