December 16, 2020 - 11:00am
Farieissia (Fri) Martin was a 22-year-old mother of two toddlers when she was given a life sentence for murder. Martin stabbed her violent partner Kyle Farrell as he was attacking her in their Liverpool home. Today, the Court of Appeal will hear compelling new evidence that will hopefully lead to the quashing of the murder conviction on the grounds of diminished responsibility.
Martin was a victim of coercive control by Farrell. Coercive control in the context of a defence to murder was first considered by the Court of Appeal, 2019, in the Sally Challen case. The court heard how this abuse seriously impacted Challen’s mental health which then diminished her responsibility for the offence.
According to Professor Evan Stark, an expert in coercive control, in such relationships the abusers deploy a broad range of tactics over an extended period to subjugate or dominate a partner, rather than to really hurt them physically.
“Compliance is achieved by making victims afraid and denying basic rights, resources and liberties,” says Stark, “without which they are not able to effectively refuse, resist or escape demands that mitigate against their interests.”
Farrell’s jealousy and controlling behaviour increased as the relationship progressed. He would accuse Martin of infidelity , imposed a ‘them and us’ mentality and isolated Martin from all of her friends and family. He was physically violent including when she was pregnant. Farrell would repeatedly tell Martin she was ‘fat and ugly’ and would damage her possessions. Farrell would rape Martin and convince her it was her fault.
The appeal relies on fresh psychiatric and psychological evidence which shows that at the time of the offence Martin was suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) caused by the abuse. The condition would have affected her response to the threat of violence she faced at the moment she stabbed Farrell.
Following her conviction Martin’s family contacted Justice for Women (which I co-founded in 1991). It was clear that she was not a murderer and had been badly served by both her legal team and the court.
“I have been in prison for over six years now, most of the women I have met inside have been victims of domestic violence or sexual abuse,” Martin told her solicitor last week.
According to Martin, the court failed to understand the violence and control she had experienced. “When I walked into the court room, I knew I would be found guilty. It was an all-white jury, sitting in a city with a long history of racism. I knew I would be judged as coming from Toxteth.”
Hopefully, Martin will soon be a free woman, but why was she ever convicted of murder? Why has it taken so long for coercive control to be acknowledged in the courts? Were it not for feminist campaigners, this form of extreme abuse would still not be a criminal offence. Justice for Women regularly receives letters from women in prison convicted of the murder of a violent partner, all of whom will have experienced coercive control as well as violence. There are countless women serving life sentences because until recently the law failed to acknowledge the true scale and horror of domestic abuse.
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SubscribeBindel seems to believe that all the evil in the world is traceable to men, & every wrongful action a woman makes, up to and including murder, is all necessarily the fault of men, & any responsibility they might take for their actions is all part of a global conspiracy against them, perpetrated by Men. She was desperately trying to exonerate Aileen Wuornos a couple of weeks ago. Maybe Myra Hindley next week
There is a chance that he has knocked her self confidence to the point she doesn’t defend herself adequately in a murder trial, and get a manslaughter verdict.
But we have to think carefully about how the law could change, or men will be getting off on ‘coercive control’ grounds for years to come.
I happen to know of more than one man who has been coercively controlled by their spouse. Should they have carte blanche to kill their spouse on those grounds? It’s going to take thought, because as things stand, the law is supposed to apply equally to everyone.
It’s highly unlikely that the coercive control defense will be available to men. This is simply a means of handing women an excuse for killing their husbands without penalty.
Whatever happened to “don’t blame the victim”?
Can you get a victim from self defense?
“All-white jury’. How awful. yet the evidence that her ‘race’ was a factor in the jury’s decision is nowhere given in the article.
There are also legal avenues to escape a bullying marriage partner. Did she try any of those first? We’re not told. Why would one live with a violent partner ‘over an extended period’ without trying some means of escape which are nowadays available?
All of us have met the woman who splits from one violent partner and immediately takes up with another. Are they attracted to these men precisely because of their bullying? I was present in a work capacity at a woman’s third divorce. She was bright, and very pleasant, yet each of her 3 divorces was from a bullying partner, on the grounds of cruelty. It struck me then that she perhaps liked bullying partners (for whatever ‘cultural’ or ‘personal’ reason), but only until the inevitable line was crossed.
Perhaps she had a bullying father which made it “usual” for her rather than her liking violent men. Our childhoods prime us.
Ha! Coercive control. I guess about 75% of married men in the West are subject to Coercive Control.
BTW the law and the courts also systematically discriminate against males as only some kinds of abusive treatment are on the statute book.
It’s time for gender equality, which, of course, I believe in. We really need to balance up the prison population (with quotas if necessary). Nagging most definitely should be put on the statute book as a criminal offence with a minimum mandatory jail term of 6 months.
That would rapidly give us gender balance among the incarcerated. And who could argue against that?
Are you for real?
This will get very interesting as women are CHAMPIONS at using this over men to ruin their lives.
I would say this is an area where women are just as good at it as men. Where men are more capable at physical coercion women make up for it with emotional control. It gets more publicity when physical violence is used of course, but how often is that a response by men to emotional abuse. As with this article it is only justified when a woman responds that way.
I’m afraid I must disagree. the research shows that women are better at it than men.
Medical Daily, 30 June 2014
Domestic Violence Against Men:
Women More Likely To Be ‘Intimate Terrorists’
With Controlling Behavior In Relationships
“All-white jury”, “city with a long history of racism”. Call Lewis Hamilton-maybe he’ll put your name on a shirt.
“He was mean to me” is a defense that we must be very careful with…
Why has it taken so long? The straightforward answer is it is a very tricky thing to define. We are all coercive in our relationships, it’s really a matter of where the line is.
If I was with a woman who was seriously overweight, and I coerced her into healthier habits which might save her life but equally cause her miserableness, is that crossing the line.
Of course there are going to be clear cut cases, maybe the one in the article is, but coercion is such as grey area that it’s almost impossible to set a standard.
Last point is that the government of this country is basically one giant coercive machine constantly trying to mould us into the ‘perfect’ citizen, according to their definition anyway.
A friend of mind did just that with his girlfriend. She used to be fat and jolly, now she’s skinny and miserable.
Could this law not be used maliciously, by both genders, to avoid murder convictions?
The crime certainly exists but what is the standard of proof for an accusation that could be difficult to prove and should it be applied retrospectively to murder victims who cannot defend themselves?
Bindel is completely wrong in seeing this as a women’s issue: it’s in reality more a men’s issue. I’m the author of three peer-reviewed science review papers on intimate partner violence (IPV) and I can confirm that the controlling partner usually is the female, in line with mate retention tactics being mostly and mostly used by females, as they have much greater fear of the partnership dissolving. Girls/women overwhelmingly are the perpetrators of IPV, not boys/men. The large slew of recent dyadic studies confirms this. Furthermore, experiments show very clearly that normal males are strongly self-inhibited from aggressing towards a female, whereas physical violence actually is the preferred mode of aggression in a couple context for women generally. Tellingly, despite injury rates expected to be 20:1 female:male (if IPV were the same in both directions) given far greater male upper-body strength and far weaker female body-frame weakness, actual IPV injury rates show little if any sex differential (and re specifically serious injury there are several times the number of not female but male victims). This indicates massive levels of hidden female perpetration that (a) will be unreported by males (as they do not reveal anything indicating weakness because of its negative impact on status), and (b) is routinely misrepresented as instead male perpetration (given that females expressing vulnerability is sexually attractive); and much of the rest of what is taken to be male perpetration actually is instead male attempt to restrain female violence.
All lines of evidence show Bindel’s ideological line is just that: it is wholly contradicted by scientific investigation.
But you’re forgetting that evidence are reasoning are trumped by feelings, because using logic is male, and a means of patriarchal control.
Yes, and I’m also forgetting that pointing out that such epistemological sophistry is ‘taking the ball home’ / ‘throwing the toys out of the pram’ constitutes meezodgenannnynonny ….. and pointing to there not being a single science paper ever published demonstrating meezodgenannynonny exists (with all scientific evidence showing PHILogyny and misandry) of course must now fall on the point you’ve just made!
You can be sure that this line of murder-justification will never be allowed to explain a man’s behavior if and when he snaps and ends up in the situation Farrell was in.
Sounds like almost every employer I’ve had.
Oh dear! The research doesn’t appear to fit with the eternal “evil men” narrative!
Medical Daily, 30 June 2014
Domestic Violence Against Men:
Women More Likely To Be ‘Intimate Terrorists’ With Controlling Behavior In Relationships
I’d happily post the actual link, but this website appears to block comments with links. You’ll have to look up the research yourself.
But, hey. This is Bindel. The woman of reason who said:
“I would actually put them [men] all in some kind of camp where they can all drive around in quad bikes, or bicycles, or white vans. I would give them a choice of vehicles to drive around with, give them no porn, they wouldn’t be able to fight ““ we would have wardens, of course! Women who want to see their sons or male loved ones would be able to go and visit, or take them out like a library book, and then bring them back.”
And later:
“‘All men are rapists and should be but in prison then shot’
And you can’t get more balanced and reasonable than that, can you?
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Yes, incredible that Julie hasn’t been cancelled, disappeared, a non person after that rant, obviously some groups can be vilified with impunity.
Quite the belching sewer pipe of hate isn’t she this Bindel bigot.
Julie Bindel’s politics is the vilest obscenity. Meeting her in person she’s really quite nice. She has been ruined by a nasty totalitarian extreme ideology that is a fundamentally false understanding of what makes people and society tick.
Thank you Steve, I suspected as much. Obsession with ideology does tend to do that to people, they end up with a distorted view of reality.
“Ideologies are substitutes for true knowledge, and ideologues are always dangerous when they come to power, because a simple-minded I-know-it-all approach is no match for the complexity of existence.”
“• Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
Oh dear! The research doesn’t agree with Bindel’s eternal “Evil Men” narrative.
Medical Daily, 30 June 2014
Domestic Violence Against Men:
Women More Likely To Be ‘Intimate Terrorists’ With Controlling Behavior In Relationships
But then, what can we expect from someone balanced and reasonable commentator like Bindel, who said in 2015:
“I would actually put them [men] all in some kindof camp where they can all drive around in quad bikes, or bicycles, orwhite vans. I would give them a choice of vehicles to drive around with, give them no porn, they wouldn’t be able to fight ““ we would have wardens, of course! Women who want to see their sons or male loved ones would be able to go and visit, or take them out like a library book, and then bring them back.”
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Why has it taken so long to acknowledge coercive control?
Because the majority of perpetrators are women. And in today’s society, women are sacred cows.
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In a nutshell, Al.
Well, I supported a highly controlling person for nearly 20 years.
She happened to be female, though I don’t see it as a sex thing particularly.
I escaped in the end, after the children finished schooling.
They mostly are female: Bindel and her extreme-feminist bigoted sisterhood has it the wrong way round — as with all feminist tenets.
What about all the other genders…how do they figure in this scenario?
I don’t know the figures for Coercive Control, but as far as those for actual domestic violence is concerned, research shows that the incidence is more likely in lesbian households than any other, followed by male gay households, with DV being least prevalent in heterosexual households.
Mind you, I do not have figures for the other 230 or so (or however many we have today) ‘genders’.
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Telling a woman she is fat and ugly is not grounds for murder. It’s definitely mean but it doesn’t make murder okay. Neither is accusing someone of infidelity grounds for murder.
Domestic violence is quite different. Usually, there’s a police record of physical abuse, sometimes numerous police reports of violence. The article does not indicate that there was any such police record. There should also be a police record of the rape. All these things would be important in a murder trial. I agree that women who are physically abused have the right to self defense including killing their partner to save their own lives. But calling someone fat? No, you can’t murder someone for that.
Oh dear! The research doesn’t agree with Bindel’s eternal “Evil Men” narrative.
Medical Daily, 30 June 2014
Domestic Violence Against Men:
Women More Likely To Be ‘Intimate Terrorists’ With Controlling Behavior In Relationships
.
And plenty of other papers with similar conclusions.
This is just standard issue Bindel all over again and I’ve had more than enough. I really don’t understand why we need to take up space to entertain the silly notion that emotional abuse and coercion is somehow a unique feature of male behaviour.
In every piece of Bindel’s that I have read, she concocts the same dubious and unconvincing and contemptible arguments with a view to blaming all of human evil on Men and almost exclusively those with white skin – while brown skinned men, if they do misbehave, do so only because they were forced to do so as a result of the actions of white men.
If we wouldn’t tolerate such arguments blaming women, jews, or muslims for the ills of the world, then we shouldn’t accept such arguments blaming people who happen to be white and male.
For Bindel, white male evil is quite simply THE explanation for all of human suffering – with the possible exception of Margaret Thatcher as we shall see;0).
In this latest piece of Bindel’s I’m reminded of her Podcast interview with Meghan Murphy in which Bindel somehow mustered the awe-inspiring intellectual dishonesty to blame the predations of primarily Pakistani ‘grooming gangs’ not on the poor tawny dears who had actually perpetrated the violent crimes agains the young women in question- no no, it wasn’t their fault! No! it was racism, poverty, the Police and wait for it… Margaret Thatcher, that were collectively responsible. (Oh, that awful Mawgwet Fatchah! Oh Wacism!)
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For Julie Bindel, you see, it’s the white men and their economic power and racism who quite literally CAUSE the brown men to commit crimes you see, and the heartlessness of Margaret Thatcher and her evil white male henchmen( puppet masters?) who created the poverty you see, which created necessity for those poor sweet brown men to do what they had to do to survive. At base, for Julie, It’s all the fault of the white men, you see. (although I admit she does make an exception for that nasty Mawgwet.)
(As an aside, we might wonder if the grooming gangs actually benefited from the cover provided by the threat of false accusations of racism which may have, in combination with outright cowardice, prevented the police from taking action.)
Essentially It’s a very simple universe Julie lives in, with only one agent of causation: White Men. Sound familiar? Perhaps we need to admit that Bindel is nothing more than the eternal idiot who would almost certainly be blaming everything on ‘The Jews’ instead of ‘The Men’ if only she had been born in a different historical context.
It is my considered opinion that poor Julie Bindel’s article is just a plodding, cliche-regurgitating conformist herd-following bore, incapable of doing more than mindlessly reciting the ghastly conventions of our time.
Most of your comments make me so sad. No-one should be abused. No-one should go through coercive control. Recorded stats do show DA at 1 in 4 for women and 1 in 6 for men, but I think men don’t always report it as much as women. Do I see Julie as extreme and needing to be dismissed as some of you seem to have done? No, there are valid points to what she says and reports. Do I feel we need to acknowledge when you look at the bigger picture of domestic abuse and violence, which isn’t just physical, that worldwide there are more instances of it happening to anyone than there should be. Yes. And I’m sure Julie would agree with me and not put my comments down as they don’t agree with hers.
Well I am a male victim of very spectacular long term coercive control and one incident of serious injury by a woman. The NHS had to provide rather a lot of very expert trauma therapy to put me back together. I was very lucky to get it. My response was never violent. But if it had been, I don’t think I’d have garnered much sympathy. I escaped from that situation simply because the perpetrator got cancer and died. Otherwise I might still be in it. Maybe I’d have been OK. I don’t think so actually.
Female abusers tend to favour coercive control, or at any rate manipulation of the victim’s psychology. It’s just as you describe in the piece above: “a broad range of tactics over an extended period to subjugate or dominate a partner, rather than to really hurt them physically”. It’s not hard to do.
I don’t hate you Julie Bindell, and I tend to agree with you more than you might anticipate on many topics. But you do assume men are (*must be*) the perpetraors in rather an uncritical way, even as you describe cases of psychological abuse (and it’s all psychological abuse, whatever else it is). It’s an assumption shared by the culture at large. Women get away with serious abuse *all the time* because of that attitude. Ultimately that means people of both genders are suffering harm, and I’m going to go ahead and claim that this attitude you have might simply be immoral, in the sense it may be causing harm, maybe even harm to women. I’m sorry but you appear to think one gender is morally superior to the other, rather than just less prone to physical violence. That’s something you’ve yet to justify. Professionally I am a scientist who works on MRI imaging with monkeys, and so I’ve sarted to study primate behavior to try to understand all this. It’s complicated.
It requires an open mind.
Meanwhile my personal solution is to stay away from women because they can do what they like to you without fear of consequence. And sometimes they do. It’s a miserable way to live. It’s just not safe, it’s way better to just focus on work. The psychologist who treats me (a woman, and a lovely person) tries to change my mind but I don’t think it’s fixable.
I think you need to stop actually, you’re very extreme in your attribution of blame. That doesn’t mean you’re wrong about *everything*. But you appear to believe women are incapable of causing harm, in a way that’s obstructive to progress. All I get from you is anger, and it appears to be directed at me of all people.
We’ve all been subject to Coercive Control for 9 months
Stop this pro lockdown nonsense. Actions speak louder that words. Beth Rigby and Kay Burley have demonstrated clearly that the entire media and political class know the The Corona hysteria is a load of nonsense.
Dr JOHN LEE saw through the nonsense early on. He was once allowed to write in the Spectator.
The clampdown that is just bureaucratic insanity: Dr JOHN LEE argues that putting London into Tier 3 lockdown could cripple the capital
daily mail debate/article-9053311/DR-JOHN-LEE-clampdown-just-bureaucratic-insanity.html
True.
Best irrelevant shoehorn of the day! Give yourself an uptick.