Substance Use Coercion as a Barrier to Safety, Recovery, and Economic Stability: Implications for Policy, Research, and Practice
People who abuse their partners often coerce them into using substances, including deliberately sabotaging their recovery attempts. This insidious form of power and control cuts across every facet of a survivor’s life and has potentially lethal effects. Forcibly keeping a survivor reliant on substances can harm their mental and physical health, impact their relationship with and custody of their children, interfere with their housing and employment, and create other barriers to getting help.
In order for services to be effective, safe, and accessible to survivors, practitioners and policymakers need to understand the ways that substance use coercion impacts survivors and their children. In response to these issues, a federal Technical Expert Meeting was convened in October 2019 to improve understanding about the prevalence and impact of substance use coercion and to generate recommendations for policy, research, and practice.
Learn more, download the full series of reports, and watch the webinar here.
