Methodology
How MendRii's content is developed
MendRii's educational material is written from published research on coercive control and intimate partner violence, together with guidance from recognized domestic-violence organizations. Where a concept belongs to a specific researcher, that researcher is named and linked.
Five things MendRii asks you to hold together
Behavior first, not motive
MendRii describes what is happening in the words in front of it. It does not tell you why someone did something, what they intended, or what kind of person they are. Nobody can read motive out of a text message, and software least of all.
Context decides almost everything
The same behavior can be ordinary or restricting depending on whether it was freely agreed, whether it goes both ways, whether it can be renegotiated, and what happens when you say no. Shared location between two people who both chose it is not the same thing as being required to prove where you were.
Pattern and mechanism, not a single moment
One argument, one bad night, one disputed memory, one defensive reaction — these are part of being human. What research describes as coercive control is repetition, and a way that compliance gets maintained over time.
Impact on autonomy
The question MendRii keeps returning to is whether you have become more or less free to make ordinary choices — what you say, wear, spend, post, study, pursue, and who you see. That is a reflection, never a number.
Trajectory
Is something isolated, recurring, spreading into more areas of your life, or changing over time? Direction of travel matters more than any single answer.
What MendRii is not
MendRii is not a diagnostic tool, a validated screening instrument, a clinical assessment, a risk, danger or lethality assessment, or a legal evidence tool. It does not determine whether abuse occurred, whether anyone is abusive, whether a relationship is safe or unsafe, or what anyone is likely to do next. It produces no score.
Some of the concepts and measures MendRii draws on have been studied and validated by researchers. That does not make MendRii itself validated — it is educational software built on top of that literature, and it has not been psychometrically tested.
Where popular language runs ahead of the evidence — terms like “love bombing,” “trauma bonding” or “narcissistic abuse” — MendRii either avoids the term or describes the observable behavior instead and says plainly how uncertain the research is.
Sources
- Evan Stark — Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life (Oxford)
The scholarship that reframed abuse around liberty, autonomy and everyday restriction rather than incidents of violence.
- Dutton & Goodman — Coercion in intimate partner violence: toward a new conceptualization
Describes coercion as a process: a demand, a credible consequence, and the surrounding conditions that make compliance likely.
- CDC — Intimate partner violence and the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS)
Prevalence data and definitions for physical violence, sexual violence, stalking and psychological aggression.
- The National Domestic Violence Hotline — coercive control
Plain-language survivor-facing description of controlling behavior and support options.
- NNEDV Safety Net — technology and abuse
Guidance on technology-facilitated monitoring, location tracking, account access and device safety.
- Jennifer J. Freyd — DARVO research
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. The term and the concept are Dr. Freyd's; MendRii teaches it with attribution and links to her own work.
- Adams et al. — Scale of Economic Abuse
Research on economic control, exploitation and employment interference.
- Grace & Anderson — Reproductive coercion: a systematic review
Peer-reviewed synthesis on pregnancy pressure, contraceptive interference and reproductive control.
The limits of the AI part
When you paste text, a large language model reads it and describes what the language may resemble. It can be wrong in both directions: it can miss something serious, and it can point at something that is entirely ordinary in your particular relationship. It cannot know your history, your context, or anyone's intent. Read how it works for the mechanics, and privacy for what happens to what you paste.