INCORPORATED

COERCION

INCORPORATED

A memoir of coercive control, family court failure, and the system that punishes women and children for surviving.

She left the relationship. She did not leave the abuse.

ALL IN. ALL BETRAYED.

The Hidden Architecture of Control

A decade. A marriage. A child. A life built around his rules. She fled. The abuse did not stop. It changed address, moving from the bedroom, the kitchen and the family car into legal letters, affidavits, court hearings and supervised contact.

Coercion Incorporated is the forensic account of both halves of that story. What happened inside the relationship, and what happened after, when the system she ran to for protection handed him new ways to reach her. It is memoir and education in one place, drawing on the work of Evan Stark, Lundy Bancroft and Dr Emma Katz, so the reader understands not only what was done, but how it works.

She names what he did. She names what the system did. She names what needs to change.

A love letter to her children. A warning to the system. A manifesto for every woman still inside it, and every child whose body remembered what the courtroom would not hear.

The night before I left, I lay beside him in the dark and listened to him snore. I had made a calculation. The kind you make when you have spent years learning the architecture of someone else’s anger. If I stayed still. If I made no sound. If I did not flinch one inch. I might get through until morning.

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“The court and the relationship run on the same currency: your silence, purchased through coercion and exhaustion.”

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Sometimes the institution is worse than the man.

The Author

Adeline Burnet is a professional, a mother, and a woman who spent a decade inside a coercively controlling relationship while building a life the world could see. She documented everything. She kept the receipts. This book is the result.

She wrote it because the system required her silence, and silence was no longer something she was willing to give. She writes on coercive control, post separation abuse and institutional betrayal on Substack. She lives in Australia with her children and a dog who has no idea how important he is.