8 children killed in Shreveport shooting, motive unknown
Police are investigating a shooting that left eight children dead in Shreveport, with investigators investigating the suspect, weapon and motive.
Some states are banking on the idea that domestic violence can be stopped even before it leads to beatings. A controversial, fledgling approach to domestic violence prosecutions seeks to criminalize psychological intimidation of family members.
These laws have gained national attention after a Louisiana man shot and killed his seven children and their cousin on April 19th. He is just one of millions of family and domestic violence abusers across the country, with an estimated 10 million victims at risk each year, according to the National Institutes of Health.
Nearly a dozen states in the United States have now enacted or are currently pursuing legislation that more fully defines domestic violence and takes into account long-held notions of power and control in the domestic violence world. So-called “coercive control laws” target criminals who intentionally seek to control partners and family members through fear, intimidation, surveillance, gaslighting, and other non-physically abusive behavior.
Coercive control refers to patterns of acts and behaviors that abusers use to limit another person’s freedom and control their life. Lawmakers argue that such psychological abuse can be a seedling for physical or sexual violence.
“It leaves people unable to take care of themselves, trapped and unable to protect their children,” said Joan Meyer, founding director of the National Family Violence Law Center and professor of clinical law at George Washington University. “It’s an inseparable web that surrounds them, so they can’t move in any direction without some fallout from their abuser.”
The concept has been criminalized in Hawaii and has been incorporated into family or civil court definitions of domestic violence in states such as California, Connecticut, Colorado, Hawaii, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Vermont. Other lawsuits are pending in New York and Maryland.
This is a new and still-contested legal attack on America’s domestic violence problem.
Police say Shamar Elkins went on a pre-dawn rampage in Shreveport on April 19, shooting and killing seven of his children and a cousin, as well as the children’s mother and another woman, before ultimately dying. Authorities have not yet released a motive for the shooting, but described it as a “tragic domestic violence incident.”
According to a 2023 NIH study, up to 1 in 4 women and 1 in 9 men are victims of domestic violence, but many incidents are likely to go unreported.
Research shows that examples of abuse include sexual and physical violence, as well as stalking and psychological attacks. This problem has far-reaching effects, affecting not only the victims but also their families, colleagues and communities, negatively impacting physical and mental health, reducing productivity and reducing quality of life.
The study estimates that domestic and family violence costs the nation more than $12 billion each year.
What is coercive control?
Types of coercive control include emotional abuse, restricting access to or threatening to harm family or friends, using technology to track a person’s movements and actions, controlling a person’s finances or personal choices, and threatening to share private information or intimate images publicly, according to WomensLaw.org.
“These actions are about gaining power, not showing love or concern,” the group said. “Even if the abuser does not use physical or sexual abuse as part of a pattern of coercive control, it is still a serious form of abuse.”
An 11-city study published in the American Journal of Public Health in 2003 found that women’s lives are most at risk when trying to leave an abusive relationship with a “highly controlling” male partner.
According to Meyer, these actions systematically chip away at people’s autonomy. Abusers often use fear, humiliation, and isolation to limit their own behavior as well as control the external narrative.
“Coercive managers are very good at making the world believe they’re crazy when they’re not,” she says.
California case shows how one law works
California Governor Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 1141, allowing family courts to consider coercive control as a form of domestic violence. The bill, introduced by Sen. Susan Rubio, describes coercive control as “a pattern of behavior that unreasonably interferes with an individual’s free will and personal freedom.”
The law was proven effective in a 2023 case involving a Santa Clara County software engineer who created a multi-page list of instructions and demands that his wife had to follow “right down to how to wash the dishes,” according to the California Women’s Law Center, which cited Superior Court Judge Vanessa Zescher as saying.
Additionally, the woman was required to see her husband at the same time every night to ensure he was meeting his demands, the law center said, adding that court documents described how her husband complained about her “violations” such as waking up “several minutes later than promised” and serving him breakfast.
According to the law center, the woman’s wife said she found the treatment “demoralizing, humiliating, and exhausting.” Judge Zecher said domestic violence violated women’s rights to “freedom of thought, action, and decision-making,” and ruled that the act amounted to coercive control.
“When a human being has to worry about and consider an intimate partner’s reaction in every aspect of their life, including whether the intimate partner approves of the behavior, that human being is not actually free in decision-making or action,” Zecher said before issuing a permanent restraining order against her husband for coercive and controlling domestic violence, the center reported.
“Too often it backfires.”
The Hawaii state legislature made the concept a misdemeanor in 2021 under a pilot program, according to the Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system. But data on its implementation is almost nonexistent, and legal applications of the concept elsewhere are too new and difficult to measure, given that many family courts do not publish such procedures or compile such data themselves, Meyer said.
The concept is more accepted overseas, she said. Australia and the United Kingdom have criminalized coercive control, and legislation is pending in Canada.
Meyer said it’s ironic that the U.S. is moving so slowly toward criminalization, given that factor has long been an important consideration for those in the domestic violence field. Still, she said, it wasn’t until sociologist Evan Stark’s book “Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Their Private Lives,” published in 2007, that advocates began to seriously consider applying it in a legal setting.
One of the reasons for the slow introduction of coercive regulatory considerations is that the concept can be unfairly applied to victims themselves. Judges have also been reluctant to consider anything that is not codified in law.
“Too often that backfires on women,” Meyer says. “You might see a victim doing things like telling their partner not to go see so-and-so anymore because they’re always drunk with that person. Or they might be trying to manage disturbing aspects of their partner’s behavior by controlling access to their children. These things can look like control, so if we’re not careful, people can put labels on them that don’t really apply.”
