The above considerations should make it clear that what many people consider mind control would best be described by some other term, such as behavior modification, thought disruption, brain disabling, behavior manipulation, mind-coercion or electronic harassment. People are not now being turned into robots by hypnosis or brain implants. Furthermore, it should be obvious that given the state of knowledge in the neurosciences, the techniques for effective mind control are likely to be crude, and their mechanisms imperfectly understood.

Thus, if we restrict the term 'mind control' to those cases where a person successfully controls another person's thoughts or actions without their consent, our initial list of examples of what people consider to be mind control will be pared down to just five items: the tactics of religious, spiritual, and other New Age recruiters; the tactics of husbands who control their wives; the Stockholm syndrome; the so-called brainwashing tactics of the Chinese inquisitors of American prisoners during the Korean War; and the alleged creation of zombies in Voodoo. The last, however, can be dismissed as based either on fraud or on the use of drugs to render people helpless.

Wives who are terrorized by their husbands or boyfriends are not victims of mind control, but of fear and violence. Still, there seem to be many cases where a battered woman genuinely loves her man and genuinely believes he loves her. She stays, beating after beating, not because she fears what he will do to her if she leaves, but because she really doesn't want to leave. Perhaps. But perhaps she doesn't leave because she is completely dependent on her lover/batterer. She doesn’t stay just because she has nowhere to go. She needs him and stays because she is completely dependent on him. If a man can reduce a woman to a state of total dependency, he can control her. But is it true to say that he has controlled her mind? To what extent, if any, can a batterer take away the free will of his victim? He can reduce her choices so that staying with him is the only option she knows. What is the likelihood of this happening? It seems more likely that she will reduce her own choices by rationalizing his behavior and convincing herself that things will get better or that they really aren't that bad. If a man is not using brute force or the fear of violence to keep a woman around, then if she stays, it may be because of choices she has made in the past. Each time she was abused, she chose to stay. He may have used sweet and seductive talk to persuade her not to leave, but at some time in the relationship she was free to reject him. Otherwise, the relationship is based on fear and violence and mind control does not enter the picture. A woman who appears to be under the spell of a batterer is not a victim of mind control. She is a victim of her own bad choices. This is not to say that we should not sympathize with her plight or extend aid to her should she ask.  She is where she is through bad luck and a series of bad choices, not because of mind control, assuming, of course, that the woman is not mentally ill. In that case, it is Nature, not her man, that has reduced her capacity for free choice. The abuser takes advantage of the situation, but he does not create it..