CCChat

It is said that the Inuits have many many words for how to describe snow and the existence of all these words shows the relationship between the vocabulary and the physical environment it is used in.

With physical abuse we don’t need the language. It’s not necessary, because the evidence is in front of our eyes.

With coercive control, it is different. We can not simply rely on our eyes.

We need more.

Too many can only identify coercive control when it is in the presence of obvious violence but, if the physical evidence is absent, too many flounder at understanding what is happening and lack the language to evidence that which can not readily be seen.

Many learn of coercive control by looking at the legal definition of what it is, who is covered by the law and what evidence to look for, but that only teaches us what coercive control is when it has reached the high evidentiary threshold needed for it to be a crime.. It teaches us very little about its beginnings, how it escalates , what it feels like when it starts to go wrong..

If we only concentrated on perfecting an accent, without looking at sentence construction and grammar, we would have quite a poor understanding of language.

And language is one of the main reasons why there is still a lack of understanding - we lack the vocabulary to describe both what we are seeing, but also what it feels like, to live it and for a victim of coercive control to adequately explain what is going on.

A more expansive vocabulary would help to both explain and understand the lived experience.

This is something CCChat is currently working on.