JUST BECAUSE A CHILD WASN’T HIT, DOESN’T MEAN A CHILD WASN’T HURT: COERCIVE CONTROL, CHILD EXPOSURE, AND THE GAP IN ALABAMA’S CUSTODY PRESUMPTION

A CASE FOR AMENDING THE DEFINITION – NOT ADDING ANOTHER PRESUMPTION – IN ALABAMA’S CUSTODY AND DOMESTIC OR FAMILY ABUSE ACT.

FELECITY WELCH*

I.              Introduction   

The courtroom goes quiet when the judge asks whether the child was ever physically harmed. The mother describes four years of threats, surveillance, and financial control. She explains that the child slept in the hallway during arguments, watched his father put a fist through a bedroom door, and learned to go silent whenever the front door opened. She describes checking her phone before she speaks, and choosing a pediatrician based on which office her husband would not call. The child was never struck. No broken bones appear in the medical records. There is no single incident that neatly defines what this family lived through.

            The court must now decide whether the child was merely exposed to domestic violence, or harmed by it – and in Alabama, whether what happened in that house counts as domestic violence at all. That last question has a statutory answer, but not the answer most would assume.

II.            The Wrong Question

            Family courts have inherited an evidentiary habit from criminal law: they look for a clearly defined incident.[1] Who did what, on what date, with what result. The habit is understandable. Incidents are provable. They generate police reports, photographs, and emergency room records. They fit the way lawyers are trained to build a case.

            But the incident model asks the wrong question about children. It asks whether the child saw a particular assault and treats a “no” as the end of the inquiry.[2] Children living with an abusive parent rarely experience abuse as a series of discrete events they either witnessed or missed. They hear it through a wall. They see the aftermath – the busted drywall, the eerie silence, the mother with marks that go unexplained. They learn to read a parent’s mood from the sound of a car in the driveway. Some intervene. Some take on the job of preventing the next episode.[3] Jeffrey Edleson’s foundational review of the research made this point more than twenty-five years ago: eye witnessing is only one of many ways children are exposed to adult domestic violence.[4] More recent research goes further, describing children in these homes not as “witnesses” at all, but as direct victims of the abuser’s control.[5]

The more accurate question is not whether the child saw a blow land. It is whether the child was raised inside a pattern of conduct that made the home unsafe and made one parent’s authority contingent on the other’s permission.

III.          Abuse as a Course of Conduct

            Evan Stark named that pattern coercive control: a strategy combining intimidation, isolation, and deprivation that constrains a partner’s liberty in ways that assault alone does not explain.[6] His central claim was jurisdictional as much as clinical – that abuse is better understood as a liberty crime than a crime of violence, and that a legal system organized around injury will systematically miss most of what abuse actually does.[7] 

In practice, the conduct is mundane and cumulative. It looks like monitoring phones, messages, and location. It looks like controlling access to money, a car, a job, or a degree program. It looks like cutting a partner off from family, threatening to take the children, using the children as messengers or informants, threatening self-harm, destroying property, harming a pet, threatening a partner’s immigration status, filing motion after motion to drain her savings, and engineering the housing instability that makes leaving impossible.[8] Lundy Bancroft and Jay Silverman documented how these behaviors continue after separation and how custody litigation itself becomes a tool of the same campaign.[9] 

            None of it necessarily produces a bruise. All of it reorganizes a household around one adult’s mood, and children grow up inside that reorganization.[10]

IV.          What Alabama Law Reaches – and What It Does Not

            Alabama’s framework is, on its face, among the more protective in the country. The Custody and Domestic or Family Abuse Act, enacted in 1995 and codified at Article 6 of Chapter 3 of Title 30, tracks the Model Code on Domestic and Family Violence promulgated by the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges (NCJFCJ).[11] 

Section 30-3-131 provides that in any custody dispute, a court’s determination that domestic or family violence has occurred raises a rebuttable presumption that placing a child in sole custody, joint legal custody, or joint physical custody with the perpetrator is detrimental to the child and not in the child’s best interest – while also directing the judge to take into account what impact, if any, the violence had on the child.[12] Section 30-3-132 requires the court to consider the safety and well-being of both the child and the victim parent, and bars the court from weighing against a parent an absence or relocation caused by the other parent’s violence.[13] Section 30-3-133 creates a companion presumption that the child should reside with the non-perpetrating parent, in the location of that parent’s choice, inside or outside the state – a provision that matters enormously in practice, because it allows the victim parent geographical flexibility to achieve safety and the family’s best interests.[14] Section 30-3-134 makes a post-judgment finding of domestic violence a change of circumstances.[15] Section 30-3-135 permits visitation by a perpetrator parent only if the court finds that adequate provision can be made for the safety of both the child and the victim parent, offering a toolkit of protected exchanges, supervised visitation, intervention programs, and abstention conditions – and notably, forbidding a court from ordering a victim into counseling about her status as a victim as a condition of custody or visitation.[16]

            The law here is built carefully, but it rests on definitions that do not align with the intentions that Article 6 is meant to protect. Section 30-3-130 defines “domestic or family abuse” as “an incident resulting in the abuse, stalking, assault, harassment, or the attempt or threats thereof,” and each of those component terms is defined by cross-reference to a criminal offense – harassment, for instance, means the offense prescribed in section 13A-11-8.[17] As a result, three consequences follow.

First, the definition is built on “an incident.” It is singular and episodic by design. A course of conduct that never crystallizes into a chargeable event has no obvious purchase on the statute, no matter how long it ran or how completely it governed the household.

Second, tethering a civil custody standard to definitions of criminal offenses imports criminal-law elements into a proceeding that has nothing to do with punishment. Surveillance that would not satisfy the stalking statute, and humiliation that would not satisfy the harassment statute, may nonetheless be the organizing fact of a child’s life.[18] 

Third, section 30-3-132’s mandatory factors reinforce the injury frame. Beyond safety and well-being generally, the statute directs courts to the perpetrator’s history of causing “physical harm, bodily injury, assault, or causing reasonable fear of physical harm, bodily injury, or assault.”[19] A judge reading Article 6 as a whole could be forgiven for concluding that the legislature meant physical violence.

            There is another loose thread here worth pulling. Section 30-3-130 clearly defines “domestic or family abuse.” However, sections 30-3-131 through 30-3-135 all operate on “domestic or family violence,” which the article never defines.[20] Any amendment to Article 6 ought to reconcile that inconsistency rather than perpetuate it.

            Meanwhile, Article 7 pulls in the opposite direction. Alabama policy favors frequent and continuing contact, and Section 30-3-152 requires the court to consider joint custody “in every case,” weighing, among other things, the parents’ agreement or lack of agreement and their “past and present ability to cooperate with each other and make decisions jointly.”[21] The same provision also directs courts to weigh “[t]he ability of the parents to encourage the sharing of love, affection, and contact between the child and the other parent”—a friendly-parent factor in all but name.[22] In an ordinary case, these factors are sensible. In a coercive-control case, they are close to perverse: the survivor who declines informal exchanges, who insists on written communication, or who will not agree to joint decision-making presents as the uncooperative parent, while the parent who created the conflict presents as reasonable, calm, and eager to co-parent. A national study of custody outcomes led by Joan Meier gives reason to worry that this asymmetry is not hypothetical.[23]

V.            California’s Proof of Concept

            The most useful comparison is not a state that added a coercive-control custody presumption. It is a state that already had a presumption and simply fixed what fed into it.

            California Family Code section 3044 provides that upon a finding that a party seeking custody has perpetrated domestic violence within the previous five years, a rebuttable presumption arises that an award of sole or joint custody to that person is detrimental to the child’s best interest.[24] Several design features deserve attention. The presumption is rebuttable only by a preponderance of the evidence, and the perpetrating parent bears that burden.[25] Critically, the statute forecloses circular reasoning: the preference for frequent and continuing contact may not itself be used to rebut the presumption, in whole or in part.[26] The rebuttal factors are concrete—completion of a qualifying batterer’s treatment program, completion of substance-abuse counseling or a parenting class where appropriate, compliance with probation, parole, or a protective order, whether further acts of domestic violence have occurred, and, as of the current version, whether the restrained person unlawfully possesses a firearm.[27] A court may not rest a domestic violence finding solely on a custody evaluator’s conclusions or Family Court Services’ recommendation.[28] If the court finds the presumption is overcome, it must state its reasons in writing or on the record, addressing each factor—a requirement the Legislature added to codify the rule established in Jaime G. v. H.L., in which the Court of Appeal reversed a joint custody order because the trial court had found the presumption overcome without addressing each statutory factor.[29]

Here is the part Alabama should notice. Section 3044 does not contain the phrase “coercive control.” It does not need to. Subdivision (c) defines “perpetrated domestic violence” by reference to conduct for which a court may issue an order under section 6320 and section 6320(c), providing that disturbing the peace of the other party includes coercive control, “a pattern of behavior that in purpose or effect unreasonably interferes with a person’s free will and personal liberty,” with illustrative examples covering isolation, deprivation of necessities, monitoring of movements, communications, finances, or access to services, and compulsion by force, threat, or intimidation, including threats based on immigration status.[30] California amended one definition in its restraining-order statute.[31] The custody presumption followed automatically. That is a legislative economy Alabama can replicate.

            California is not alone. Hawaii and Connecticut both expanded their domestic abuse definitions to reach coercive control. Connecticut did so through the 2021 legislation known as Jennifer’s Law.[32] Massachusetts added coercive control to the definition of abuse under Chapter 209A in 2024.[33] Washington’s civil protection order statute defines coercive control as a pattern of behavior causing physical, emotional, or psychological harm that unreasonably interferes with free will and personal liberty, expressly reaching technology-facilitated abuse and abusive litigation.[34] The NCJFCJ’s revised Chapter Four of the Model Code – the same instrument Alabama borrowed from in 1995 – now builds coercive control into its screening and custody framework.[35] At the federal level, the Keeping Children Safe from Family Violence Act, known as Kayden’s Law and enacted as part of the 2022 VAWA reauthorization, conditions a STOP formula grant increase on state reforms that include judicial training on coercive control.[36] Alabama’s Article 6 was ahead of its time in 1995. However, its definition has not moved since.[37]

VI.          Why Exposure IS Harm

            The developmental case for treating exposure as a child-safety concern is strong, and it should be stated carefully rather than dramatically.

            Children need safety, predictability, and caregivers who are free to respond to them. Coercive control degrades all three, and it does so continuously rather than episodically.[38] Edleson’s review found associations between exposure and a wide range of behavioral, emotional, and cognitive difficulties, while identifying moderating factors – concurrent child abuse, age, gender, and time since exposure – that caution against treating every exposed child as identically affected.[39] The adverse childhood experiences literature links chronic exposure to adversity, including household violence, to measurable long-term health and functioning outcomes.[40] Bancroft and Silverman describe the mechanism most relevant to custody: the batterer’s conduct restructures family roles, undermines the abused parent’s authority with the children, and often continues through post-separation contact.[41] Two cautions matter. Children are not uniformly damaged; resilience is real, and many children exposed to serious abuse appear well.[42] Symptoms are sometimes even invisible. Some children internalize, comply, and perform.[43] A rule requiring a diagnosis before a court will credit harm would filter out precisely the children who have learned that staying quiet is the safest strategy.

            The answer is modest. Exposure to a substantiated pattern of coercive control should be treated as a risk to healthy development sufficient to shape custody, without requiring the child to arrive in court already broken.

VII.        The Alabama Proposal

Alabama does not need a new presumption. It has one. It needs a definition that reaches what abuse actually is.

            The Legislature should amend section 30-3-130 to define “domestic or family violence” for purposes of Article 6 to include a pattern of coercive control, defined as a course of conduct that, considered in context and in totality, unreasonably interferes with another person’s free will, personal liberty, safety, or access to resources.[44] The statute should list non-exclusive examples drawn from the statutes discussed above – intimidation, isolation, surveillance and monitoring, economic control, threats involving children, stalking, destruction of property, threats grounded in immigration status, and the abusive use of legal process – and should make clear that no single example is required and that no incident-based offense element applies.[45]

To keep the definition from consuming ordinary conflicts, a finding should require four triggers: a repeated course of conduct or a single act of comparable gravity; conduct intended to or having the effect of intimidating, dominating, isolating, or controlling; a substantial effect on the other parent’s freedom, safety, or capacity to make decisions; and a demonstrated connection between that conduct and either the child’s welfare or the parties’ ability to exercise parental responsibilities safely. The court should be required to make written findings on each element.[46] 

The Legislature should also amend section 30-3-132 so that the mandatory factors reach patterns of controlling conduct rather than only histories of physical harm.[47] Legislation should also adopt California’s rule that the policy preference for frequent and continuing contact under section 30-3-150, and the joint-custody consideration required by section 30-3-152, may not themselves serve to rebut the Article 6 presumption.[48] Without adopting this rule, the presumption is rebutted by the very policy it was enacted to qualify.

Once the definitional fix is made, the existing machinery does the rest. Section 30-3-131’s presumption already reaches joint legal custody. Section 30-3-135 already conditions visitation on an affirmative safety finding and authorizes protected exchanges, supervised time, intervention programs, and conditions on possession.[49] What courts need is not new remedial authority but a definition that gets these cases through the door—and the confidence to order parallel parenting, structured communication through a monitored platform, and periodic review based on documented conduct rather than on courtroom demeanor.[50] 

            On the standard of proof, the proposed answer is preponderance of the evidence. Preponderance of the evidence is Alabama’s ordinary civil standard, including in protection-from-abuse proceedings, is California’s standard under section 3044, and is consistent with Article 6, which specifies no heightened standard.[51] There is a respectable argument for clear and convincing evidence, since the presumption constrains a constitutionally weighty parental interest, and the original impulse toward that standard is understandable.[52] However, this standard would make coercive control harder to prove than assault under the same Article, which inverts the reform’s purpose and rewards abusers whose methods leave no evidentiary trace. The rigor belongs in the definitional elements and the written findings requirement, not in an elevated burden that survivors without lawyers, records, or safe storage for evidence will rarely carry. Furthermore, the statute should not require a police report, a conviction, or a protective order. Abuse often occurs in private, and many survivors never involve law enforcement at all—out of fear of reprisal, a desire to protect the offender, or a sense that the abuse is a private matter, and, for some, because an abuser holds leverage over their immigration status or finances.[53] None of those reasons has anything to do with the credibility of the victim or the validity of the abuse.

Rebuttal deserves equal attention. A certificate of completion should not be dispositive.[54] Some abusive parents learn the vocabulary of accountability without changing anything, and program attendance is easily performed. Courts should look for sustained conduct over a meaningful period: no further threats, stalking, or harassment; compliance with orders and exchange protocols; recognition of harm that does not route back into blaming the other parent; and independent evidence that expanded contact is safe for the child and the other parent. Alabama should also borrow California’s rule that a domestic violence finding may not rest solely on an evaluator’s conclusion, and its requirement of written reasons when a presumption is overcome.[55] The burden should sit with the parent seeking expanded custody to show that the arrangement will not perpetuate the pattern.

VIII.     Conclusion

Alabama built a genuinely protective custody framework in 1995. Article 6 presumes against joint custody, conditions visitation on a safety finding, protects a survivor’s choice of residence, and gives courts a full complement of remedial tools.  However, this protective framework is relatively inaccessible, dependent on a definition that asks whether an incident occurred.

Abuse is not usually an incident. It is a way of running a household that makes a child inside that household be calibrated to control their voice based on a parent’s mood, watch one adult surrender their ordinary freedoms, and be forced to learn that safety is something they earn by anticipating someone else. These children are not merely bystanders to someone else’s marriage—they are actively affected victims who are living in the conditions the law says it wants to prevent.

Custody orders should not preserve the structure of abuse. If Alabama means what Article 6 says about the best interests of children, the fix is available, narrow, and has already been tested elsewhere: change the definition and let the presumption do the work it was written to do.

[1] See Evan Stark, Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life ch. 3 (2007) (critiquing measures of abuse that count discrete violent acts); Deborah Tuerkheimer, Recognizing and Remedying the Harm of Battering: A Call to Criminalize Domestic Violence, 94 J. Crim. L. & Criminology 959 (2004) (criticizing the “transactional model of crime that isolates and decontextualizes violence” and thereby “conceals the reality of an ongoing pattern of conduct”).

[2] See Emma Katz, Beyond the Physical Incident Model: How Children Living with Domestic Violence Are Harmed by and Resist Regimes of Coercive Control, 25 Child Abuse Rev. 46, 46 (2016) (noting that child-focused research has concentrated on children’s witnessing of physical violence, even though fathers’ controlling tactics against mothers are well documented).

[3] See Jane E.M. Callaghan et al., Beyond “Witnessing”: Children’s Experiences of Coercive Control in Domestic Violence and Abuse, 33 J. Interpersonal Violence 1551, 1551 (2018) (reporting, from interviews with twenty-one children, that children are aware of and constrained by a perpetrator’s controlling behavior and develop their own strategies to manage it).

[4] Jeffrey L. Edleson, Children’s Witnessing of Adult Domestic Violence, 14 J. Interpersonal Violence 839, 840–43 (1999).

[5] See Callaghan et al., supra note 3, at 1551 (arguing that children in these households are better understood as direct victims of abusive control than as passive witnesses); Katz, supra note 2, at 46.

[6] Stark, supra note 1, at 5–7, 13–16.

[7] Id. at 373–79.

[8] See Wash. Rev. Code § 7.105.010(4)(a) (2025) (listing, among other examples of coercive control, monitoring a partner’s communications and finances; isolating a partner from sources of support; damaging property; threatening to harm the partner’s children or pets, to harm oneself, or to contact immigration authorities; and litigation used to drain a partner’s finances or affect her housing); Stark, supra note 1, ch. 8 (describing the tactics of intimidation, isolation, and control); see also David Ward, In Her Words: Recognizing and Preventing Abusive Litigation Against Domestic Violence Survivors, 14 Seattle J. for Soc. Just. 429, 434–47 (2016) (describing abusive-litigation tactics reported by survivors and their lawyers).

[9] Lundy Bancroft & Jay G. Silverman, The Batterer as Parent: Addressing the Impact of Domestic Violence on Family Dynamics 75–101 (2002).

[10] See Katz, supra note 2, at 46 (finding, from interviews with fifteen mothers and fifteen children, that fathers’ controlling behavior often kept children from seeing relatives and friends and from taking part in activities, leaving them isolated and restricted).

[11] Custody and Domestic or Family Abuse Act, 1995, No. 95-629, 1995 Ala. Acts 1332 (codified at Ala. Code §§ 30-3-130 to -136 (2025)); see Model Code on Dom. & Fam. Violence § 401 (Nat’l Council of Juv. & Fam. Ct. Judges 1994) (presumption concerning custody).

[12] Ala. Code § 30-3-131 (2025).

[13] Id. § 30-3-132(a)(1), (b).

[14] Id. § 30-3-133.

[15] Id. § 30-3-134.

[16] Id. § 30-3-135(a), (b)(1)–(4), (d).

[17] Id. § 30-3-130. Since 1995, the Legislature has amended § 30-3-130 only once, in 2023, to update its cross-references to the criminal code’s stalking and assault provisions; the incident-based definition itself was left untouched. See H.B. 153, 2023 Leg., Reg. Sess. (Ala. 2023) (enacted as Act No. 2023-481).

[18] See Ala. Code § 13A-6-90(a) (2025) (requiring, for first-degree stalking, a threat made “with the intent to place that person in reasonable fear of death or serious bodily harm”); id. § 13A-6-90.1(a) (requiring, for second-degree stalking, an “improper purpose” and “material harm to the mental or emotional health” of the victim, or a reasonable fear for the victim’s employment); id. § 13A-11-8(a)(1) (requiring, for harassment, an “intent to harass, annoy, or alarm” plus physical contact or abusive or obscene language or gestures).

[19] Id. § 30-3-132(a)(2).

[20] Compare id. § 30-3-130 (defining “domestic or family abuse”), with id. §§ 30-3-131 to -135 (using “domestic or family violence” and similar phrasings without defining them).

[21] Id. §§ 30-3-150, 30-3-152(a)(1)–(2). Notably, the policy statement in § 30-3-150 is itself qualified: it favors “frequent and continuing contact with parents who have shown the ability to act in the best interest of their children.”

[22] Id. § 30-3-152(a)(3). Recent proposals would push Article 7 further by presuming joint custody outright. See, e.g., H.B. 53, 2025 Leg., Reg. Sess. (Ala. 2025) (proposing a rebuttable presumption that joint custody is in the child’s best interest, subject to an exception for domestic or family violence).

[23] See Joan S. Meier, Denial of Family Violence in Court: An Empirical Analysis and Path Forward for Family Law, 110 Geo. L.J. 835, 846, 851 (2022) (reporting that mothers who alleged a father’s abuse lost custody in 28.4% of cases, that courts awarded custody to fathers in 12.7% of cases in which they believed the father had been abusive, and that fathers’ alienation cross-claims “roughly double courts’ skepticism, especially of child abuse claims,” and noting earlier research finding that courts treated “‘friendly parent’ statutory provisions as outweighing domestic violence provisions”); Joan S. Meier et al., U.S. Child Custody Outcomes in Cases Involving Parental Alienation and Abuse Allegations: What Do the Data Show?, 42 J. Soc. Welfare & Fam. L. 92, 92 (2020) (finding that mothers’ abuse allegations increase their risk of losing custody and that fathers’ alienation cross-claims “virtually double that risk”).

[24] Cal. Fam. Code § 3044(a) (West 2026).

[25] Id. § 3044(a), (b)(1).

[26] Id. § 3044(b)(1).

[27] Id. § 3044(b)(2)(A)–(G).

[28] Id. § 3044(e).

[29] Id. § 3044(f); Jaime G. v. H.L., 236 Cal. Rptr. 3d 209(Ct. App. 2018) (reversing a joint custody order because the trial court found the presumption overcome without stating its reasons on each of the statutory factors).

[30] Cal. Fam. Code §§ 3044(c), 6320(c) (West 2026).

[31] S.B. 1141, 2019–2020 Leg., Reg. Sess. (Cal. 2020) (enacted as 2020 Cal. Stat. ch. 248) (amending only Cal. Fam. Code § 6320).

[32] Conn. Gen. Stat. § 46b-1(b) (2025) (defining “domestic violence” to include coercive control); Haw. Rev. Stat. § 586-1 (2025) (defining “domestic abuse” to include “coercive control” between family or household members); S.B. 1091, 2021 Gen. Assemb., Reg. Sess. (Conn. 2021) (enacted as Pub. Act No. 21-78).

[33] Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 209A, § 1 (2025) (defining “abuse” to include “coercive control,” a change made by An Act to Prevent Abuse and Exploitation, which was signed on June 20, 2024, and took effect on September 18, 2024).

[34] Wash. Rev. Code § 7.105.010(4)(a), (4)(a)(i)(B), (4)(a)(v); see also id. § 26.51.020 (defining “abusive litigation”).

[35] Model Code on Dom. & Fam. Violence §§ 401(1)(e), 401(4)(a), 405–406 (Nat’l Council of Juv. & Fam. Ct. Judges, rev. 2022) (defining “domestic abuse” to include “coercive controlling abuse” and requiring custody evaluators and dispute-resolution programs to screen for domestic abuse).

[36] Violence Against Women Act Reauthorization Act of 2022, Pub. L. No. 117-103, div. W, tit. XV, § 1504, 136 Stat. 840, 953 (codified at 34 U.S.C. § 10446(k)); see 34 U.S.C. § 10446(k)(3)(C), (k)(5)(A)(iv) (conditioning the grant increase on state laws requiring judges who hear custody cases to complete training that addresses “coercive control”).

[37] See supra note 17 and accompanying text.

[38] See Katz, supra note 2, at 46 (finding that fathers’ controlling behavior left children isolated, disempowered, and restricted, potentially undermining their resilience and development); Callaghan et al., supra note 3, at 1551.

[39] Edleson, supra note 4, at 843–47, 857–62.

[40] See Robert F. Anda et al., The Enduring Effects of Abuse and Related Adverse Experiences in Childhood: A Convergence of Evidence from Neurobiology and Epidemiology, 256 Eur. Archives Psychiatry & Clinical Neurosci. 174, 174–79 (2006) (finding that outcomes across multiple domains “increased in a graded fashion as the ACE score increased”); Vincent J. Felitti et al., Relationship of Childhood Abuse and Household Dysfunction to Many of the Leading Causes of Death in Adults: The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study, 14 Am. J. Preventive Med. 245, 245 (1998) (treating violence against the mother as a category of household dysfunction and linking the number of childhood exposures to leading causes of adult disease and death).

[41] Bancroft & Silverman, supra note 9, at 185–91.

[42] See Cecilia Martinez-Torteya et al., Resilience Among Children Exposed to Domestic Violence: The Role of Risk and Protective Factors, 80 Child Dev. 562, 562 (2009) (finding that 54% of preschool-age children exposed to domestic violence nonetheless adapted positively); see also Edleson, supra note 4, at 839 (identifying factors that moderate the effects of exposure).

[43] See Callaghan et al., supra note 3, at 1551 (describing strategies children develop to manage a perpetrator’s controlling behavior); Katz, supra note 2, at 46.

[44] See Cal. Fam. Code § 6320(c) (defining coercive control as “a pattern of behavior that in purpose or effect unreasonably interferes with a person’s free will and personal liberty” and evaluating conduct “based on the totality of the circumstances”); Conn. Gen. Stat. § 46b-1(b) (using the same definition); Wash. Rev. Code § 7.105.010(4)(a); Model Code on Dom. & Fam. Violence § 401(4)(a) (Nat’l Council of Juv. & Fam. Ct. Judges, rev. 2022) (defining “coercive controlling abuse” as “a pattern of conduct that has the purpose or effect of substantially restricting the other parent’s safety or autonomy”).

[45] See Cal. Fam. Code § 6320(c)(1)–(4); Conn. Gen. Stat. § 46b-1(b); Wash. Rev. Code § 7.105.010(4)(a)(i)–(vi).

[46] Alabama law currently requires no such findings. See Ex parte Fann, 810 So. 2d 631(Ala. 2001) (holding that the Act “contains no provision requiring a trial court to make an express finding as to whether abuse has occurred”); cf. Cal. Fam. Code § 3044(f)(2) (requiring a court that finds the presumption overcome to “state its reasons in writing or on the record”).

[47] See Ala. Code § 30-3-132(a)(2).

[48] Ala. Code §§ 30-3-150, 30-3-152(a); see Cal. Fam. Code § 3044(b)(1).

[49] Ala. Code §§ 30-3-131, 30-3-135(a), (b)(1)–(4).

[50] See id. § 30-3-135(b)(8) (authorizing a court to “[i]mpose any other condition that is deemed necessary to provide for the safety of the child”).

[51] See Ala. Code § 30-5-6(a) (2025) (providing that, at the final hearing on a protection-from-abuse petition, “the standard of proof shall be a preponderance of the evidence”); Cal. Fam. Code § 3044(a). Article 6 itself prescribes no standard of proof. See Ala. Code §§ 30-3-130 to -136.

[52] See Troxel v. Granville, 530 U.S. 57, 65 (2000) (plurality opinion) (describing “the interest of parents in the care, custody, and control of their children” as “perhaps the oldest of the fundamental liberty interests recognized by this Court”); cf. Santosky v. Kramer, 455 U.S. 745, 747–48 (1982) (requiring at least clear and convincing evidence before a state may terminate parental rights).

[53] Brian A. Reaves, U.S. Dep’t of Just., Bureau of Just. Stat., NCJ 250231, Police Response to Domestic Violence, 2006–2015, at 1, 4 tbl.3 (2017) (reporting that 56% of domestic violence victimizations from 2006 to 2015 were reported to police and that the most common reasons victims gave for not reporting were privacy (32%), a desire to protect the offender (21%), a belief that the crime was minor (20%), and fear of reprisal (19%)); see also Cal. Fam. Code § 6320(c)(3)–(4) (recognizing control of a partner’s finances and threats based on immigration status as forms of coercive control).

[54] Cf. Cal. Fam. Code § 3044(b) (treating completion of a batterer’s treatment program as only one of several factors a court weighs together).

[55] See Cal. Fam. Code § 3044(e), (f)(2).