State as Abuser

Abstract

This article proposes that the concept and language of coercive control provides helpful ways to describe, frame, and mediate the tactics used by the Family Regulation System to control and regulate families. This work enters current conversations about the Family Regulation System and makes two important interventions. First, much of the way scholars and activists define the harm they see and preface their calls for reform or abolition is based on an analysis of the social and political injustices perpetuated by a system designed to privilege class, ableism, whiteness, and heteronormative living arrangements. The analysis, then, is one that considers how the Family Regulation System imposes itself on a class or community of people—most notably communities of Black and brown families—and is part of the web of systemic subordinating forces. This project aims to enter the conversation at an additional tack, engaging critiques of institutions and systems but also moving to the individual and the interpersonal to define the ways in which the Family Regulation System harms the families it serves.

Secondly, this project posits that the Family Regulation System, as designed and as operationalized, is an abuser. The Family Regulation System shares elements of the patriarchal scaffolding that invites violence in relationships; more specifically, the particularized regime of dominance and subordination known as coercive control in the domestic violence field is evident in the relationships created by the Family Regulation System. The concept of coercive control is one that arises from the study of, and advocacy against, domestic violence, and much of the concept is situated in feminist scholarship about the sociology of abuse generally. When social scientists and advocates first identified and fully articulated the concept of coercive control in the domestic violence arena, it led to important responses that helped the targets of coercively controlled relationships. Further, the language and naming in and of itself proved to be empowering to targets of coercive control who felt seen and understood. The hope herein is that clarifying the normative claim that the Family Regulation System is coercive, with precision about the means and mechanisms of that abuse, will be similarly liberating for families ensnared in the Family Regulation System while also supporting calls for reform that serve to dismantle, or at least diminish, the brutal power hierarchy between families and agents of the Family Regulation System.

Recommended Citation: Claire P. Donohue, State as Abuser, 20 U. MASS. L. REV. 44 (2025).