Staff profile

Dr Emma Katz is commonly regarded as the world's leading academic expert on how coercive control - a severe form of domestic abuse - impacts on children and young people. Dr Katz researches the impacts of domestic violence and abuse on children and young people, exploring coercive control, agency, resistance, recovery, and mother-child supportiveness in domestic abuse contexts.

Research distinctions

• Dr Katz's research on coercive control is cited in government policy and used extensively by organisations and practitioners globally. Her research formed the basis of a REF2021 Impact Case Study.

• Dr Katz uses her social media presence, including her popular Twitter account (25,000 followers, January 2023), to communicate her research to the public. She won the 2022 Clear Path UK 'Cycle Breaker' Award for the person or organisation who has had the biggest impact nationally on changing misconceptions around abuse

• Dr Katz won the Wiley Prize for Best Paper published in Child Abuse Review 2015-18 (First Prize) and the Corinna Seith Prize awarded by Women Against Violence Europe (WAVE). (Both awards were received for her 2016 Child Abuse Review article 'Beyond the Physical Incident Model'.)

Dr Emma Katz can be contacted at emma.katz@durham.ac.uk for:

• invitations to speak via the media and at conferences and events

• potential PhD supervision on domestic violence and abuse, and other gender-based violence issues

Follow on Twitter @DrEmmaKatz

Current position

Dr Katz is Associate Professor in Sociology. She teaches two modules, Violence and Abuse in Society (undergraduate) and Gender, Violence and Abuse (PGT).

Education and employment history

Dr Katz studied at the University of Nottingham, completing an ESRC-funded PhD, as well as an MA Research Methods (Distinction) and a BA (Hons) Sociology (First Class).

Prior to joining Durham University, Dr Katz was Senior Lecturer in Childhood and Youth at Liverpool Hope University (2013-22). She won 3 annual teaching awards, as voted for by students.

Book

Katz, Emma (2022) Coercive Control in Children's and Mothers' Lives. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Praise for the book: Amidst the failure of police, courts and child welfare to hold male domestic abuse perpetrators accountable, Emma Katz follows fifteen families through their harrowing years of abuse and recovery. In a pioneering work that shows that children are subjected to the same abuse tactics as their mothers, she applies the new paradigm of coercive control to amazing effect, evoking the voices of women and children to identify the multiple forms of harm inflicted, how children resist, and how some women break free. This book will change how we understand and respond to children's experience of domestic abuse. - Professor Evan Stark, PhD, MSW, Author of Coercive Control, Rutgers University, USA.

Selected conference keynotes

International Festival of Public Health 2022. University of Manchester, 21 July 2022.

Safe and Together Model Second European Conference. 9 October 2020.

Intervening after Domestic Violence: Working Systemically with Victims, Children and Perpetrators. Dublin, 10 October 2019.

International Conference on Honour Related Conflicts. Copenhagen, 22-23 November 2018.

International collaborations

Collaborative Partner in a project led by Professor Merja Laitinen (University of Lapland) on the impacts of stalking on children. 2017-21 project funded by 480,000 Euros from the Academy of Finland.

Expert advisory work

Member of Expert Advisory Panel - Domestic Abuse Policy Guidance for UK Universities, HARM Network/Research England - 2021. Project shortlisted for 2022 Times Higher Education Awards.

Monitoring and evaluations

Monitoring and evaluation of domestic abuse 'Survivors to Thrivers' project at The First Step - completed 2019.

Media and presentations

• Dr Katz has given more than 100 invited presentations, including several Keynotes. She has delivered invited presentations to audiences in countries including Singapore, Brazil, France, Finland, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, the United States, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.

• In the United Kingdom, she has given invited presentations at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and invited seminars for the Home Office and the Domestic Abuse Commissioner's Office.

• News & current affairs: featured in Newsweek, NBC News, Ms Magazine, the i Newspaper, CBC (Canada) BBC Radio 5 Live, and ITV News.

• Featured expert on primetime documentary Caroline: The Murder that Fooled the World (Channel 5, first aired 17th February 2022).

• Consultant: BBC One documentary Ian Wright: Home Truths (2021); Hollyoaks soap opera (2020-22).

Authored book

• Katz, Emma (2022). Coercive Control in Children's and Mothers' Lives. Oxford.

Journal Article

• Nikupeteri, Anna, Katz, Emma & Laitinen, Merja (2021). Coercive control and technology-facilitated parental stalking in children’s and young people’s lives. Journal of Gender-Based Violence 5(3): 395.
• Katz, Emma, Nikupeteri, Anna & Laitinen, Merja (2020). When Coercive Control Continues to Harm Children: Post‐Separation Fathering, Stalking and Domestic Violence. Child Abuse Review 29(4): 310.
• Katz, Emma (2019). Coercive Control, Domestic Violence, and a Five-Factor Framework: Five Factors That Influence Closeness, Distance, and Strain in Mother–Child Relationships. Violence Against Women 25(15): 1829.
• Radford, Lorraine, Lombard, Nancy, Meinck, Franziska, Katz, Emma & Mahati, Stanford Taonatose (2017). Researching violence with children: experiences and lessons from the UK and South Africa. Families, Relationships and Societies 6(2): 239.
• Katz, Emma (2015). Recovery-Promoters: Ways in which Children and Mothers Support One Another's Recoveries from Domestic Violence. British Journal of Social Work 45(suppl 1): i153.
• Katz, Emma (2015). Beyond the Physical Incident Model: How Children Living with Domestic Violence are Harmed By and Resist Regimes of Coercive Control. Child Abuse Review 25(1): 46.
• Katz, Emma (2013). Domestic Violence, Children's Agency and Mother-Child Relationships: Towards a More Advanced Model. Children & Society 29(1): 69.