In his book Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life (2007), the American sociologist Evan Stark, who has died aged 82, developed a new understanding of domestic abuse that has since been taken up by governments, justice systems, activists and survivors around the world. Incidents of physical assault, he argued, were only the most visible part of domestic abuse.

Drawing on 30 years of research as a forensic social worker, he documented a broader and more devastating pattern of manipulative behaviours and subjugation, closer to kidnapping or slavery, that he called “coercive control”. His book showed in detail how abusive men use coercive control to subvert women’s autonomy, isolate them from friends and family and deny them access to the basic resources needed by most people.

Stark revealed a phenomenon that he explained had been hiding in plain sight. His research helped to show that coercive control is domestic abuse at its most dangerous: its presence or absence is a better indicator of a future homicide than the existence of physical violence alone.

Recognition of that fact has led governments around the world to introduce new criminal offences, based on Stark’s work. With the Serious Crime Act of 2015, England and Wales became the first jurisdiction in the world to criminalise coercive control. By 2021, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Ireland had all followed suit. New South Wales, Australia passed coercive control laws in 2022 and Canada is expected to pass similar legislation this year.

These criminal justice reforms not only have the potential to save lives but also help abused women reframe their views about themselves. Recognising coercive control as a criminal offence counters the gaslighting so typical of coercive control, which can make women blame themselves for the abuse. Beyond a legislative context, Stark also shaped the scholarly understanding of abuse and its representation in the media. “Coercive control” is now a key term used internationally.

Stark was born in a housing cooperative in Queens, New York. His mother, Alice (nee Fox), worked as a secretary for the civil rights leader A Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first successful Black union in the US. Evan’s father, Irwin Stark, was a writer, teacher, and pacifist. Evan attended Roosevelt high school in Yonkers, going on to study sociology at Brandeis University, where he also became involved in the civil-rights movement as a student representative of CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality.

After graduating from Brandeis in 1963, he pursued his PhD at the University of Wisconsin, but his graduate fellowship was withdrawn in 1967, in retaliation for his role as a leader of protests against the war in Vietnam. From 1971 to 1975, Stark was an assistant professor of sociology at Quinnipiac University, in Hamden, Connecticut. He later earned his PhD at the State University of New York, Binghamton, in 1984, and a master’s in social work at Fordham University. He then established an independent private practice in forensic social work.

In 1977 Stark married Anne Flitcraft, an American doctor and an early researcher of the epidemiology of domestic abuse, focusing on the implications of abuse on women’s health. In 1978 the couple travelled to Britain to visit one of the first refuges - Chiswick Women’s Aid, in west London, which was set up by Erin Pizzey in 1971. They also visited safe houses operated by Women’s Aid in the Midlands.

On returning to the US, they worked with a small group to found a shelter in New Haven, Connecticut. In the following decade, Stark and Flitcraft influenced local and national policy in the US, co-chairing the task force on domestic violence prevention within the US Surgeon General’s Workshop on Violence and Public Health in 1985.

From 1995, Stark became a professor at Rutgers University, in Newark, New Jersey, and turned his attention to the legal and theoretical implications of his earlier grassroots work. He began to give expert evidence for abused women in criminal and civil trials, gaining an extensive knowledge of the experiences of survivors that formed the basis of the theory and reform proposals that he put forward in Coercive Control.

Stark retired from teaching at Rutgers in 2012, and in the following years devoted himself to his legal work. He spoke extensively on the need to reform traditional criminal justice responses to domestic abuse.

It was the UK and the Commonwealth that proved to be initially most receptive to his ideas. His keynote address at the Scottish Women’s Aid 30th birthday celebrations, in 2006, first convinced campaigners in Scotland that a new approach to the criminalisation of domestic abuse was needed.

Seven years later, while Stark was Leverhulme visiting professor at the University of Edinburgh, Bill Walker, a Scottish MSP, was convicted of 23 assault charges against three of his former wives and a step-daughter. As the Scottish judge Kathrine Mackie sentenced Walker to the maximum permitted punishment (one year’s imprisonment), she echoed Stark’s research in her summing up. What was most notable about Walker’s abuse, she wrote, was the bullying and coercive behaviour that was not in itself criminal at that time.

In 2019 Stark flew to London to give expert evidence at the court of appeal in the case of Sally Challen, who had killed her husband in 2010 and was sentenced to life in prison for murder. After the criminalisation of coercive control in England in 2015, Challen had appealed her conviction, arguing that her husband had engaged in “controlling or coercive behaviour”. Stark’s evidence helped the court and the public understand the impact of the coercive control on Sally and her murder conviction was quashed.

Stark was a disciplined writer, often starting his work before sunrise and was renowned among friends and family for his stories and acerbic wit. He circulated annotated lists of the literature that had moved him each year, sometimes running to three pages in length, which were famous among colleagues, family and friends. He also loved to play the piano, especially jazz standards and musicals, singing loudly and often with no prior warning. He was sometimes the oldest personon the dance floor by several decades.

Stark is survived by Anne and their sons, Sam, Daniel and Eli; a son, Aaron, from his first marriage, to Sally Connolly, which ended in divorce; three grandchildren, Adrian, Ezra, and Ash; and his sister, Joyce.

• Evan David Stark, sociologist, born 10 March 1942; died 18 March 2024