However destructive these behaviors may be, they are not always treated by law enforcement or courts as inappropriate on their own, reinforcing the belief that victims should be beaten and hospitalized before their accounts can be taken seriously. The question of how the justice system would treat them is not without reason: about 88% of the survivors interviewed by the ACLU said that the police did not believe them or blamed them for the abuse.
The new laws to deal with coercive behavior have raised some concerns from defenders who fear that – in lawsuits that lawyers in the area say are already against survivors – the standard of evidence can be very high, especially when employees lack the tools to identify and prove patterns of risky behavior. “Researchers understand coercive control as something that can help predict the outcome of a dangerous situation that becomes deadly,” said Rachel Louise Snyder, author of the 2019 book “No visible bruises: what we don’t know about domestic violence can kill us. “But, she added,” law enforcement doesn’t necessarily recognize that. “
Coercive control has been illegal in England and Wales since 2015, but 2018 saw the highest number of deaths related to domestic violence in five years, according to the BBC. The Center for Women’s Justice, a British watchdog group, filed complaints in 2019 and 2020, alleging “systematic failure” by the police to protect victims. “The police in the field don’t understand” coercive control, said Harriet Wistrich, the center’s director. Although there was some training, she emphasized that for the law to be more effective, the police, social workers and the courts need to have a common understanding of how emotional abuse can become a crime.
Others are concerned that, in the United States, the adoption and implementation of new laws may drain resources from survivors’ urgent logistical needs or other avenues for justice. A growing faction of advocates says the best answer is not in the criminal courts, with their racial and economic inequalities, but in alternatives based on dialogue, such as restorative justice.
Judy Harris Kluger, a retired New York judge who is the executive director of the non-profit organization Sanctuary for Families, said she agreed that coercive control is important as a concept. As a judge, however, “I prefer to have the energy to enforce the laws we have,” she said, “but also to focus on things other than litigation to deal with domestic violence,” such as funding for prevention, housing and job for survivors.
Still, supporters say that legally recognizing how harmful the problem is will make it easier to fight – and help to force a reckoning on its spread.
They point to Scotland as a potential model. Its domestic abuse laws enacted in 2019 focus on coercive control and include funding for training; most of its police and support staff took mandatory courses to understand the problem, said Detective Superintendent Debbie Forrester, who is responsible for Scotland’s police in cases of domestic violence. The judiciary also took classes. Beside a public campaign explaining that controlling behavior is illegal, the authorities warned the attackers that they would be examined: “We will speak to previous partners,” warned a police statement.