That's an excellent question. It can be very problematic, we agree.
When children are victims of such behaviour, their mothers are too, usually. If a mother is the victim of coercive control, for example, her child will be too.
I wouldn't think of children as lone victims of coercive control. Rather, it would be part of the relationship that parents have with each other. When it comes to intimate partner violence, children are usually left out of the equation. Yet they're not just witnesses, they're also part of a certain dynamic where they're controlled by the aggressor.
We can think of behaviours like simply looking at a child in a certain way to make him understand that he'd better behave, because we...