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Since the 1980s, victims’ voices have been increasingly heard and have been influential in policy debates. Since that time, the nature and presence of those voices has changed shape and form from the influence and presence of victim centred organizations to the rise of the high profile individual victim. The purpose of this article is to explore the presence of one victim’s story, Rosie Batty, and to examine her influence on the rise of the policy agenda on family violence in Australia. This article considers the ways in which this story gained traction and influenced the reform of family violence policy in Australia, and considers the extent to which an understanding of this process contributes to an (emergent) narrative victimology.

In 2015 in England and Wales a new offence of controlling or coercive behaviour was introduced with the aim of improving legal responses to intimate partner violence. Recognizing the historical limits of legal interventions in this area, this article examines the efficacy of coercive control as a conceptual device for improving access to law and justice outcomes for women victims. To do so, it considers the problems and possibilities of translating a concept generated from clinical practice into legal practice alongside an exploration of the potential unintended consequences of this new offence. The gendered analysis undertaken here reveals the limitations of framing women’s experiences as ‘coercive control’ in law and concludes that, in the case of coercive control, more law is not the answer to improving responses to intimate partner violence.

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