UNSEEN: Coercive Control in the Shadows of Childhood

Children can become directly involved in coercive family dynamics in many ways. They may be pressured to take sides, repeatedly exposed to negative or frightening narratives about someone they love, drawn into adult grievances, expected to monitor or report on another parent, burdened with information they are not developmentally equipped to manage, or made responsible for an adult’s emotional wellbeing.

Communication with important family members may be restricted or obstructed. A child may learn that speaking positively about another parent causes anger, distress or withdrawal of approval, or that maintaining affection towards one person is viewed as disloyalty to another.

Over time, these pressures can influence what the child feels able to say, express or do. They may begin concealing positive experiences, monitoring their words, withholding affection, adopting increasingly rigid views, or distancing themselves from relationships that have become emotionally difficult to maintain.

For some children, prolonged relational pressure can contribute to coerced alignment, attachment deactivation and survival-based rejection.

Children need to be protected from relationships that place them at genuine risk, while also being protected from coercive narratives and behaviours that progressively recast a safe or sufficiently safe relationship as threatening, harmful or untrustworthy without a corresponding basis in the child’s direct experience.

Protecting children therefore involves more than responding to immediate physical safety. It also includes protecting their psychological and relational autonomy, their ability to form their own views, and their freedom to maintain safe relationships without being required to manage an adult’s emotions, adopt adult grievances or demonstrate loyalty through rejection.

Children should be able to hold mixed feelings, remember both positive and difficult experiences, ask questions, disagree with adults and develop their understanding of family members through their own experiences.

When coercive control interferes with one important relationship, the effects can extend through the child’s wider family network.

Relationships with siblings, grandparents, cousins and extended family may also become disrupted or lost. Children can become disconnected from family history, culture, traditions, shared memories and relationships that contribute to their identity and sense of belonging.

They may also begin learning that affection must be managed according to another person’s expectations, that disagreement threatens connection, or that caring about one family member represents betrayal of another. These relational experiences can shape how children understand trust, loyalty, boundaries, conflict and emotional safety as they develop.

Coercive control involving children does not always present through overt threats or behaviours that are immediately identifiable as harmful.

It may occur through repeated warnings presented as protection, persistent negative interpretations of another parent, selective information, emotional reactions to the child’s affection, restrictions described as being in the child’s interests, pressure to keep secrets, or expectations about whom the child should trust, fear, defend or reject.

The child may eventually appear strongly aligned with one adult and increasingly rejecting of another. What appears from the outside to be a straightforward preference or choice may, in some circumstances, reflect a more complex adaptation to the relational pressures surrounding the child.

This does not mean that every child who rejects or distances themselves from a parent is experiencing coercive control. Children may withdraw from relationships because they have experienced genuine harm. The concern arises where fear, loyalty pressure, emotional consequences or repeated influence progressively restrict the child’s freedom to experience and evaluate an otherwise safe or sufficiently safe relationship for themselves.

The campaign promotes greater recognition and understanding of:

• coercive behaviours that interfere with a child’s safe attachment relationships and family connections
• loyalty demands and pressure to align with one adult against another
• emotional consequences for expressing affection, disagreement or independent views
• adultification and the inappropriate involvement of children in adult grievances and disputes
• monitoring, information gathering and the use of children as messengers or intermediaries
• repeated narratives that influence how a child understands another parent or family member
• obstruction of communication and important family relationships
• coerced alignment, attachment deactivation and survival-based rejection
• the wider effects on siblings, grandparents and extended family
• the importance of protecting both children’s safety and their psychological and relational autonomy.

Greater awareness across families, communities and professional systems can improve recognition of these patterns before they become deeply embedded in a child’s relationships and family life.

Children should not be required to carry adult grievances, manage an adult’s emotional wellbeing, choose between people they love, or sacrifice safe relationships in order to preserve security within another.

They need protection from genuinely harmful relationships and from coercive processes that distort, destabilise or unnecessarily sever relationships that are safe or sufficiently safe.

Children deserve the freedom to develop their own thoughts and feelings, maintain safe connections with the people who are important to them, and grow without their relationships being organised around fear, pressure or enforced loyalty.

UNSEEN brings these often difficult to recognise experiences into greater public and professional awareness, so that coercive control involving children can be better understood, identified and prevented.