Why is coercive control still misunderstood?

October is Domestic Abuse Awareness Month, so this is a good time to revisit coercive control. It has been a criminal offence in England and Wales since 2015. So why, eleven years later, does coercive control remain something that is still misunderstood, difficult to recognise and frequently under-reported?

Perhaps part of the answer is that coercive control is difficult to define. The Government definition describes it as an intentional pattern of behaviour. SafeLives describe it as a continuous pattern of behaviour. And Women’s Aid describe it as a system of behaviour that creates invisible chains. It’s difficult to put a clear definition on something that encompasses so many different facets.

I once worked with a group of survivors on an art project who described coercive control as a creature with many faces, hundreds of eyes, and thousands of tentacles that make their way into every area of their lives. That’s a disturbing image, but a good analogy, a nebulous “thing” that has eyes everywhere, on everything you do and everywhere you go, and takes control of every aspect of your being.

Some of the confusion has also been caused by the framework we historically used to address domestic abuse. We considered incidents. We prosecuted incidents. We sought legal protection based on incidents, and we still do, to some extent, under family law. But coercive control isn’t about single incidents, it’s about a pattern, a spiderweb, of behaviours that may or may not involve the incidents we were already familiar with.

Coercive control is bigger and wider than any one incident. It’s a pattern that gradually restricts someone’s freedom, autonomy, confidence, dress, behaviour, activity, networking, employment, parenting, finances, or ability to make choices about their own life or the lives of their children. It spans a wide spectrum and can involve extreme jealousy and possessiveness, verbal abuse, public humiliation, threats, blackmail or malicious allegations. It does not necessarily involve physical abuse. It’s possible to effectively control and dominate someone’s life without ever laying a finger on them, although the threat of violence is ever-present.

Another reason it can be hard to identify, is because some of the individual tactics of coercive control can appear, in isolation, to be familiar to us all. This huge spectrum includes behaviours that all humans resort to on occasion: name calling, verbal abuse, emotional blackmail or manipulation to get our needs met. But although all humans can behave poorly at times, that is not the same as launching a relentless pattern of behaviour designed to take control of someone’s life.

We need to continue the shift from focussing on incidents to looking for patterns. And that shift includes how we think about risk. There is still a common assumption that domestic homicide is preceded by an escalation of physical abuse, that things become increasingly violent until they eventually reach a lethal point. But the evidence tells us that we need to think about escalation more broadly.

Research by Professor Jane Monckton Smith identified the eight-stage timeline leading to homicide. Crucially, her model does not define escalation simply as increasing violence. The Home Office’s analysis of Domestic Homicide Reviews also demonstrates how significant coercive control is within homicide cases. And research by Dobash and Dobash has also challenged the assumption that homicide is preceded by escalating violence. Their work highlights homicide in the context of increasing coercion and control, particularly where the perpetrator’s control is threatened or challenged.

So, when we’re assessing risk, we need to look beyond the question: “Has the violence increased?” We also need to ask: Has the control increased? Has the stalking increased? Are the threats becoming more serious? Has something happened that challenges the perpetrator’s control?

Because while incidents remain important. Context can be more important still. Only by helping people to join up the dots can everyone begin to see the bigger picture of coercive control. Hopefully, shining a light on the creature with many faces, will help to demystify it and take away some of its power.