If you have been following the trends in domestic violence, there is a chic new term which is being used by victims and advocates all over the world.
That term is coercive control.
In some countries, governments have made it illegal to engage in coercive control.
For instance, both England and Wales made coercive control a crime in 2015.
At first, it seemed sweet. Natalie Curtis’s boyfriend called her dozens of times a day, keen to hear every detail of what she was doing in her daily life: what she ate for lunch, who she saw at work.
But she says the longer she spent with him, and particularly after they married in 2016, four years after meeting, the more his behavior became intimidating. He made comments about what she ate. He picked fights when she went out with her friends. He threw her things around their house. He berated her while out shopping. One night, she says, he even threatened to kill her. “It’s such a drip effect, each event gets a bit worse and a bit worse,” Curtis says, speaking softly from her home in Essex, southeast England. “And then someone has control over you.”
“Coercive control” is the label domestic abuse experts give to the experience that Curtis, a 38-year-old safety specialist on the U.K.’s railways, endured. It encompasses a series of non-physical behaviors — including threats, humiliation, monitoring and isolation from friends and family — that they say can be just as damaging as physical violence, often causing severe depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. In 2015, England and Wales became the first nations in the world to criminalize such controlling behavior within relationships, making coercive control punishable by up to five years in jail. Women make up 95% of those who experience coercive control and 74% of perpetrators are men, according to a study by one U.K. police force.
Thus far, the US has not followed suit with its European counterparts.
Although psychological abuse and coercive control are not illegal in the U.S., many domestic violence organizations train law enforcement responders to recognize signs of the behaviors. According to Vickie Smith, Executive director of Illinois Coalition Against Domestic Violence, her organization trains law enforcement officers to perform a risk assessment in domestic violence cases, where they ask a series of questions about what occurs in the relationship on a regular basis. If law enforcement enters a house with broken items, Smith says it’s important for officers to figure out who owns those items, since abusers will often break sentimental objects belonging to the victim.
Despite these educational efforts, assessing domestic violence and whether coercive control figures in is often very challenging for law enforcement. Kristine Lizdas, legal policy director of the Battered Women’s Justice Project, said that in violent and nonviolent situations, it’s difficult for officers to determine which person is the abuser, especially because often times, when the police are called, it is because the victim is particularly emotional. Someone who has been subject to coercive control might in any given situation appear to be the instigator of a conflict.
Actually, according to the website Biometrica, two states have made coercive control illegal.
If you are like me, you hope the day never comes when someone can go to jail for coercive control.
Just as my article on gender bias was bound to upset many of my readers, my position on coercive control is bound to do the same.
Some people treat coercive control in a cult like manner.
That’s not to say that psychological abuse is not real, or that there are no controlling people in the world.
There are definitely controlling people; I know from personal experience.
My problem with coercive control is independent of that.
