States Adopt Laws Targeting Coercive Control in Domestic Violence Cases

Several U.S. states have implemented or are proposing laws to address coercive control in domestic violence contexts. Coercive control involves patterns of behavior intended to limit a person's freedom through fear, intimidation, surveillance, gaslighting, and other non-physical means.

Lawmakers state that such actions can precede physical violence. The concept has been criminalized in Hawaii and incorporated into family or civil court definitions of domestic violence in states such as California, Connecticut, Colorado, Hawaii, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Vermont.

Proposals are pending in New York and Maryland.

Police say a man shot the mother of his children and another woman, in addition to his seven children and one of their cousins, in a predawn rampage that culminated in his death. This event has drawn attention to domestic violence issues. He's just one of the nation’s millions of family and domestic violence abusers, a crisis affecting an estimated 10 million victims every year, according to the National Institutes of Health.

Up to one in four women and one in nine men are victims of domestic violence, according to a 2023 NIH study, though many incidents likely go unreported. In addition to sexual and physical violence, examples of abuse include stalking and psychological aggression, the study said.

The issue has broad effects, affecting not just the victim but families, co-workers and community while harming mental and physical health, causing decreased productivity and decreasing one’s quality of life. According to the study, the economic cost to the nation of domestic and family violence is estimated at more than $12 billion each year.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed Senate Bill 1141 into law, permitting family courts to consider coercive control a form of domestic violence. The bill, brought by Sen. According to the California Women’s Law Center, the law proved effective in a 2023 case involving a Santa Clara County software engineer who had compiled a pages-long list of instructions and demands with which his wife had to comply – “right down to the way she was supposed to wash the dishes,” the center quoted Superior Court Judge Vanessa Zecher as saying.

“When a human being has to worry about or consider an intimate partner’s reaction in every facet of their life, including whether the intimate partner approves of that action, then that human being really is not free in either decision making or movement,” the center quoted Zecher as saying before she entered a permanent restraining order against the husband for coercive control domestic abuse.

“It incapacitates people from taking care of themselves and entraps them so they can’t protect their kids,” said Joan Meier, founding director of the National Family Violence Law Center and a professor of clinical law at George Washington University.

Abusers often employ fear, humiliation and isolation to not only limit one’s movements but to control the outside narrative. “Coercive controllers are very good at convincing the rest of the world that you’re crazy when you’re not,” she said. The notion has found more acceptance overseas: Australia and the United Kingdom have criminalized coercive control, while a bill is pending in Canada.

Still, it wasn’t until sociologist Evan Stark’s book “Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life” appeared in 2007 that advocates seriously began to consider its application in legal settings, she said. One reason adoption of coercive control consideration has been slow is that the concept can be unjustly applied to victims themselves.

Judges, too, have been hesitant to consider something that isn’t codified in law. “Too often it backfires on women,” Meier said. “You might see victims doing things like telling their partner not to go see so-and-so anymore because they always get drunk with that person – or they’re controlling access to their child, trying to manage the disturbing aspects of their partner’s behavior.

An 11-city study published in the American Journal of Public Health in 2003 found that the lives of women who attempted to leave abusive relationships were most at risk when trying to leave “highly controlling” male partners.