Is more law the answer? Seeking justice for victims of intimate partner violence through the reform of legal categories

Abstract

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.

The ‘Coercive Control Framework’: Making Law Work for Women

“…Although the larger role of law enforcement is much debated in Scotland, the view of coercive control as a bespoke offence against women's rights is shared across a broad spectrum of actors. This view is not universally shared in England, Australia or America, however, not even among feminists (for example, see Walklate et al 2017;Tolmie 2018).…”

“…Perhaps most confounding are cases where high levels of fear appear to have been evoked in victims by offender behaviours other than violence. Tolmie (2018) and Walklate et al (2017) have warned that, regardless of what definitions police are given, the narrow purview of a justice system attuned to physically violent incidents will constrain its response in these cases to extreme violence and thereby perpetuate the false impression that coercive control is rare. This is not, however, what has happened in England thus far.…”

“…Some of our critics reject attempts to enhance the state police response to male tyranny in personal life as naïve or ill-conceived because 'more law' (sic!) simply adds weight to the already top-heavy patriarchal Golgotha (Walklate et al 2017).…”

“…I find the level of harm to women and children which these critics minimise, ignore or tolerate morally and politically unacceptable. At the other end of the spectrum are those who oppose reform because the little progress made in policing the most common partner assaults will be lost if the emphasis shifts from incidents to patterns, or from physical injury to such intangibles as control and subordination (Walby and Towers 2017;Walklate et al 2017). Here the liberal state is seen as fixed in its capacity to respond to women at the status quo.…”

“…As our critics rightly suspect (Walby and Towers 2017;Walklate et al 2017;Tolmie 2018), expanding the definition from domestic violence to coercive control shifts the level of behaviour on which the law focuses, not merely its empirical content. From the incident to historical abuse or the pattern or course of conduct; from violence to other 'bad' acts, some of which are already criminal, some of which are only crimes now when committed by strangers and some of which become elements of a criminal pattern only in combination with other 'bad' acts; from injury and the intent to harm to a range of less tangible outcomes, including a 'reasonable probability' of causing fear.…”