What is coercive control and why is it so difficult to recognize?

a post by Charlotte Barlow, Sandra Walklate and Kelly Johnson for the OUP blog


“Grayscale Photograph of Woman Touching Her Eyes” by Juan Pablo Arenas. CC0 via Pexels

Engaging in controlling and/or coercive behaviour in intimate or familial relationships became a new criminal offence in England and Wales in December 2015.

Coercive Control involves a pattern of abuse that is used to harm, punish, or frighten the victim.

Example behaviours included in this legislation are

• isolation from friends and family,
• deprivation of basic needs,
• monitoring behaviour and time,
• controlling a victim’s life and/or finances, and
• may include physical violence.

The introduction of this offence was welcomed for recognising the cumulative impact of various forms of domestic abuse and for encouraging police and other criminal justice agencies to move beyond an incident-led and physical violence-based understanding of domestic abuse.

However, four years on since the legislation was enacted and with no compulsory national level training or support, what has actually changed?

Coercive control as an offence carries implications for how we record and understand coercive control and domestic abuse victimisation more broadly in the UK. Despite recent figures suggesting an increase in recorded crimes of coercive control (from approximately 4,000 in 2016-17 to over 9,000 in 2018-19), prosecutions and convictions for the offence remain consistently low.

This is in contrast to other domestic-abuse related crimes, namely those that result in actual bodily harm, which are 20% more likely to result in an arrest and a charge.

Furthermore, the Office for National Statistics recently removed coercive and controlling behaviour questions from the Crime Survey for England and Wales because of uncertainty as to whether the questions were adequately capturing victims of the offence.

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See also:
Putting Coercive Control into Practice: Problems and Possibilities
Charlotte Barlow, Kelly Johnson, Sandra Walklate, Les Humphreys
The British Journal of Criminology, azz041,
Full text (PDF 20pp)

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