The officer takes the statement in the kitchen. There has been no assault. What there has been is this: he checks her phone every night, he sets the amount she may spend each week, he has told her which friends she may see and she no longer sees any of them, he times her journeys home, he moves the car keys, he has explained many times that she is unwell and that people can tell. She is describing a life. The officer is looking for an incident, because an incident is what the law recognises, and there is not one.
For most of the history of domestic violence law, that conversation ended there.
Evan Stark, a sociologist and forensic social worker at Rutgers University, published Coercive Control in 2007. Its central claim was that the criminal law had defined domestic abuse around the wrong unit. The law counted assaults. The women he had worked with for thirty years described something else: a continuous condition of domination, made up of intimidation, isolation, surveillance, and the regulation of the small routines of daily life, in which physical violence might be rare, or absent, or only a memory that kept the rest of the system running.
Stark called this coercive control and compared it to hostage-taking or kidnapping: an offence against liberty rather than against the body. Measured by incidents, the woman in the kitchen has suffered nothing. Measured by liberty, she has lost most of hers.
The idea had a scholarly lineage. Michael Johnson at Pennsylvania State University had argued in 1995 that the survey data on domestic violence conflated two different things: occasional, often mutual, situational violence between partners, and what he first called patriarchal terrorism and later intimate terrorism, a systematic project of control, overwhelmingly by men against women. The Duluth Power and Control Wheel had put isolation, economic abuse, intimidation and the use of children on the same diagram as physical violence since 1984. Stark's contribution was to insist that the pattern, not the violence, was the crime.
England and Wales acted first among large jurisdictions. Section 76 of the Serious Crime Act 2015 created the offence of controlling or coercive behaviour in an intimate or family relationship, in force from 29 December 2015, with a maximum sentence of five years. The offence requires behaviour that is repeated or continuous, that has a serious effect on the victim, and that the perpetrator knew or ought to have known would have that effect. It does not require any physical violence at all.
The drafting is the point. The offence is defined by a course of conduct and its effect, not by any single act. That is the shift from incidents to patterns, written into statute. Home Office statutory guidance, first issued in 2015 and revised in 2023, lists examples that would once have been legally invisible: isolating a person from friends and family, monitoring their time, controlling their finances, depriving them of basic needs, repeatedly putting them down.
The Domestic Abuse Act 2021 went further, giving domestic abuse a statutory definition that includes controlling or coercive behaviour alongside physical, sexual, economic and psychological abuse, and amending the 2015 offence so that it no longer required the perpetrator and victim to be living together. Ex-partners who continue to control from a distance were brought inside the law.
Scotland took a different route with the Domestic Abuse (Scotland) Act 2018, which made the course of abusive behaviour itself the offence rather than adding a new offence beside the old ones. Ireland's Domestic Violence Act 2018 created a coercive control offence. In Australia, Tasmania had criminalised economic and emotional abuse as early as 2004; New South Wales passed a coercive control offence in 2022 and other states have followed.
Sally Challen killed her husband Richard with a hammer in August 2010, after a marriage of more than thirty years. She was convicted of murder in 2011. Her defence had not used the language of coercive control, because the concept had no legal standing at the time. In 2019 the Court of Appeal quashed the conviction and ordered a retrial, having heard fresh psychiatric evidence framed around Stark's concept. The prosecution then accepted a plea of manslaughter on grounds of diminished responsibility, and she was released, having served her sentence. The case did not create a defence of coercive control. It established that a pattern of control could be relevant evidence of what a person's mental state had been.
The honest position is that the law is young and the research on it is thin. Charlotte Barlow and colleagues examined the use of the new offence in one English police force in the years after 2015 and found it recorded rarely relative to other domestic abuse offences, with officers struggling to recognise patterns and to gather evidence of them. Incident-based training and incident-based record systems do not switch off because a statute changes.
Andy Myhill of the College of Policing showed in 2015 that national crime surveys, designed to count incidents, could nonetheless be re-read to identify a group of victims experiencing coercive control, and that this group differed sharply from the rest in the severity and repetition of what they reported. Jane Monckton Smith at the University of Gloucestershire, reviewing hundreds of intimate partner homicides, proposed in 2020 an eight-stage progression to killing in which coercive control was present from the early stages, well before any escalation the law would previously have recorded.
Whether criminalisation reduces abuse, or increases reporting, or changes how police respond, is not yet established. What the law has done is give the woman in the kitchen a name for what is happening to her, and the officer a box to record it in. For a category of harm that had no legal existence a decade ago, that is a large change, even before anyone has measured its effect.