The Power Cycle

Trauma supplies the wound. Power supplies the permission.

Chapter in development

Where authority goes unaccountable — in a home, an institution, a state — harm follows. This chapter will trace coercive control, intimate-partner and elder abuse, and the cross-national evidence that a society's level of gender equity predicts how much violence it produces.

It is the strongest single test of the whole thesis: that the same mechanism runs underneath harms we treat as unrelated.

This chapter is being written to the same standard as the sexual-harm chapter and the Trauma Cycle — evidence-led, fully cited, every door kept open. In the meantime, the two completed chapters show what it will become.