In June 2011, Sally Challen was sentenced to life in prison for murdering her husband, Richard, with a hammer in their family home in Surrey, U.K.
During her trial, the prosecution painted Sally as a possessive wife who had just “snapped.” But Sally and Richard’s two boys, James and David, describe a very different scene behind closed doors. “The atmosphere always changed when my father got home from work,” their youngest son, James, told The Guardian. “Everyone was on edge.” The brothers would go on to detail years of psychological, financial, and emotional abuse within their household, describing a pattern of demeaning and humiliating Sally, isolating her from friends and family, and maintaining complete control over family finances.
Richard’s behaviour, though limited in its deployment of physical violence, demonstrates what experts say is often a more insidious pattern of domestic abuse known as “coercive control.”
In 2015, England and Wales became the first countries to pass a bill criminalizing coercive control. As a result, Sally’s defence was able to submit evidence demonstrating the grave impact that decades of this form of abuse had on Sally’s mental state. Her charge was reduced to “manslaughter;” she was formally released with time served on June 7, 2019.
In Canada, a private member’s bill that would criminalize coercive control as a form of intimate partner violence (IPV) was introduced by MP Laurel Collins last year and was well on its way to becoming law before Parliament was prorogued on Jan. 6.
Andrea Silverstone, Chief Executive Officer of Sagesse, an organization committed to disrupting the structure of abuse for individuals, organizations and communities, describes coercive control as a pattern of behaviour characterized by a “sense of fear and being so afraid that even in the absence of physical violence you’re unable to make decisions that are in your own best interest.”
Silverstone, who helped Collins author the bill, says that it’s essential for people to understand more about coercive control, in part because of how pervasive the issue is. “Only about 20 to 30 per cent of domestic abuse situations involve physical violence, but 95 per cent of intimate partner violence involves coercive control,” she says.
When Bill C-332 passed unanimously in the House of Commons on June 12, 2024, it had been updated to outline a detailed list of 10 primary patterns of behaviour ranging from controlling or attempting to control an intimate partner’s communication with others, finances, employment, appearance and using or threatening to use violence against the partner, children, others known to the partner or pets.
Had it passed in the Senate, the bill would have modified the existing criminal code to include up to a 10-year prison sentence for those committed of coercive and controlling behaviour, following suit with similar laws in England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland and New South Wales in Australia.
The controversy of criminalizing coercive control
Pamela Cross, a feminist lawyer and member of Ontario’s Domestic Violence Death Review Committee, says the bill received widespread popularity in part because it’s a “feel-good bill.”
Though Cross was heavily involved in the committee process for Bill C-332 and advocated for many of the changes that were made before it was passed in the House, she says she doesn’t see criminalization as an effective tool in reducing IPV.
One study found that in the year following the implementation of coercive control legislation in England and Wales, 4,686 defendants were prosecuted for coercive and controlling behaviour.
Of those, only five per cent were convicted, with only 4.7 per cent receiving sentencing. While the report highlights that low conviction rates are generally expected within the first few years, “low convictions … can raise questions about the effectiveness of a coercive control law.”
“I worry that women won’t report [coercive control] for the same reasons they don’t report other kinds of abuse,” Cross says.
One survey highlights that in 2019, 80 per cent of people in Canada who experienced IPV did not report it to police. The same survey states that some of the reasons for not reporting include the belief that abuse is a private matter, that the incident is not important enough to report or fears of court system intervention and lack of trust in the criminal justice system.
“[Most of our existing laws] are designed by men for men,” says Lana Wells, associate professor at the Faculty of Social Work at the University of Calgary.
Wells says she is skeptical of efforts to criminalize coercive control, specifically because of the criminal justice system’s tainted history in aiding marginalized groups. “What we’ve learned from Indigenous and racialized communities in particular is that the legal system does not serve them … I’m just not sure this is the best place to deal with this.”
Studies show that Indigenous women face unique barriers to reporting IPV, including a lack of culturally appropriate resources, distrust of law enforcement and a perceived lack of confidentiality in the justice system. They are also more likely to experience IPV than other women on average, with 67 per cent having experienced IPV compared to 44 per cent.
“We’re talking about a much more hidden kind of abuse…we can’t just write a new law and hope that everybody can figure out what it means.”
Cross adds that criminalizing coercive control runs the risk of adding another tool for abusers to use against their victims. “A clever abuser can create a situation where he can convince the police that it’s the victim who has been engaging in coercive control and then she ends up being the one to potentially face charges.”
Further, Cross argues that it could create unwanted complications within family law. She says an abuser could attempt to use an acquittal in Criminal Court to their advantage in Family Court. “[Despite the fact that I’m in] Family Court describing 10 years of a variety of abusive behaviours, that acquittal in Criminal Court is going to interfere with my claims in Family Court.”
“With coercive control, there’s often nothing to show for it in a criminal kind of way, so I think we’re going to see a lot of not guilty findings and that’s going to get dragged into Family Court. Not because that’s what the law says but because we aren’t as a society well enough educated [around this issue].”
What could a future coercive control bill get right?
A report co-authored by Wells highlights 10 key challenges and limitations with adopting coercive control models for criminalization, including low conviction rates, limited integration of digital abuse within the model, limited focus on same sex and LGBTQ individuals, the onus on the victims to provide evidence and the limited focus on preventing coercive control.
Any effective tools against IPV need to be focused on prevention, Wells says. “I recognize we need an ‘and’ and ‘both’ approach to ensure society and men in particular understand that these forms of violence are illegal, and you can’t harm people in these ways.”
A recent study found that in cases with men who have been charged with domestic violence, almost three quarters of them had an interaction with police before the charge, with two thirds seeing an increase in police interactions two years prior. “Those are major flags for prevention,” says Wells.
Many perpetrators of domestic violence either witnessed or were themselves victims of some form of abuse, typically in childhood, which Wells sees as another opportunity to stymie abusive tendencies before they escalate.
She notes that our current approach involves primarily focusing on working with women around a victim safety plan, but “we don’t work with men around a responsibility or accountability plan.”
At a time when society is contending with a rise in issues like incel-culture and a surge in online misogyny following the recent U.S. election, Wells says it’s increasingly important that we pay attention to the perpetrators of IPV.
“I’m not saying we take from the [resources] that support women and survivor groups … but we also need to flip the script and focus on investing in men and men’s support services to help them build the capacity to be in healthy relationships.” Wells highlights that Men& and Fear Is Not Love are two groups that offer resources to men to help prevent and address the perpetration of IPV.
Wells adds that not all incidents of IPV are going to be best handled by the justice system. “People love their partners. Oftentimes they just want the violence to stop … we need a healing and transformative approach and support for people in the community who actually want to stay together … and want to heal, reconcile and restore. It’s just a very complicated issue and the legal system can be quite harmful for victims.”
The future of coercive control in Canada
For Silverstone, even in an imperfect justice system, this kind of legislation is important for victims of abuse. “It’s not perfect, but I would prefer to try and work from within to make change than to pretend that the system doesn’t exist at all.”
Both Cross and Silverstone suspect that a coercive control bill will be re-introduced in Canada, though they both hope that it will be a government bill, not a private member’s bill like Bill C-332.
Unlike a private member’s bill, a government bill would include a clause for funding, which Cross says would be essential to educate the public, law enforcement, judges, the Crown and attorneys.
“We’re talking about a much more insidious, much more hidden kind of abuse. We need to set the social context; we can’t just write a new law and hope that everybody can figure out what it means.”
Cross adds, “I’ve worked with so many women who have said ‘I wish he would have hit me across the face, because I would have understood that much more quickly as not being OK– and when I told people about what he was doing to me, they would have understood it, too.’”
For people who suspect they may be in a coercive controlling relationship, Silverstone suggests telling a trusted friend or family member about what is happening or reaching out to a domestic abuse helpline that can help discern between normal couples’ conflict and abuse.
