Coercion is Chartable; You’re Not Imagining It

I ran across some interesting history in the social sciences realm recently. Biderman’s Chart of Coercion is a framework developed in 1957; it’s not new to try to understand coercion. American sociologist Albert Biderman was documenting the coercive, psychological torture methods used by Chinese and Korean captors on American prisoners of war, though, not involving a husband and wife as the tactic may be more so used now.

The chart identifies eight general tactics designed to break a person’s will, create dependency, and induce compliance. While built for wartime interrogation analysis, it is widely used today by mental health professionals, legal advocates, and researchers to explain patterns of coercive control in domestic abuse, human trafficking, and cults.

The Eight Tactics of Coercion

1. Isolation

Interfering with family, church, and work connections… depriving the victim of all social support and outside contact. It may be subtle — “You’re going out tonight? What about our time?” or “You’re going there again?”

Purpose: Makes the person dependent on the captor/abuser and destroys their ability to resist or see alternative perspectives.

2. Monopolization of Perception

Fixing all attention upon the immediate predicament and controlling the person’s environment and sources of information. They may also have long-winded, strong opinions about “what this is really about” to…