Evan Stark’s involvement with domestic violence began more than 30 years ago.

After learning that a friend in St. Paul, Minnesota, had started the first shelter for battered women in the United States, Stark set out to apply the idea to his work as a community organizer in New Haven, Connecticut.

The domestic violence revolution arrived soon thereafter, altering public perceptions about battered women, creating shelters for them and their children, and devising criminal justice responses to the problem.

But the revolution has since stalled, and it’s not at all clear that women today are any less likely to be beaten, controlled, and killed, Stark writes in his new book, Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life (Oxford University Press, 2007). In February the volume was named the 2007 Best Book in Sociology/Social Work by the Association of American Publishers.

The number of men arrested for partner violence has risen dramatically in recent years, and partner homicides are down. Yet domestic violence persists, is widely tolerated, and harms millions of American women, argues Stark, an associate professor at the School of Public Affairs and Administration in Newark and chair of the Department of Urban Health Administration at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.

The failure of the criminal justice response, like the ineffectiveness of other interventions, reflects the gap between the conventional wisdom about abuse and the tactics men actually use to entrap women in personal life, according to Stark. “We equate woman abuse with violence and violence with physical injury,” he writes. “When a woman’s injuries are not severe, her batterer tends to go free.”

Police arriving at a domestic violence crime scene look at the specific incident that’s occurred and weigh whether there was serious injury. “The reality is that the hallmark of battering is the frequency of violence, not its severity,” Stark said in an interview. “Most domestic violence incidents are relatively trivial from a criminal justice and medical standpoint. So when we focus on incidents, the woman or the guy ends up in traffic court, and nothing happens. We have effectively turned one of the most devastating forms of oppression in our society into a second-class misdemeanor.”

A more common form of domestic violence, meanwhile, remains virtually invisible. Stark calls it “coercive control,” an ongoing pattern of constraint he likens to terrorism or indentured servitude. For coercive controllers, violence can be routine. They cut women off from friends, family, or co-workers; monitor how they spend their time; deny them sleep; and may execute strict rules for living, regulating everything from housekeeping to sex. (Stark cites the case of a woman required to vacuum daily, “so you can always see the lines.”)

Coercive control intimidates, shames, and isolates, Stark says. It also robs women of their basic human rights, with devastating consequences. But states have not made coercive control a crime, something Stark advocates. He would like to see it made a “liberty” violation.

In his book, Stark describes horrifying cases of coercive control, gleaned from his work as an expert witness in more than 100 criminal and civil cases. He also presents three detailed profiles of women subjected to coercive control who killed or committed other crimes in the context of being abused.

“Male controllers in my [consulting advocacy] practice have … inspected their partner’s underwear; listened to answering machines; searched the house for lovers; locked their partners in the house or in the bedroom,” he writes. “[They have] ripped out phones; measured the breakfast cereal to see if others had eaten it; forced them to report in and out; hid under beds, in closets, or in trees outside their house. … [They have] lain on them for hours to prevent their going out; stalked them; insisted they be accompanied at all times; and forced women to adopt a compromising pose … while the man probes for ‘evidence.’ ”

Few scholars know as much about family violence as Stark. During the 1970s he and his wife, Anne Flitcraft, a physician, opened their own home to battered women and children and helped start a shelter in New Haven. He and Flitcraft later did influential research in the field, discovering that partner violence was the single major source of injury for which women sought medical attention at Yale–New Haven Hospital. Stark’s analysis gains credibility from the key roles he played as an advocate for battered women and their children and as a consultant to the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institute of Justice, and numerous other federal and state agencies.

Throughout, people have never stopped asking why women remain in abusive relationships. The question betrays a lack of understanding, Stark says: “You would never ask why a hostage or kidnapping victim stays – or why they finally retaliate.”