Evan Stark, who studied domestic violence with his wife and later pioneered a concept called “coercive control,” which describes the psychological and physical dominance abusers use to punish their partners, died March 18 at his home in Woodbridge, Conn. He is 82.
Her husband, Dr. Anne Flitcraft, said the cause was likely a heart attack that occurred while she was on a Zoom call with women’s advocates in British Columbia.
Through studies that began in 1979, Dr. Stark and Flitcraft became experts on intimate partner violence, sounding the alarm that battering — not car accidents or sexual assault — is the biggest cause of injury that sends women to emergency rooms.
But by talking to battered women as well as veterans who experienced post-traumatic stress disorder from their military treatment, Dr. Stark said coercive control is a strategy that includes violence but also involves threats of beatings, isolating female victims from friends and family and cutting off their access to money, food, communication and transportation.
“Like assault, coercive control undermines a victim’s physical and psychological integrity,” she wrote in “Coercive Control: The Entrapment of Women in Personal Life” (2007). “But the main method used to establish control is the micro-regulation of everyday behavior associated with stereotypical female roles, such as how to dress, cook, clean, socialize, women take care of their children or perform sexuality.”
Dr. started Stark began forensic social work practice in 1990 — a year later, she earned a master’s of social work degree from Fordham University — and began testifying for victims in court.
In 2002, she was the lead witness for 15 women whose children were placed in foster care by the Administration for Children’s Services of New York City because they witnessed abuse of their mothers in the 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. testified. Stark in London on an appeal against the murder conviction of a domestic abuse victim, Sally Challen, who beat her husband to death with a hammer; he was released from prison.
“Coercive control,” he told the court, “is designed to subjugate and dominate, not just to hurt.”
His research on coercive control helped revolutionize the field of domestic abuse.
“What made him different was that he took this rather vague concept that up to that point was in the literature of prisoners of war and cults and brought it into the world of domestic abuse,” said Lisa Fontes, who has- 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, NY. His father, Irwin, was a poet who taught narrative writing at the City College of New York. His mother, Alice (Fox) Stark, was a secretary for the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a Black workers’ union run by civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph.
Dr. received Stark earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Brandeis University in 1963 and a master’s in the same subject in 1967 from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. As a doctor’s student, he helped organize a protest in late October 1967 against the recruitment of students on the campus of Dow Chemical, which produced napalm for the US military during the Vietnam War. The demonstration turned bloody when police with riot sticks forcibly removed students from a campus building where Dow’s interviews were being held.
After the protests, an FBI agent visited a university official, said Dr. Flitcraft, and the graduate fellowship of Dr. Stark was immediately withdrawn. (He later received his Ph.D. in sociology in 1984 from the State University of New York at Binghamton.) He fled to Canada with his future first wife, Sally Connolly, to find work there as a senior planner for at the Agricultural and Rural Development Agency in Ottawa in 1967.
After returning to the United States, he spent a year, beginning in 1968, as an administrator for an anti-poverty program in Minneapolis.
In 1970, Dr. Stark to organize the Honeywell Project, campaigning to persuade Honeywell Inc. to stop its production of weapons.
She went on to teach sociology at Quinnipiac College (now Quinnipiac University) in Hamden, Conn., from 1971 to 1975. She married Dr. Flitcraft in 1977, when he was working on his thesis at the Yale School of Medicine. He examined the injuries of 481 women over the course of a month in the emergency room of Yale New Haven Hospital and found that they had been victims of physical abuse at a rate 10 times higher than the hospital detected.
Together, Dr. Flitcraft and Dr. Stark’s study, published in the International Journal of Health Services in 1979. They wrote: “Overall, where physicians saw one in 35 of their patients as bruised, a more accurate estimate was one of four; where they admit that one injury in 20 resulted from domestic abuse, the actual figure is as high as one in four.”
They added, “What they describe as a rare occurrence is in reality an event of epidemic proportions.”
Dr. Stark was a research associate at Yale’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies from 1978 to 1984. She was hired the following year by Rutgers University and taught in its School of Social Work as professor of women and gender studies until she retired in 2012.
In 1985, he and Dr. Flitcraft is the United States surgeon general’s special task force on domestic violence prevention.
In subsequent studies, they replicated their initial findings on a larger scale, showing that of 3,600 women treated for injuries at Yale New Haven’s emergency room over a one-year period, 20 percent had been battered. of their husbands or other male intimates.
He and Dr. Flitcraft is co-author of “Women at Risk: Domestic Violence and Women’s Health” (1996). On his own, Dr. Stark’s “Children of Coercive Control” (2023).
In addition to his wife, he is survived by their children Sam, Daniel and Eli; another son, Aaron, from his marriage to Ms. Connolly, who ended in divorce in 1975; three grandchildren; and a sister, Joyce Duncan.
The work of Dr. Stark’s insistence on control resonated in the United Kingdom, where he taught sociology at the University of Essex in the early 1980s, held a fellowship at the University of Bristol in 2006 and became a visiting professor at the University of Edinburgh in 2013.
In a speech to the Scottish Women’s Aid organization 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 scholar at The City Law School in London who wrote the obituary, said by phone that Dr. Stark’s coercive control helped lead to its criminalization in England and Wales as well as similar laws in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Ireland.
Last year, Ms. Wiener, along with Dr. Stark when he spoke to a delegation of French government officials who were considering whether to criminalize coercive control of their country.
“You could hear a pin drop,” he said, “and the head of the delegation, a judge, said, ‘I understand, we have to make progress here.'”
