Evan Stark, domestic violence advocate
Evan Stark, a sociologist who helped broaden the definition of domestic violence beyond physical assault to include the patterns of domination often at its root, a shift that improved services for victims as well as their treatment under the law, died March 17 at his home in Woodbridge, Conn. He was 82.
His wife and academic collaborator, Anne Flitcraft, confirmed his death. He was on a Zoom call with domestic violence advocates in British Columbia when he had an apparent heart attack, Flitcraft said.
Dr. Stark was a self-described “veteran radical sociologist” who participated in the civil rights movement and led protests against the Vietnam War before turning his attention to domestic violence — “an epidemic problem that has been invisible,” he once said — when a friend in Minnesota helped open one of the country’s first shelters for battered women in the 1970s.
As a sociologist, author, expert witness, and advocate, Dr. Stark challenged pervasive misconceptions about domestic violence, which is primarily, although not universally, inflicted upon women. One of the most pernicious myths is the notion that women who remain in abusive relationships do so willingly.
“You would never ask why a hostage or kidnapping victim stays — or why they finally retaliate,” Dr. Stark once said.
In the 1980s, advocates created a diagram known as the “Power and Control Wheel” to represent the tactics often employed by abusers to keep their victims from leaving. Those tactics might include belittling a woman to degrade her self-esteem, isolating her from her friends and family, limiting her access to money, surveilling her activities, and threatening violence against her or her children.
Dr. Stark encapsulated such behaviors under the term “coercive control,” a concept he outlined in books including “Coercive Control: The Entrapment of Women in Personal Life” (2007) and “Children of Coercive Control” (2023).
“He singularly articulated the real double binds that define the lives of battered women,” said Nancy Grigsby, a member of the advisory group for the Battered Women’s Justice Project and a longtime domestic violence advocate in Ohio.
With his work, she continued, Dr. Stark helped demonstrate that “battered women live in a landscape where their daily choices are defined and confined by the possible consequences that their partners might impose.”
For example, shelters and protective orders do little to help women who live in justified fear of availing themselves of such options. Informed by the concept of coercive control, advocates expanded their efforts beyond the immediate prevention of homicide and injury to also address the underlying forces that keep women in relationships of physical violence — and to help them get out.
Dr. Stark often testified as an expert witness in court, notably in a federal class-action suit brought in New York on behalf of abused women whose children were forcibly placed in foster care by New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services on the grounds that the women had neglected their children by keeping them in violent situations.
In his expert report, Dr. Stark argued that “removal of a young child from its primary caretaker can be particularly traumatic where domestic violence has occurred and should be used only as a last resort and in the face of evidence that the child faces imminent harm.”
Regarding the abused mothers, he “talked about coercive control … though he did not call it that in the context of this lawsuit,” Jill M. Zuccardy, one of the lead lawyers for the plaintiffs, wrote in an email. “He understood at a time when many did not that domestic violence was so much more than just violence.”
Judge Jack B. Weinstein of the US District Court in Brooklyn found in favor of the women in 2002.
Sharwline Nicholson, the lead plaintiff in the case, was a 32year-old mother of two when the father of her younger child attacked her in 1999. She asked a trusted neighbor to care for her children before calling an ambulance for herself. At a hospital, she learned that authorities had taken custody of them.
“The blame from the city was more to the woman,” Nicholson said in a telephone interview. “Evan Stark came in and explained where a woman’s mindset would be after they had been beaten or were a victim of violence,” she continued, adding that “he made things even clearer for survivors themselves.”
Evan David Stark was born in Manhattan on March 10, 1942. His father was a novelist, poet, and professor at the City College of New York, and his mother did administrative work for the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the African American labor union.
His marriage to Sally Connolly ended in divorce. Besides his wife, of Woodbridge, he leaves a son from his first marriage, Aaron Stark of New Haven, Conn.; three sons from his second marriage, Sam Stark of Cambridge, Daniel Stark of Jacksonville, Fla., and Eli Stark of Holyoke; a sister; and three grandchildren.