Victims’ attachment to perpetrators has often been mischaracterized as a symptom of a victim’s dysfunction—something rooted in codependency, masochism, or learned helplessness. But these outdated frames blame survivors and obscure the role of the perpetrator in forming and sustaining attachment that serves as a tool of coercive control.
Research from the University of Cambridge by myself and my colleagues (Lesiak & Gelsthorpe, 2025) shows that coercive control can be exerted not only through overt force or confinement but through strategic emotional manipulation that aims to weaponise attachment. The perpetrators used grooming, flattery, shared trauma disclosures, and calculated cycles of care and withdrawal to manufacture attachment before the abuse even began. This is not codependency; it’s coercion disguised as connection.
The study shows that the bond between victim and perpetrator does not emerge because of abuse, as earlier theories suggested, but long before it begins. The attachment typically is actively engineered by the perpetrator, often through what emerged in the data as a “two-faced soulmate” pattern—an abuser who presents as attentive and loving while concealing control beneath charm. Participants in the study consistently described their partners as figures of contradiction. At first, he appeared magnetic: “Charming. Charming, charming. Very attractive. Always friendly. Always offering to buy a drink, so seemingly generous. Always very complimentary.” Yet as the relationship deepened, that warmth gave way to secrecy and emotional distance. “I could talk to him about anything,” one woman said, “as long as it wasn’t about him. And even after 20 years, I don’t feel I know him any better than when we met.” The pattern they described—intense affection followed by withdrawal—created a sense of entrapment that felt like love but functioned as control.
Crime is falling, but violence against women is not
Across the UK and much of the Global North, overall crime has fallen to historic lows—a decades-long decline in theft, robbery, and most violent offences. Yet violence against women has risen sharply in both prevalence and severity. In England and Wales, 2.3 million adults experienced domestic abuse in the year ending March 2024, including 6.6% of women and 3% of men. Police now record almost 3,000 violence-against-women offences each day—37% more than in 2018—while nearly nine in ten cases close without a charge (ONS, 2024).
The persistence and rise of gendered violence amid a broader “crime drop” suggest not progress but transformation. According to situational action theory, crime reflects the moral codes and value systems offenders internalise. As overt violence becomes less socially acceptable, coercion migrates into the emotional sphere. Cultural scripts that equate masculinity with dominance and femininity with care recast control as romance and submission as devotion. Online ecosystems—from incel forums to dating apps and influencer subcultures—amplify these scripts, teaching men to withhold empathy, perform detachment, and treat intimacy as leverage. In these spaces, domination is reframed as confidence and empathy as weakness. The result is a generation learning that power, not reciprocity, defines attraction. Emotional manipulation becomes the new grammar of control, while physical aggression remains its inevitable extension.
Expanding the Operational Definition of Coercion
Current operational frameworks often prioritise visible indicators of risk—such as physical injury, explicit threats, or financial dependence—while overlooking the emotional and psychological strategies through which perpetrators entrap victims. By evidencing that attachment can be deliberately weaponised through grooming, trauma-sharing, and cycles of intermittent reinforcement, this study challenges the assumption that apparent autonomy equates to freedom. Participants were financially independent, lived separately from their abusers, and reported no overt threats—yet still described emotional captivity. This shows the need for practitioners to recognise coercion not merely as a single act but as a patterned process, often executed through affective manipulation rather than force. Effective support requires moving beyond the logic of victim choice and towards a perpetrator-focused analysis of control tactics, including behavioural volatility, performative vulnerability, and relational destabilisation. Risk assessments and safeguarding responses must therefore incorporate relational indicators—such as emotional compulsion and cognitive dissonance—as legitimate evidence of harm and coercion, rather than treating them as psychological weaknesses or anomalies. Without this shift, services risk misrecognising victims’ affective entrapment as complicity, and overlooking the most insidious forms of control precisely because they leave no visible trace.
Implications for Understanding Consent
Understanding consent within the context of coercion requires a shift from individualistic and momentary interpretations towards a holistic, patterned, and perpetrator‑centred analysis. Traditional consent frameworks, grounded in liberal notions of isolated acts, fail to account for how consent can be systematically manufactured through emotional conditioning and attachment manipulation. The present findings demonstrate that perpetrators deliberately construct dependency through grooming, trauma‑sharing, and intermittent reinforcement—tactics that gradually erode autonomy without overt threats or physical restraint. Within such contexts, apparent agreement or continued participation cannot be read as genuine consent but rather as the behavioural residue of coercive strategy. A meaningful understanding of consent must therefore examine the pattern of interaction, the intentionality of the perpetrator, and the structural and emotional circumstances under which compliance occurs, rather than focusing on the victim’s isolated acts of acquiescence. This broader lens acknowledges that consent can be progressively undermined, rather than explicitly withdrawn, and reframes relational coercion as a sustained process of epistemic and affective domination rather than a discrete event of force.
