Evan Stark, a sociologist who helped broaden the definition of domestic violence beyond physical assault to include the patterns of domination often at its root, a shift that improved services for victims as well as their treatment under the law, died March 17 at his home in Woodbridge, Conn. He was 82.
His wife and academic collaborator, Anne Flitcraft, confirmed his death. He was on a Zoom call with domestic violence advocates in British Columbia when he had an apparent heart attack, Flitcraft said.
Dr. Stark was a self-described “veteran radical sociologist” who participated in the civil rights movement and led protests against the Vietnam War before turning his attention to domestic violence — “an epidemic problem that has been invisible,” he once said — when a friend in Minnesota helped open one of the country’s first shelters for battered women in the 1970s.
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As a sociologist, author, expert witness and advocate, Dr. Stark challenged pervasive misconceptions about domestic violence, which is primarily, although not universally, inflicted upon women. One of the most pernicious myths is the notion that women who remain in abusive relationships do so willingly.
“You would never ask why a hostage or kidnapping victim stays — or why they finally retaliate,” Dr. Stark once said.
In the 1980s, advocates created a diagram known as the “Power and Control Wheel” to represent the tactics often employed by abusers to keep their victims from leaving. Those tactics might include belittling a woman to degrade her self-esteem, isolating her from her friends and family, limiting her access to money, surveilling her activities and threatening violence on her or her children.
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Dr. Stark encapsulated such behaviors under the term “coercive control,” a concept he outlined in books including “Coercive Control: The Entrapment of Women in Personal Life” (2007) and “Children of Coercive Control” (2023).
“He singularly articulated the real double binds that define the lives of battered women,” said Nancy Grigsby, a member of the advisory group for the Battered Women’s Justice Project and a longtime domestic violence advocate in Ohio.
With his work, she continued, Dr. Stark helped demonstrate that “battered women live in a landscape where their daily choices are defined and confined by the possible consequences that their partners might impose.”
For example, shelters and protective orders do little to help women who live in justified fear of availing themselves of such options. Informed by the concept of coercive control, advocates expanded their efforts beyond the immediate prevention of homicide and injury to also address the underlying forces that keep women in relationships of physical violence — and to help them get out.
Dr. Stark often testified as an expert witness in court, notably in a federal class-action suit brought in New York on behalf of abused women whose children were forcibly placed in foster care by New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services on the grounds that the women had neglected their children by keeping them in violent situations.
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In his expert report, Dr. Stark argued that “removal of a young child from its primary caretaker can be particularly traumatic where domestic violence has occurred and should be used only as a last resort and in the face of evidence that the child faces imminent harm.”
Regarding the abused mothers, he “talked about coercive control … though he did not call it that in the context of this lawsuit,” Jill M. Zuccardy, one of the lead lawyers for the plaintiffs, wrote in an email. “He understood at a time when many did not that domestic violence was so much more than just violence.”
Judge Jack B. Weinstein of the U.S. District Court in Brooklyn found in favor of the women in 2002, writing that “the pitiless double abuse of these mothers is not malicious, but is due to benign indifference, bureaucratic inefficiency, and outmoded institutional biases.”
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Sharwline Nicholson, the lead plaintiff in the case, was a 32-year-old mother of two when the father of her younger child attacked her in 1999, leaving her bleeding from the head and with a broken arm and fractured ribs.
She asked a trusted neighbor to care for her children before calling an ambulance for herself. At a hospital, she learned that authorities had taken custody of them. Her children were placed in foster case — initially with no legal authorization — where they remained for several weeks.
“The blame from the city was more to the woman,” Nicholson said in a telephone interview after Dr. Stark’s death. “Evan Stark came in and explained where a woman’s mind-set would be after they had been beaten or were a victim of violence,” she continued, adding that “he made things even clearer for survivors themselves.”
Early activism
Evan David Stark was born in Manhattan on March 10, 1942, and grew up in Queens, the Bronx and Yonkers, N.Y. His father was a novelist, poet and professor at the City College of New York, and his mother did administrative work for the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the African American labor union.
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Dr. Stark joined the civil rights movement as a member of the Congress of Racial Equality. He received an undergraduate degree from Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., in 1963, before entering a graduate sociology program at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
In 1967, he helped lead a demonstration at Madison against on-campus recruiting by Dow Chemical, a manufacturer of napalm. The protest, which left dozens injured when police used nightsticks and tear gas to break it up, attracted national attention.
Dr. Stark had received his master’s degree at that point but left Madison after the protest, suspending his doctoral studies. He lived briefly in Canada before returning to the United States, where he did antipoverty work in Minnesota and helped lead the Honeywell Project, a protest campaign against Honeywell Inc., one of the state’s largest employers, over its manufacture of antipersonnel fragmentation bombs.
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In the 1970s, Dr. Stark and Flitcraft were living in New Haven, Conn., where she was a medical student at Yale University. They became involved in domestic violence advocacy and opened their home to women fleeing abusive relationships.
Flitcraft pursued a thesis examining the medical profession’s treatment of domestic violence victims. Recalling the language used at the time, she said in an interview that a typical patient chart might note that a woman had been “hit in the head by a glass ashtray,” without noting who had thrown the object at her.
Furthermore, Flitcraft said, many physicians failed to understand the recurrent nature of much domestic abuse. When a patient returned again and again with injuries, the hospital treated each incident separately, without addressing the blatant pattern of abuse.
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At the time, Dr. Stark was employed at Yale’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies. Working together, he and his wife received a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to expand on Flitcraft’s study.
The result of their work, an article titled “Medicine and Patriarchal Violence: The Social Construction of a ‘Private’ Event,” was published in the International Journal of Health Services in 1979. Having examined the records of 481 women treated at a New Haven hospital for a total of more than 1,400 cases of trauma, they determined that battering was approximately 10 times more common than doctors acknowledged.
With his wife, Dr. Kraft later wrote the book “Women at Risk: Domestic Violence and Women’s Health” (1996).
Dr. Stark received a PhD in sociology in 1984 from Binghamton University, part of the State University of New York, according to his wife. He spent much of the rest of his career at Rutgers University in New Jersey, where he taught in fields including public health and women’s studies. His degrees also included a master’s of social work from Fordham University in 1991.
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His marriage to Sally Connolly ended in divorce. Besides his wife, of Woodbridge, survivors include a son from his first marriage, Aaron Stark of New Haven, Conn.; three sons from his second marriage, Sam Stark of Cambridge, Mass., Daniel Stark of Jacksonville, Fla., and Eli Stark of Holyoke, Mass.; a sister; and three grandchildren.
Working with local advocates, Dr. Stark helped persuade numerous nations to criminalize coercive control in recent years. England and Wales, Ireland and Scotland were among the first international jurisdictions to take that step.
In the United States, only Hawaii “followed suit in the criminal law,” but several states “have incorporated coercive control into the civil law with his help,” according to Joan S. Meier, director of the National Family Violence Law Center at George Washington University’s law school.
“Domestic abuse is a crime against the whole community because the community cannot thrive without women’s full participation,” Dr. Stark once said in a speech. He hoped, he remarked in another, to “have made significant inroads into ending violence against women and children.”
