He decides who you see. He keeps you up arguing until three in the morning, then expects you to function the next day. He tells you what will happen if you ever leave. Then he brings you a cup of tea, says sorry, and for one evening he is the man you first met.
Taken one at a time, each of these can be explained away. A bad day. A row. A nice gesture. Put together, they form a pattern that was written down nearly seventy years ago, in a setting that had nothing to do with relationships.
It is called Biderman’s Chart of Coercion. It can be an unsettling thing to read, because it can look like your own relationship set out in a table.
Where the chart comes from
Albert Biderman was a sociologist working for the United States Air Force in the 1950s. His job was to find out what had happened to American airmen captured during the Korean War, some of whom had made false confessions to crimes they never committed.
The popular explanation at the time was “brainwashing”, as if the captors had some mysterious new power over the mind. Biderman interviewed the men who came home and reached a far less dramatic conclusion. There was nothing new or mysterious about it. The captors had used ordinary methods of pressure that police and interrogators had relied on for centuries.
He set those methods out in a chart of eight techniques, presented in 1956 and published in 1957 in the Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine. Of the 235 Air Force men who were returned, about half had faced these attempts directly.
The most important detail is what he left out. Biderman deliberately did not list physical torture as one of the eight. Violence did happen, he wrote, but inflicting pain was “not a necessary nor particularly effective method of inducing compliance”. What wore people down was the pattern.
The eight methods, and what they look like at home
Biderman wrote about prison camps. The examples below are what each method can look like inside a relationship. You do not need to recognise all eight. Coercion is a pattern, and patterns are built from whichever methods work.
1. Isolation
Biderman found that cutting a prisoner off from other people removed the support that helped him resist, and left him dependent on his captor.
- He criticises your friends and family until seeing them is more trouble than it is worth
- He reads, answers or blocks your messages and calls
- He turns up when you are out with other people, or makes you pay for it afterwards
- You stop going to the gym, the class, the church, the job
2. Monopolising your attention
Biderman called this “monopolisation of perception”. The aim is to fix all of your attention on him and your immediate situation, so nothing else competes.
- You have to account for where you have been and who you spoke to
- He checks your phone, demands your passwords or tracks your location
- He calls or messages constantly, and there are consequences if you do not answer
- Your whole day is organised around predicting his mood
3. Exhaustion
Biderman’s term was “induced debilitation”. A person who is worn out, hungry or unwell has less strength left to push back.
- He keeps you awake with arguments, accusations or demands
- He controls what and when you eat, or when and where you sleep
- He withholds your medication or stops you getting to appointments
- He controls the money, so every basic need has to be asked for
4. Threats
Threats, Biderman wrote, cultivate anxiety and despair. They do not need to be carried out to work. Vague threats were on his chart too.
- Threats to hurt or kill you, your children, your family or your pets
- Threats to take the children, or to report you to social services, the police or immigration
- Threats to share private photos or information about you
- Threats to hurt or kill himself if you leave
5. Occasional kindness
Biderman called these “occasional indulgences”: small favours, promises and sudden changes in attitude. He found they gave the prisoner a reason to comply and made the hardship harder to adjust to.
- An apology, a gift, a good weekend
- Promises that he will change, get help, or that it will never happen again
- Being kind immediately after being cruel
- Rewards when you do what he wants
This is the method that keeps hope alive. It is also the one most often mistaken for love.
6. Showing he is all-powerful and all-knowing
Biderman listed “demonstrating omnipotence and omniscience”. The message is that resistance is pointless because he controls what happens to you and knows everything you do.
- He knows where you were and what you said, and makes sure you know he knows
- He tells you nobody will believe you: not the police, not the court, not your family
- He claims he can get into your phone or accounts, or that he has friends who would hurt you
- He says he will always find you
7. Degradation
Biderman found that humiliation made resisting feel more damaging to a person’s self-respect than giving in.
- Name calling, insults and constant criticism of you as a partner or a mother
- Humiliating you in front of other people, or in private
- Denying you privacy
- Mocking your appearance, your intelligence, your body
8. Enforcing trivial demands
The last method is petty rules. Biderman’s finding was that enforcing small, pointless demands builds a habit of obeying.
- Rules about how the house is kept, how food is cooked, what you wear
- Rules that change without warning, so you can never get it right
- Punishments for breaking them
- Having to ask permission for ordinary things
Why a chart about prisoners of war matters to you
Biderman’s chart was not written about relationships. His chart has since been applied to domestic abuse, including in safeguarding training material used in England, because the methods are the same. Three things in it are worth holding on to.
It works without violence. Biderman left physical torture off the chart on purpose. If you have ever told yourself it cannot be abuse because he has never hit you, the research behind this chart says otherwise. Control does not need violence.
It works on strong people. The men in his study were trained military personnel held by an enemy. Biderman found that every man who faced this pressure showed some mixture of resisting and complying. If these methods could wear down airmen, giving in to them at home is not a sign of weakness. It is what the methods are designed to produce.
It only makes sense as a whole. One late night argument is a row. One comment about your friend is an opinion. The chart shows how small things join up into a system. That is why it is so hard to explain to someone outside the relationship, and why you may have struggled to explain it to yourself.
There is one difference, and it makes your position harder. A prisoner of war knows who the enemy is. You are dealing with someone you love, or loved, and whose kindness on a good day feels real. On Biderman’s chart, that kindness is one of the eight methods.
A word of caution. The chart is a way of seeing a pattern. It is not a test, a diagnosis or a legal definition, and nobody needs to tick all eight boxes for their experience to count.
What the law in England and Wales says
The law does not mention Biderman. It does describe the same thing in its own words.
Controlling or coercive behaviour is a criminal offence under section 76 of the Serious Crime Act 2015. It has been in force since 29 December 2015 and carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison. It is also part of the legal definition of domestic abuse in section 1 of the Domestic Abuse Act 2021.
For the offence to apply, four things must be true:
- The behaviour is repeated or continuous. A single incident is not enough. The law is looking for a pattern.
- You are personally connected. This covers partners, former partners, spouses, people who share a child, and relatives.
- It has a serious effect on you. Either it has made you fear violence on at least two occasions, or it has caused you serious alarm or distress that has a substantial adverse effect on your usual day to day activities.
- He knows, or ought to know, the effect it is having.
The government’s statutory guidance is clear that violence, or threats of violence, do not need to be present. It also lists behaviours that fall within the offence, and the list reads like the chart: isolating you from family and friends, making you account for your time, dictating when you sleep and what you eat, monitoring your phone, making rules and punishing you for breaking them, threats, and humiliation.
If you have already left
Since 5 April 2023 the offence applies to former partners and family members whether or not you live together. That change was made by section 68 of the Domestic Abuse Act 2021. It is not retrospective, so behaviour by an ex you were no longer living with can only be charged under this offence if it happened on or after that date. Earlier behaviour may still be covered by other offences, such as harassment or stalking.
What you can do with this
Use it to name what is happening. Go through the eight methods and note which ones you recognise. You may find that things you had filed as separate problems belong together.
Use it to record the pattern. The offence is about repeated behaviour and its effect on you, so a record of single incidents is less useful than a record that shows the pattern. For each method you recognise, write down what he does, when it happened, and what you have changed in your life because of it. The changes matter: who you stopped seeing, what you stopped doing, what you now do to avoid a reaction. Our guide, Keep A Record, explains how to document abuse in a way that can be used later.
Keep any record safe. The statutory guidance itself warns that keeping records can put you at risk if he finds them. Do not keep notes on a shared device or anywhere he checks. If writing it down is not safe right now, do not do it.
Know that you can report it. Controlling or coercive behaviour is a crime in its own right. You do not need an injury, and you do not need to wait for it to become physical.
If you are in immediate danger, call 999.
The Women’s Railroad is the original practical guide to equip women with the knowledge and options to navigate and leave domestic abuse. If the chart describes your relationship, the guide is where to go next.
Go deeper
- Dictionary: Biderman’s chart of coercion, coercive control, isolation
- Read: What Coercive Control Can Actually Look Like, Is Checking My Phone and Messages Controlling Behaviour, The Cycle of Abuse: Why It Doesn’t Just Stop After One Incident
- Guides: Keep A Record shows you how to document what is happening safely. You can find them on our Get Help page.
