FAQ

Different jurisdictions have different evidentiary standards. In Arizona, as one example, we submit reports and testify under Arizona Rule of Evidence 702, which tracks the federal rule and requires the proponent to show, more likely than not, that the expert witness is qualified and that the testimony is helpful, based on sufficient facts or data, the product of reliable principles and methods, and a reliable application of those methods to the facts. Carlton Research’s statement of those facts, including the five Daubert reliability factors, the known error-rate example, and the controlling standards, is set out in our Reliability and Scientific Foundations memorandum. Ask about your jurisdiction.

Cultural nuances exist across U.S. states and countries. Coercive control operates the same way everywhere: customized control over the target using a range of tactics. The end result is the same: loss of liberty, loss of self, and severe mental health impacts. Jurisdictions apply law to coercive control differently. Evidentiary standards differ by jurisdiction.

Carlton Research’s research instrument, The Codebook for Identifying Coercive Control in Longitudinal Artifacts, codes contemporaneous records from the channels the parties actually used in the disclosed window: text, email, parenting-app messages, call logs, and equivalent artifacts. Volume, direction, and initiative of contact can be measured from logs. Date, time, sender, recipient, and duration or message-count suffice for those measures. Whether contact was controlling, isolating, threatening, or masked requires message or document content, or another artifact that shows function. Asymmetry requires both parties’ records in the same window, coded under identical rules.

Coercive control statutes, including Arizona HB 2995 and California Family Code section 6320, describe a pattern of conduct rather than a single incident, so the evidence needs to show conduct across time, not one episode. Contemporaneous records the parties created, such as text messages, email, parenting-app messages, call logs, and financial records, are tested for repetition, relatedness, continuity, and asymmetry within a disclosed window. Evidentiary standards and the weight given to any exhibit differ by jurisdiction; counsel decides what to offer, and the court decides what the evidence shows.

Text messages can show coercive control when the messages, read in sequence across months, form a pattern of monitoring, isolation, threats, financial restriction, or regulation of daily life directed by one party at the other. A single hostile or controlling message rarely carries that weight, and the same message can appear in ordinary conflict. The analysis reads both parties’ messages in the same window under identical rules, measures volume, direction, and initiative from the logs, and reports whether all four prongs of the pattern test are met. Email, parenting-app messages, and financial records from the same period can corroborate or contradict what the texts appear to show.

Coercive control does not require physical violence. Evan Stark’s course-of-conduct model, Arizona HB 2995, and California Family Code section 6320 all describe coercive control through non-physical conduct such as isolation, monitoring, financial control, and threats. Without injuries or police reports, evidence of the pattern usually sits in the written record: messages, account statements, location data, and litigation history read across time. Whether that evidence meets the legal standard in a given case remains a question for the court.

High conflict runs in both directions: both parties argue, escalate, and retaliate, often around discrete events such as exchanges, holidays, or court dates. Coercive control is a one-sided regulation project in which one party restricts the other party’s liberty through related tactics that recur across time. The four-prong test separates the two by requiring repetition, relatedness, continuity, and asymmetry, and bilateral hostility of comparable intensity on both sides fails the asymmetry prong. Conflict is not coercive control, and a high-conflict label does not rule out coercive control when the record shows a sustained one-sided pattern.

A truncated window does not break the method. A truncated window limits what the method may be said to represent. The window is a disclosed analytic period. The window does not claim that nothing occurred before the start date. A year of dense, two-sided records in the parties’ communication channel can suffice to test a pattern inside that year. Earlier records can be offered to show the window is unrepresentative; that limitation is disclosed in the report. Findings describe the disclosed window, not the entire history of the relationship.

Social science sets no minimum number of messages that establishes a pattern of coercive control. A tactic becomes an established pattern element only when it satisfies all four prongs: repetition, relatedness, continuity, and asymmetry. Repetition and continuity are established through a recurrence floor calibrated to that corpus. The floor is not a fixed universal number. Example only: one year divided into quartiles, with a floor of three instances of one tactic across three of four periods. Count alone is not a finding. Isolated or sporadic acts do not form a pattern.

A pattern of coercive control requires four concurrent elements. Repetition: isolated or single-instance acts fall short. Relatedness: acts share similar purposes, results, participants, targets, or methods of commission, and are not isolated events. Continuity: activity amounts to ongoing conduct rather than sporadic or time-limited clusters. Asymmetry: measurable imbalance appears in volume, direction, or initiative of controlling acts between the two parties. Failure of any one prong means the pattern is not established. Conflict is not coercive control. The four-prong test and peer-reviewed codes with strict inclusion and exclusion rules are the instrument’s rule for telling the two apart.

The pattern is not established if the coded corpus fails any of the four prongs. That result includes: no control code meets the recurrence floor as calibrated to that dataset; the acts that meet the floor are isolated or confined to discrete conflict episodes; the acts are not related by purpose, result, participants, targets, or method; or control codes are not predominantly unidirectional. Bilateral hostility without a regulation project, with comparable control density on both sides, is coded as symmetrical and is not a coercive-control finding. A required negative-evidence check records competing readings the four-prong test does not overcome, including conflict-bounded hostility and genuine two-sided cooperation. A single welfare report, clustered hostile exchange, criminal conviction, treatment episode, or diagnosis does not establish the pattern.

Yes. Both parties are coded independently under identical inclusion and exclusion rules. Asymmetry is an analytic finding, not an assumption. Unfavorable messages from either party enter the calculation. The Codebook also codes prosocial communication, the antithesis of coercive control. Responses to coercive control, e.g., resistance, appeasement, negotiation, and help-seeking, are coded as well. Symmetrical bilateral hostility without a one-sided regulation project points away from coercive control. The method does not award the control narrative to the retaining party.

A case-specific coercive control expert codes a defined corpus of artifacts against the research instrument’s rules and reports whether a coercive-control pattern is established in that corpus. The expert does not treat the child, does not run the parenting-time schedule, and does not occupy the advisor’s or interventionist’s function. Expert testimony generally takes two forms: general expertise about dynamics, and case-specific review of the record. Carlton Research offers both. If court appointment orders already require those neutrals to determine coercive control by a specified method, a second pattern analysis may be duplicative. The engagement is held to pattern determination. Recommendations those neutrals are appointed to give are outside the scope.

The Codebook is an internal research instrument. The methodology is ethnographic. Ethnography is an established method. Categories and decision rules are aligned with peer-reviewed constructs: course-of-conduct control (Stark 2007), intimate terrorism versus situational couple violence (Johnson 1995, 2008), post-separation and legal-systems tactics (Douglas 2018; Elizabeth 2017; Spearman, Vaughan-Eden, Hardesty, and Campbell 2023), and children living under control regimes (Katz 2016). Alignment means the rules were written to operationalize those constructs. Alignment does not mean a journal has validated this Codebook. Validation is what a court can inspect: the rules are stable, trained analysts using those rules reach the same findings, and the findings track the distinction between coercive control and ordinary conflict, not the story the client hired the analyst to tell. The Codebook is appended to reports so the work can be replicated.

No. Pleadings and after-the-fact narratives are competing hypotheses, not facts accepted in advance. The analysis codes contemporaneous records authored by the parties. The analysis does not judge revised narratives and does not award a narrative to either party on the pleadings. Interviews are not the default method. Interviewing one party would require equal time for the other; the other party may decline. Contextual facts do not enter as coercive-control codes. The instrument reports what the coded record supports. The instrument does not resolve credibility contests between competing stories.

The report and any testimony will not evaluate custody, will not recommend legal decision-making or parenting time, and will not diagnose any party. Those limits hold if asked on direct or cross-examination. Carlton Research does not perform clinical evaluations, does not treat patients, and does not engage in victim-advocacy work. Findings are tied to the disclosed corpus and the four-prong test. They are not a parenting-time plan.

Yes. Paste a text or email into our free Is it coercive control? checker for an analysis of the tactics it contains.