Making Invisible Patterns Visible

Making Invisible Patterns Visible

Coercive control is rarely a single dramatic incident — it is a pattern, woven across hundreds of ordinary moments that, in isolation, can seem unremarkable. In this demonstration, Rich Simon shows how artificial intelligence can be trained to recognize those patterns by grounding it in the field’s most rigorous frameworks: Evan Stark’s model of coercive control as a liberty crime, Emma Katz’s child-centered lens on how control pervades family life, Christine Cocchiola’s work on the malicious fracturing of attachment, and Lisa Fontes’ taxonomy of controlling behaviors across diverse relationships. Using survivor accounts as source material, Rich will walk attendees through how AI — when prompted with precision and theoretical grounding — can map a constellation of tactics across isolation, financial abuse, surveillance, emotional manipulation, and intimidation, surfacing the overarching pattern of entrapment that survivors have lived but that systems have so often failed to see.

This is not a session about replacing human judgment. It is about giving every advocate, clinician, family court professional, and first responder a sharper lens — one built on decades of survivor-centered scholarship — that can make the invisible visible, and the unnamed finally nameable.

Speakers