Coercive control in relationships operates in almost exactly the same way as coercive control in prisoner of war camps. It’s brainwashing.
In the 50s a man called Albert Biderman was asked by the US government to conduct some research. They wanted to understand how American POWs in the Korean War had been ‘turned’. The US government suspected that the Koreans were using sophisticated brainwashing tactics to get American POWs to defect. But it wasn’t that sophisticated. It was just good old coercive control.
“Biderman established that three primary elements were at the heart of coercive control: dependency, debility and dread. To achieve this effect, the captors used eight techniques: isolation, monopolisation of perception, induced debility or exhaustion, cultivation of anxiety and despair, alternation of punishment and reward, demonstrations of omnipotence, degradation, and the enforcement of trivial demands. Biderman’s “Chart of Coercion” showed that acts of cruelty that appeared at first to be isolated were actually intricately connected. It was only when these acts were seen together that the full picture of coercive control became clear.”
“In the 1970s, when women began fleeing to newly opened shelters, they spoke about being isolated from friends and family, instructed on how to behave, degraded, manipulated, sexually violated and threatened with death. Physical violence was common, and could be sadistic in its extremes, but survivors insisted it was not the worst part of the abuse – and some were not physically abused at all. In her groundbreaking book Rape in Marriage, Diana Russell presented two lists side by side: Biderman’s Chart of Coercion, and the common techniques of domestic perpetrators. The lists were virtually identical. The only difference was that whereas captors in North Korea deployed the techniques tactically, husbands appeared to be replicating the system of coercive control unconsciously.” (Taken from Jess Hill’s book, Look What You Made Me Do.)
Mick Philpott was a psychopath. In the most clinical, empirical sense of the word. Mairead Philpott was considerably younger than him, of sub normal intelligence, and completely under his control. I doubt she was even sure of her own name unless he told her what it was.
Of course it is absolutely right that she should be punished for her part in the crime. But it is also absolutely right that her punishment should be mitigated by the fact that she was completely controlled and manipulated by an evil, murdering psychopath.