Cultivating Continued Control: Post-Separation Abuse and Entrapped Legal Consciousness

Einav Perry, Gil Rothschild Elyassi and Arianne Renan Barzilay ()
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Einav Perry: School of Criminology, University of Haifa, Haifa 3498838, Israel
Gil Rothschild Elyassi: Faculty of Law, School of Criminology, University of Haifa, Haifa 3498838, Israel
Arianne Renan Barzilay: Faculty of Law, University of Haifa, Haifa 3498838, Israel

Laws, 2025, vol. 14, issue 5, 1-25

Abstract: Scholars have long shown that post-separation abuse continues through legal channels and that legal institutions often reinforce existing social relations. Nevertheless, little is known about how abused mothers’ legal experiences shape their understanding of legality and how this dynamic may function to perpetuate coercive control. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 32 Israeli mothers co-parenting with abusive ex-partners, this study offers a phenomenological account of how post-separation abused mothers experience family law proceedings, based on a feminist imperative to bring their voices to center stage. The analysis reveals a dialectical legal consciousness comprising three interconnected orientations—characterized by internal contradictions and tensions that paradoxically serve to maintain rather than disrupt existing power relations: Institutional Trust and Disillusionment in the law’s protective promise, Institutional Asymmetry as experienced from the abused mothers’ perspective, and Recognizing Entrapment—the realization that legal processes reproduce the very dynamics they sought to escape. Abused mothers thus describe a paradoxical relationship with the law of both needing and distrusting a system that mandates continued contact with their abusers. Caught in a second-order abusive relationship, they feel compelled to comply with processes they perceive as harmful. We term this Entrapped Legal Consciousness—a form of legal subjectivity shaped by institutional norms that reconfigure resistance and reinscribe coercive control. This study offers empirical and theoretical insight into how legality may become a mechanism for cultivating continued control.

Keywords: legal consciousness; post-separation abuse; coercive control; family law; gendered violence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D78 E61 E62 F13 F42 F68 K0 K1 K2 K3 K4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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