Coercive control and intimate partner homicide

Abstract

Over the past decade, there has been a paradigm shift away from understanding intimate partner violence (IPV) as comprising single discrete instances of physical abuse towards a more comprehensive and accurate paradigm based on coercive control: a model of abuse that encompasses a range of strategies or tactics used by men to dominate individual women in their personal life. Despite this shift, domestic violence laws continue to coalesce around an incident-specific focus and weigh the severity of abuse by the level of force used or injury inflicted. This chapter considers how coercive control as a criminological concept has become central to contemporary understandings of domestic abuse and intimate partner homicide. It discusses how the concept of coercive control challenges the focus on physical injury in the development of risk assessments for domestic abuse and intimate partner homicide. The chapter also considers how coercive control has the potential to inform the criminal defences of women who are victims of domestic violence and who kill their abusers. While there is controversy about the desirability of introducing a specific family violence offence modelled on coercive control, this approach to domestic abuse is not restricted to the introduction of new offences. Recent efforts to tender evidence of coercive control in the trials of women who have killed an abusive partner have confronted significant difficulties, but feminist commentators suggest it is a strategy that should be pursued. While the concept of coercive control has increasingly become part of the language and thinking of feminist research and legal and policy responses to domestic abuse and intimate partner homicide, the chapter concludes that more work needs to be done if we are to truly reorient our understandings of IPV as a liberty crime.