Unit 6 – Video material
The three videos in this section bring together the threads running through this whole unit — what healthy and unhealthy relationships actually look like, how coercive control is recognised in real clinical practice, and the specific risk factors that predict serious danger.
The first, from Stanford, walks through a realistic scenario to distinguish healthy relationship patterns from unhealthy and abusive ones — notably, it opens with genuine safety guidance for anyone watching who may currently be at risk, worth taking seriously if it applies to you. The second, from Adele Sheridan-Magro, who manages domestic and family violence services at a major Sydney hospital, covers the real patterns of coercive control directly — including same-sex and male-to-male intimate partner violence, which doesn’t get nearly enough attention in most discussions of this topic. The third, from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, covers the specific, research-based risk factors used to assess how dangerous a given situation actually is.
As with the rest of this unit, please approach this with care — and see the additional note before the third video specifically.
A more serious content note than usual for this one: this video includes a detailed real case in which a domestic violence survivor was ultimately killed by her partner, described with real specificity, including strangulation and the circumstances leading up to her death. This isn’t included to alarm you — it’s here because understanding real lethality risk factors is genuinely important, and this content comes from validated clinical research used across the domestic violence field. But please go into it knowing what it contains. If you’re not in a place to engage with this level of detail right now, that’s completely understandable — skip it and come back another time, or not at all. If anything in this unit has felt personal, please don’t carry it alone: speak with a domestic abuse support service, a GP, or a trusted professional.
|
↑
Don’t miss the rest of this unit!
Click the Materials tab above to see MORE VIDEOS
|
This second set of videos goes deeper into coercive control, drawing on the work of one of the field's foundational scholars alongside a genuine survivor account.
The first, from Professor Evan Stark — whose 2007 book "Coercive Control" essentially established the term as it's used today, and whose work underpins the legislation covered in Document 1 — explains why incident-based domestic violence law fails to capture the reality of coercive control, and argues for treating it as its own, more serious offence. The second brings together Alice Liveing, a Women's Aid ambassador and survivor, and Jess Phillips, the UK's Minister for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls, walking through real-life red flags in an honest, conversational way. The third, a short clip from Professor Stark, introduces something genuinely important that the rest of this unit hasn't covered directly: how children within a coercively controlled household are affected too, and the impossible position it can put a mother in.
As with the rest of this unit, please approach this with care — and if anything here feels personal, don't carry it alone.
