Dr Emma Katz

Profile

Biography

Overview

Dr Emma Katz is a leading expert on how coercive control impacts on children and young people.

Previously Associate Professor at Durham University, Dr Katz has been featured as an expert in multinational broadcast and print media including Al Jazeera, BBC and ITV, CBC, NBC, New York Daily News, The Financial Times, The Korea Times, NewsNation, and Newsweek.

Through 100s of talks to public audiences, and with 100,000 social media followers, Dr Katz is skilled in public engagement. She can break down her complex ideas in totally jargon-free ways to all publics, including to young people via Instagram and in popular mass media such as TV shows.

She uses this skill to disseminate her work through invited talks to audiences in relevant industries (law enforcement, criminal justice, judiciary, public sector work, charity sector work, local government, education, health care, and social work), creating multiple research impacts.

Her first monograph Coercive Control in Mothers’ and Children’s Lives (2022) was published by Oxford University Press. She has also worked with Professor Jeffrey Edleson (University of California, Berkeley) on an academic study of the Hague Abduction Convention.

Internationally, Dr Katz’s research is extensively used by organisations and practitioners at a global level. She has been cited in the governmental anti-domestic violence policies of a number of countries. She regularly delivers keynotes / invited speeches to audiences across the world – in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, New Zealand, Portugal, Singapore, United Kingdom and the United States. She has been an expert consultant on family courts to the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women and Girls, and has personally advised ministers from the French Government about the impacts of coercive control on children and families.

Her doctorate was an ESRC (UK Government Research Council) funded PhD on domestic violence, completed at the University of Nottingham in 2015.

Email: [email protected]

Research distinctions

• Internationally, Dr Katz produces heavily-cited research, with Sage Policy Profiles identifying 81 citations of Dr Katz’s research across 64 policy documents in 16 countries. Her research is extensively used by organisations and practitioners at a global level and is named in the anti-domestic violence policies of a number of governments.
• Dr Katz submitted a world-leading Impact Case Study to REF 2021.
• Dr Katz has been a PhD External Examiner five times so far, at five separate HEIs including at the University of Bristol.
• Dr Katz was PhD supervisor to Rajinder Kaur (2023) ‘The Criminalisation of Forced Marriage: Impacts on Britain’s Sikh and Muslim Community Members and On Their Traditions of Arranged Marriage’. She is also currently a visiting supervisor at Radboud University (Netherlands).
• Dr Katz has delivered more than 25 invited talks nationally and internationally since the start of 2025.
• Dr Katz uses her social media presence to communicate her research to the public. She has substantial followings accross Substack, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads, X, and Bluesky, totalling approximately 100,000 followers.
• Dr Katz 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, and the 2016 Corinna Seith Prize awarded by Women Against Violence Europe ‘WAVE’.
• Dr Katz’s work is highly read. For example, her 2020 article ‘When coercive control continues to harm children’ has had more than 75,000 reads. Its Altmetric Score is in the top 0.1% of all 33 million+ articles worldwide tracked by Altmetric. Her monograph is available as an audiobook due to high public interest in the work.

Dr Emma Katz can be contacted at [email protected] for:

• Invitations to speak via the media and at conferences and events;
• Potential PhD supervision on domestic violence and abuse or other gender-based violence issues.

Education and career history

• Dr Katz studied at the University of Nottingham, completing an ESRC-funded PhD on the subject of domestic violence in the School of Sociology and Social Policy. Prior to this, she completed an MA Research Methods (Distinction) and a BA (Hons) Sociology (First Class), all at the University of Nottingham.
• Prior to joining Edge Hill University in December 2023, Dr Katz was an Associate Professor in Sociology at Durham University (2023) and was a Lecturer then a Senior Lecturer in Childhood and Youth at Liverpool Hope University (2013-2022). 
• Dr Katz has been a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy since 2014.
• At Liverpool Hope University, Dr Katz won 3 awards for her teaching, as voted for by students.
• In 2019, Dr Katz completed the Advance HE Aurora leadership programme.
• Dr Katz has been appointed as external examiner for 5 PhD theses and one Masters dissertation in the UK and internationally, including at the University of Bristol, UK and University of Fort Hare, South Africa.
• Dr Katz has peer reviewed funding bids for the ESRC, AHRC and the NIHR.
• During her career, Dr Katz has spearheaded her institution’s REF 2021 submission to the Social Work and Social Policy Unit of Assessment, and held the role of Deputy Chair of the Board of Examiners in her department. 

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.

Current research project

• Co-investigator on Coercive Control and Transforming Practices of Power: Understanding the Experiences and Needs of Child Victims-Survivors. Principal Investigator: Professor Merja Laitinen. Funded by the Research Council of Finland. 2023-2027.

Expert advisory work

• Expert consultant to the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls. Consulted on report A/HRC/53/36: Custody, violence against women and violence against children (2023).
• Invited presentations to French government ministers in 2023 about the impacts of coercive control on children and families.
• Member of Expert Advisory Panel for the Domestic Abuse Policy Guidance for UK Universities, produced by the HARM Network/Research England. Project shortlisted for 2022 Times Higher Education Awards.

Monitoring and evaluations

• Monitoring and evaluation of ‘Survivors to Thrivers’ project at charity The First Step – completed 2019.

Media and presentations

• Dr Katz has been featured as a domestic abuse expert in broadcast and print media including Al Jazeera, BBC News at 10, BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio 5 Live, BBC Woman’s Hour, CBC News, New York Daily News, The Financial Times, Glamour, i News, ITV News, The Korea Times, The Metro, Ms Magazine, NBC News, News.com.au, NewsNation, and Newsweek (all since 2022).
• Dr Katz has delivered keynotes and invited presentations to industry audiences in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, New Zealand, Portugal, Singapore, United Kingdom and the United States.
• 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.
• From 2020-2022, she was a consultant to Channel 4’s television soap opera Hollyoaks, offering guidence on their domestic abuse related storyline.

Publications

Authored book

• Katz, Emma (2022). Coercive Control in Children’s and Mothers’ Lives. New York: Oxford University Press.

Journal articles

• Blake, Julie A., Peperkamp, Iris, Katz, Emma, Meyer, Silke & Datta O’Connor, Manjula (Submitted). Child Abuse & Neglect.

• Jyläskoski, Nenna, Katz, Emma, Laitinen, Merja, Lapierre, Simon, Nikupeteri, Anna & Thibault, Jacqueline (Submitted). Journal of Gender-Based Violence.

• Jyläskoski, Nenna, Katz, Emma, Laitinen, Merja, Lapierre, Simon, Nikupeteri, Anna, Rautio, Susanna & Thibault, Jacqueline (Under Review). Journal of Gender-Based Violence.

• Edleson, Jeffrey L. & Katz, Emma (2026). Protecting Children from Coercive Control: A Case for Denying Return Under the Hague Abduction Convention. Journal of Gender-Based Violence. Online Early View.

• Dalgarno, Elizabeth, Katz, Emma, Ayeb-Karlsson, Sonja, Barnett, Adrienne, Motosi, Paola, & Verma, Arpana (2024). ‘Swim, swim and die at the beach’: family court and perpetrator induced trauma (CPIT) experiences of mothers in Brazil. Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law 46(1): 11.

• 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 (2016). 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 (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 (2013). Domestic Violence, Children’s Agency and Mother-Child Relationships: Towards a More Advanced Model. Children & Society 29(1): 69.

Teaching

Dr Katz has extensive teaching and supervision experience during her career across multiple programmes at undergraduate, PGT and PhD levels.

She has led and contributed to teaching on a number of programmes:

• At undergraduate level: BA Childhood and Youth, BA Sociology and BA Criminology.

• At PGT level: MA Sociology and MA Social Work

Dr Katz has led modules including:

• Gender, Violence, and Abuse (MA)

• Domestic Abuse, Children and Young People (MA)

• Violence and Abuse in Society (BA)

• Questioning Myths About Domestic Violence (BA)

• Gendered Violence, Crime and Justice (BA)

• Coercive Control in Children's and Mothers' Lives