Coercive control is a form of intimate terrorism and must be criminalised
Adebate is developing across Australia – one with increasing momentum but some emerging divisiveness. Should Australia’s criminal laws recognise domestic abuse in all its guises and condemn what many victims describe as the worst parts: coercive control?
Coercive control describes a broad range of behaviours that one person (usually a man) uses to intimidate, humiliate, surveil, gaslight and isolate another person (usually a female intimate partner) and strip them of their sense of autonomy and self-worth so as to have control over them.
Specific behaviours can range from a man deleting contacts from his wife’s phone and using spyware to monitor her movements; to threatening to harm children, relatives and pets; to outright physical and sexual violence.
Research shows this collection of abusive behaviours – sometimes referred to as “intimate terrorism” – can be devastating when experienced cumulatively, increasing the risk of victims becoming homeless, suicidal, having poor health outcomes, sliding into poverty and committing offences themselves. It is also the most common element in domestic homicides: a recent review in New South Wales found that 77 out of 78 domestic perpetrators had used coercive control on their partners before they killed them.
For some men, killing their partners and/or children will be their first act of physical violence, but they almost uniformly have a history of perpetrating coercive control.
So why the divisiveness about criminalising this insidious conduct, this well-known red flag for intimate partner homicide? Quite frankly, it’s because a small group of well-respected advocates and criminologists are nihilistic about the ability of the justice system to protect women.
In a way, that’s understandable. Many victims of domestic abuse have had negative experiences with the justice system. They’ve been disbelieved, they’ve had the violence minimised, they’ve been relegated to second-class participants in criminal proceedings, and they’ve even been misidentified as the perpetrator of abuse rather than the victim.
But these are not issues that are specific to a coercive control offence. When these arguments are used to oppose criminalising coercive control they reflect a defeatist attitude about the justice system as a whole. Accepting this line of reasoning would warrant decriminalising breaches of intervention orders, physical assaults, and even rape, because prosecuting each of these offences is clearly imperfect.
Yes, the justice system is limited, but it’s what we have. So we work to improve laws and community attitudes relating to sexual assault and domestic and family violence rather than abandon the task. Adding a coercive control offence – accompanied by training for police and the judiciary – can make criminal justice responses better.
At the moment, when police are called as first responders to a family violence incident, they’re on the lookout for individual incidents. Who hit who? Who isn’t supposed to be here?
On with the handcuffs. Off you go. If a victim has defended herself, she may find herself being charged with assault, or having police dismiss the complaint because “she’s as bad as he is”.
A coercive control offence can change that, as we’ve begun to see across the United Kingdom and in Ireland. When done right, the introduction of this new offence includes extensive consultation with the domestic and family violence sector; an iterative drafting process that acknowledges the local context in which the offence will operate; and an extensive lead-in period during which everyone – police, prosecutors, the judiciary, other frontline responders, support workers,
literally anyone whose work somehow relates to domestic and family violence – is trained about the new offence and coercive control more generally.
The consequent change in thinking could lead to a cultural change that has long been missing in Australia’s response to domestic and family violence. We need an entire system ready and willing to identify and appropriately respond to abuse without the incident-based blinders that currently obscure so much of it.
There are other objections to a new offence, but none of them hold up under scrutiny:
“This will be hard to prove.” Yes, but so are stalking and child sexual abuse.
Presumably we don’t plan on decriminalising those any time soon?
“Police will mistakenly identify women as the perpetrator again, repeating the mistakes of the past, and leading to the criminalisation of women, particularly marginalised women such as Indigenous women, migrant and refugee women, and women with disability.” Not only is there no empirical evidence of this occurring in any country where a coercive control offence has been enacted, but criminalising coercive control can actually have the reverse effect. If police are trained about the real nature of domestic abuse, they will not only be alert for coercive control offending when it’s reported, but also be more prepared to view family violence matters through a whole new lens, one that can explain why she hit him tonight – because it was the culmination of months, even years, of his abuse.
“It’s too hard to define coercive control.” Really? Those hard-to-define terms “psychological abuse”, “economic abuse” and yes, even “coerce or control” can already be found in domestic and family violence laws across Australia. We certainly will need to clearly define and outline the scope of a coercive control offence but it is not an impossible task.
“So it’s now a crime to have a normal argument in a relationship?” No. Absolutely not. We challenge anyone to find a single case where someone has been prosecuted for coercive control in the UK or Ireland and tell us it was an overreach. Because we’ve read the cases. And in each and every instance the abuse was prolonged, severe and wholly unacceptable.
“We need more evidence.” About what? We can’t prove that an offence actually deters coercive control or stops a man from killing his partner. You can’t measure what doesn’t happen. What we do know is that this is a genuinely harmful form of behaviour, and that most domestic and family violence survivors and frontline specialists believe it should be criminalised.
With our evolved understanding of domestic abuse there is simply no excuse to leave this behaviour uncriminalised and make this yet another product of patriarchal society that women must bear alone.
• Geraldine Bilston, victim-survivor and advocate; Yvette Cehtel, CEO of Women’s Legal Service Tasmania; Brad Chilcott, executive director of White Ribbon Australia; Annabelle Daniel OAM, CEO of Women’s Community Shelters; Hayley Foster, CEO of Women’s Safety NSW; Fiona Hamilton, Aboriginal victim-survivor and advocate; Jess Hill, author of See What You Made Me Do; Paul McGorrery, PhD candidate at Deakin Law School; Marilyn McMahon, deputy dean of Deakin Law School; Nithya Reddy, advocate and Preethi Reddy’s sister; Sally Stevenson AM, general manager of Illawarra Women’s Health Centre; Karen Williams, founder of Doctors Against Violence Towards Women.