In Control: Dangerous Relationships and How They End in Murder

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Reading real life interviews of these families make these women more than statistics and the murderous men who kill them to be seen as controlling rather than the victims.

Knowing about and being able to recognize the patterns of coercive control can be life-changing (or in the worst case life-saving) not only for professionals but for relatives, friends, coworkers of victims or even strangers they interact with. This book forces us to look at the dangerous, damaging and distorted picture of control/jealousy/possessiveness as love. It helps that the book is immensely 'readable' although of course some of the content is horrifying. Jealousy and manipulation in the nature of ownership is socially conscious of being "big man", "love".This is an amazing book in which Jane Monckton Smith details the stages of coersive control and domestic abuse and is the new textbook on abusive relationships. What should people do if they have a friend or a relation involved with a controlling and possibly abusive partner? But while reading this it made me think differently about four very different people, friends and those whom I crossed paths with during my life, who lived with some of the danger signs. I spend part of my working days travelling to and from visits as a Safeguarding Social Worker; for me listening to audiobooks has become a source of education and escapism.

Chapter six examines a change in thinking, which can help us to recognise signs of perpetrators planning to kill.

Leaving aside the horror of the individual cases here, and that we are probably getting a glimpse of the issue I was interested in how the eight stages may also apply to Governmental behaviour.