Is Emotional Abuse a Crime? Where a Pattern of Control Is Its Own Offense

If you are in immediate danger, call your country's emergency number: 911 in the United States, 999 in the United Kingdom, 112 in South Korea. The National Domestic Violence Hotline notes on its own help page that internet use can be monitored and cannot be completely erased, so read this on a device you trust.

Does it matter whether your partner has a diagnosis?

Search this subject in English and the first word you meet is narcissist. Set one thing down before going further. That word is not a clinical diagnosis, and diagnosing another person from the outside is not what this article is for.

The distinction that does exist is narrower than the internet suggests. Narcissistic personality disorder is a personality disorder with diagnostic criteria in the DSM-5. There is no DSM-5 diagnosis called narcissistic abuse, and the various names given to what victims experience afterward are not official diagnoses either. This article does not reproduce the diagnostic criteria for the disorder. Printing that list turns it into a self-assessment tool, or a tool for assessing somebody else, which is the opposite of useful here. Clinical commentary makes the same point from another direction: whether the person causing harm would meet criteria for a disorder and whether harm occurred are two separate questions.

That separation is not a technicality. It is the reason the rest of this article is possible. Not one of the statutes below makes a diagnosis part of the offense. The English law and the New South Wales law both ask about conduct, repeated over time, and its effect on the person on the receiving end.

The word gaslighting works the same way. It is used constantly and this article will not try to define it, because no settled academic definition was available for this piece. Government documents tend to skip the term and describe the behavior instead, as intentionally undermining or manipulating the victim.

What changes when the law looks at a pattern instead of an incident?

Coercive control as a concept comes from Evan Stark's 2007 book. His argument was that what makes violence in intimate relationships so destructive is not the force itself but the attack on autonomy, liberty and equality. He called it a liberty crime.

His second argument is the one that reached legislation. Stark criticized the way domestic violence had been defined, borrowed from criminal justice and therefore built around discrete acts. Vocabulary like repeat offender and callout trains everyone to see incidents rather than a pattern. ANROWS, Australia's national research organization, records that the model international legislators reached for was Stark's.

The Home Office statutory guidance for England and Wales quotes him directly and defines coercive control as a purposeful pattern of behavior that takes place over time or on two or more occasions, so that one individual can exert power, control or coercion over another. The same guidance follows with something worth reading twice. A victim may not recognize that what is happening to them is a pattern of coercive control, may not be ready to acknowledge it, and may not be able to articulate it.

Here is what changes mechanically. Isolating someone, monitoring them, cutting off their access to money: taken one at a time, none of those may map cleanly onto an existing offense. Bundled, they become one. The thing that had no name gets a name. This is the sentence we kept coming back to while assembling this piece. When the law looks at incidents, control is invisible.

One caution from the same document. Coercive control may sit inside a broader pattern of abuse alongside more visible physical or sexual assault, and the same conduct may surface as economic abuse, technology-facilitated abuse, harassment or stalking. Telling those apart matters because it determines which offense gets investigated.

A boundary in the other direction, for clarity about what this article is not covering. Ordinary friction inside a family, including the kind that concentrates around a holiday gathering, is a separate subject with its own measurements: what people in different countries actually brace for in that season, from grief to the cost of the table.

Where does the law stand, country by country?

Table: coercive control laws compared across countries. The elements of each offense differ, so the size of a maximum sentence is not a measure of how harshly a country treats this conduct. "No source obtained" means this article could not verify the point, not that the mechanism is absent.

England and Wales, and Scotland: repetition written into the elements

GB

Section 76 of the Serious Crime Act 2015 has four elements. The accused repeatedly or continuously engages in controlling or coercive behavior toward the victim; the two are personally connected at the time; the behavior has a serious effect on the victim; and the accused knew or ought to have known it would have that effect. Serious effect has two routes: causing the victim to fear violence will be used against them on at least two occasions, or causing serious alarm or distress that has a substantial adverse effect on their usual day-to-day activities.

The statute includes a defense. If the accused shows they believed they were acting in the victim's best interests and that the belief was reasonable, the defense is available. It is not available where the conduct caused fear of violence. The maximum is five years on indictment, with the magistrates' court's general limit on summary conviction.

The change that mattered most arrived on April 5, 2023, when section 68 of the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 amended section 76 and deleted the living-together requirement. Personally connected now covers people who are or have been married or civil partners, who agreed to marry or enter a civil partnership even if the agreement was called off, who are or have been in an intimate personal relationship, who are or have been parents of the same child, and relatives, without asking whether they share a home. Control after a relationship ends, and control by a relative living elsewhere, came inside the offense. The amendment does not apply retrospectively.

The Domestic Abuse Act 2021 also created the first statutory definition of domestic abuse in section 1, and put economic abuse in it alongside physical and sexual abuse, violent or threatening behavior, controlling or coercive behavior, and psychological and emotional abuse. Economic abuse is defined as any behavior that has a substantial adverse effect on a person's ability to acquire, use or maintain money or property, or to obtain goods or services. Money as a means of control is in the text of the statute.

Scotland wrote its own law. The Domestic Abuse (Scotland) Act 2018 created an offense of engaging in an abusive course of conduct toward a current or former partner and came into force on April 1, 2019. The explanatory material reads like Stark's argument in official prose: domestic abuse can be a course of conduct over a sustained period, made up not only of physical violence and threats that were already prosecutable but of psychological and emotional abuse that had been far harder to prosecute. A course of conduct requires at least two occasions.

The Scottish statute also carries a design feature not found in the other laws reviewed here. An aggravation applies where the perpetrator used a child in committing the offense, directed behavior at a child, where a child saw or heard the abuse or was present, or where a child is likely to have been adversely affected by the conduct.

Ireland: persistently, rather than twice

IE

Ireland took the same route with different wording. Section 39 of the Domestic Violence Act 2018 covers conduct on or after January 1, 2019 and requires that the accused knowingly and persistently engaged in controlling or coercive behavior, that it had a serious effect on the other person, and that a reasonable person would consider the behavior likely to have such an effect. Where England requires at least two occasions, Ireland asks for persistence. Conviction on indictment carries up to five years, summary conviction up to twelve months. The scope is narrower than England's in one way: it applies only to people in an intimate or former intimate relationship, not to family members or relatives sharing a home.

United States: no federal offense, and a state definition worth reading

US

Start with what the sources here do and do not support. No federal coercive control offense appears in the material reviewed for this article. The confirmed examples are at state level, and the clearest of them sits closer to family court than to criminal court.

Connecticut's Jennifers' Law was signed on June 28, 2021 and expanded the state's definition of domestic violence to include coercive control. The definition is a pattern of behavior toward a current or former intimate partner or a family or household member that causes fear or harm, or that constrains the person's freedom of action. It names verbal threats, forced isolation, stalking, cyberstalking, and a pattern or history of financial restraint and control. Whether that provision is a criminal penalty or an expansion of the requirements for a restraining order is something this article could not settle, and the material obtained points toward the latter.

The practical layer for a reader in the United States is therefore state law, and it varies. Procedures for applying for an order of protection differ from state to state, and WomensLaw.org, run by the National Network to End Domestic Violence, maintains state-by-state guides.

There is a second American difference worth naming. In England and Wales the same period that produced the offense also produced Clare's Law, a route to ask police about a partner's history of emotional abuse, controlling or coercive behavior and economic abuse. No equivalent scheme in the United States turned up in this research. That is not proof none exists.

Canada: passed the House unanimously, and did not become law

CA

Bill C-332, an act to amend the Criminal Code on coercive control of an intimate partner, was introduced on May 18, 2023 and passed the House of Commons unanimously on June 12, 2024. It then went to second reading and committee in the Senate and did not become law.

That outcome is information rather than a footnote. It blocks the tidy version of this story, in which English-speaking countries all arrived at the same answer. Some legislatures got there, one got most of the way and stopped, and the pattern of who did what does not line up neatly with anything.

Australia: state by state, not federal

AU

This is not a federal offense in Australia. New South Wales went first. Its coercive control act passed parliament on November 16, 2022 and commenced on July 1, 2024, covering a pattern of abusive behavior intended to coerce or control a current or former intimate partner, with a maximum of seven years. It applies only to conduct on or after the commencement date. The state government also limited its initial reach to current and former intimate partners, citing evidence that coercive control is strongly associated with intimate partner homicide.

Queensland followed, with a 2024 amendment act commencing on May 26, 2025. Its reach is wider, covering current and former intimate partners, family members and unpaid carers, and the maximum is fourteen years. The law is commonly known by a nickname taken from the name of one victim.

Timing inside Australia is uneven. Tasmania has dealt with economic abuse and with emotional abuse or intimidation under its Family Violence Act since 2004, which makes it the first Australian jurisdiction to criminalize patterns of non-physical harm. The position in the remaining states and territories was not verified for this article, so "Australia criminalized coercive control" is too broad a sentence to write.

Japan: not a new offense, a lower threshold for orders

JP

Japan did not make coercive control a standalone crime. The revised Act on the Prevention of Spousal Violence, in force from April 1, 2024, widened the protection order system instead. Conflating the two would be a factual error.

What moved was the threshold. Applications previously required physical violence or threats to life or body; a person threatened with respect to their freedom, reputation or property can now apply. The test for granting an order widened from serious harm to life or body to serious harm to life or to mind and body. The Cabinet Office's own examples of qualifying threats read like a list of coercive control tactics: shouting when the other person tries to go out, as a threat against freedom; threatening to distribute sexual images, as a threat against reputation; threatening to seize a cash card, as a threat against property.

The rest of the package is practical. Non-contact orders run for one year instead of six months. Orders to vacate a residence run two months as a rule, with a new six-month provision where the victim is the sole owner or tenant. Prohibited conduct now includes sending documents or social media messages continuously outside emergencies, sending them late at night or early in the morning, transmitting sexually humiliating data, and obtaining GPS location data without consent. Orders can now also prohibit contacting a child by phone. Penalties for breaching an order rose from up to one year or a fine up to one million yen to up to two years or a fine up to two million yen.

South Korea sits at the other end of this comparison, and the difference starts in the drafting. Korean law defines domestic violence broadly enough to include psychological and property harm, then defines the crime of domestic violence as a list of specific criminal code provisions: assault, abandonment and cruelty, unlawful confinement, intimidation, sexual offenses, defamation and insult, coercion, extortion, property damage and a few others. A pattern of control is not on that list. Nor are dating partners who do not live together inside the statute's definition of a family member, which is the mirror image of what England and Wales did in April 2023. The stated purpose of the Korean act is to restore the peace and stability of families destroyed by domestic violence and to protect the human rights of victims and family members. A statute framed around the family and a statute framed around an individual's liberty start from different places. Which is better is not this article's call.

France went in a third direction. Article 222-33-2-1 of the penal code punishes repeated words or conduct that degrade a spouse's or partner's living conditions and cause deterioration of their physical or mental health. The frame is harassment rather than control, and the elements require harm to health, so describing France as having criminalized coercive control would be inaccurate.

If the offense exists, why do so few reports end in charges?

The volume figures moved sharply. Police recorded 4,246 coercive control offenses in England and Wales in the year to March 2017 and 41,626 in the year to March 2022. Naming a thing produces reports of it.

The second set of figures is the reason this article is not a promotional piece for the English model. Of coercive control offenses recorded between April 2021 and March 2022, 3.7 percent resulted in a charge. For domestic abuse related offenses overall the figure was 6.7 percent, so roughly double. And 53.9 percent of coercive control cases closed under evidential difficulties, with the victim not supporting action, against 51.4 percent across domestic abuse.

Read that as a statement about proof, not about whether the law was worth passing. A single incident has a time, a place and often a witness. A pattern has none of those by default. Which is why the government that created the offense ended up writing an unusually detailed section about record-keeping.

What should you write down, and is recording legal?

The Home Office guidance tells officers what to ask, and reading it from the other side tells you what is worth having ready. Officers are told not to stop at what happened but to ask questions that would identify coercive control: whether there are rules, expectations or monitoring the victim has to comply with; how much control the victim has in the relationship, including over financial decisions and access to the internet and communication devices; whether they can get to essential documents such as a passport or a child's birth certificate; what the behavior has done to the victim and to any children; whether they can reach support from family and friends; and whether there is evidence of other abusive conduct. Those prompts are built into the police risk assessment tool used in England. The guidance also tells officers to ask about the perpetrator's past behavior, because a victim may not have recognized it as part of a pattern.

That list is not a quiz to score yourself against. It is a record of what English police are instructed to ask, which makes it a decent map of what tends to get lost when a story is told once, quickly, under stress. The same guidance says the decisive thing in a statement is not a list of acts but the serious effect on the victim, and warns that material raised for the first time in court, absent from the initial statement, can damage the case.

The evidence types the guidance lists run long: call records and messages, device logs, traces of abuse through social media and connected devices, copies of emails, photographs of injuries (defensive marks on the forearms, grip marks on the upper arms, bruising to the scalp, hair pulled out in clumps), photographs of damage (broken doors, holes in plasterboard, signs of forced entry), CCTV and home video, records held by support services, medical records, bank records showing financial control, past threats toward children or family, a diary kept by the victim, evidence of isolation (contact with family and friends falling away, dropping out of clubs and activities, the perpetrator attending medical appointments), and GPS trackers fitted to a phone or a vehicle. The guidance adds that perpetrators may try to destroy this trail, by deleting messages and photographs or by coercing the victim into handing over passwords and devices, so a case should not rest on that category alone.

Then it names four methods, and it is worth quoting the shape of them.

• Keep a log of incidents, ideally in a bound notebook, and an electronic record that captures dates and times. The same paragraph attaches a warning: if the perpetrator finds that record, the victim may be put at risk.
• Note down, safely, the details of anyone who saw or heard an incident.
• Retain messages, or record calls made by the perpetrator.
• Talk safely to a neighbor, colleague, employer, family member, friend or specialist support service.

Whether you can record a conversation depends where you are, and this is one of the places where a wrong assumption is expensive. In the United States, rules are set state by state; more than ten states require the consent of everybody in the conversation rather than just one party, and the sensible move is to check your own state's rule before relying on a recording. In the family courts of England and Wales, the Family Justice Council has issued guidance on covert recordings in children proceedings. It neither prohibits covert recording nor automatically excludes it. The court keeps the discretion, weighing probative value against the harm the recording causes, and permission from the court is needed to put one in evidence. In South Korea, what the communications privacy statute prohibits is recording or listening to a private conversation between other people; recording a conversation you are part of does not breach that act, and no advance notice is required by the statute. Legal to make and admissible in court are separate questions, and the second one is beyond what this article can answer.

Who can you contact today?

Everything below comes from the public agencies and official support services named in the sources. Individual legal questions belong with a support organization or a legal aid body in the relevant country.

United States. The National Domestic Violence Hotline is 800-799-7233, and if a call is not safe you can text START to 88788. Web chat runs at thehotline.org. Charges may apply to texts, and sending STOP ends them. Specialist lines exist alongside the main one: StrongHearts Native Helpline at 844-762-8483 for American Indian and Alaska Native people, the National Teen Dating Abuse Helpline at 866-331-9474, and a video-phone Deaf Hotline at 855-812-1001. For immediate danger, 911. For state procedures on orders of protection, WomensLaw.org. One correction worth stating plainly: 988 is the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, not a domestic violence line, and it should not be given out as one.

England, Wales and Scotland. Two mechanisms here have no counterpart in the other countries reviewed.

The first is for when you cannot speak. Call 999 from a mobile, and if you cannot make a sound or talk, an automated message of about twenty seconds plays and then pressing 55 signals to police that the emergency is real. Pressing 55 routes the call to the local force, where an operator will try to communicate using simple yes-or-no questions. Two limits have to travel with that instruction. Pressing 55 does not automatically share your location. And if you neither press 55 nor respond, the call is terminated. Official guidance is blunt about the implication: if you can speak at all, even in a whisper, do that. This procedure is described for mobile phones, and the landline procedure was not verified for this article.

The second is asking before you commit. The Domestic Violence Disclosure Scheme, known as Clare's Law, was extended to all 43 forces in England and Wales in March 2014 and gained statutory guidance from the Home Office in April 2023. It runs on two routes. Right to Ask lets a member of the public, including professionals, apply to police for disclosure in order to protect a specific person from domestic violence or abuse. Right to Know obliges police to disclose, without any request, where they judge that someone is at risk. What can be disclosed includes a history of emotional abuse, controlling or coercive behavior, and economic abuse, which is what makes the scheme the practical twin of the 2015 offense. Scotland runs a separate scheme, live since October 1, 2015, built on a right to ask and a power to tell.

There is also a rule about what happens after reporting. Under the Victims' Code, reporting a crime to police carries a right to be referred to victim support services within two working days. Choosing not to report does not remove the right to access support services at any point. England and Wales have a national round-the-clock domestic abuse helpline, a men's advice line run by Respect, and an LGBT+ domestic abuse helpline run by Galop. Those numbers were confirmed only through secondary routes, so they are not printed here; check each organization's own page.

Australia. The most concrete piece of leaving support found anywhere in this research started on July 1, 2025. The Leaving Violence Program gives eligible victim-survivors leaving a violent intimate partner relationship up to 5,000 Australian dollars, of which up to 1,500 is cash and the rest comes as goods and services. It is not only money: safety planning, risk assessment and referrals to other services run for up to twelve weeks. Applications go through leavingviolenceprogram.org.au or 1800 253 283. Eligibility includes not having received this support through an earlier pilot or national program in the previous twelve months. No equivalent cash payment for leaving was found in the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan or South Korea.

Japan. #8008 connects a caller to the nearest prefectural spousal violence counseling and support center, though it operates only within each center's own reception hours. The Cabinet Office also runs a round-the-clock phone and chat service. Its number was not confirmed on the Cabinet Office's own page and is therefore not printed here.

South Korea. The women's emergency line is 1366, dialed without an area code, staffed 24 hours a day year-round for initial counseling and emergency rescue and protection. It runs alongside a messaging channel and a web counseling site (women1366.kr), which matters when a phone call is not safe. Entry to a shelter is arranged through 1366 or a local domestic violence counseling center, and shelters provide medical support including a health check within the first month. Free legal aid covers criminal matters as well as civil and family matters, through three named bodies including the Korea Legal Aid Corporation. For longer-term housing, public rental housing is available subject to a screening process. For immediate danger, 112.

Ireland. Women's Aid and Men's Aid Ireland operate helplines. Their numbers were confirmed only through secondary sources, so check the organizations' own pages.

Why is leaving the most dangerous moment?

Take the research first. The Home Office guidance states that coercive control can continue long after a relationship ends, and that the post-separation period is a time of heightened risk of violence for victims, including children. In domestic homicide and victim suicide reviews covering April 2021 to March 2022, 19 percent of intimate partner submissions involved a relationship that had recently ended or a threat that it would. Elsewhere the same document says coercive control frequently continues or intensifies once a relationship is over. Post-separation abuse continues and can escalate without effective intervention, is designed to undermine the victim's move into a safe and settled life, can reach family relationships, employment, financial stability and online presence, and includes forms that need no physical proximity at all.

None of that is an argument against leaving. It is an argument for the difference between leaving and leaving with a plan. Support organizations in the UK and the US converge on roughly the same components.

• Timing. Pick a moment when the other person will certainly be away. Decide in advance how you will leave and where you will go first, and know more than one route out of the building.
• A bag. Money, identification, medication, important documents, a spare key, a phone charger and clothes, kept somewhere the other person will not find it, such as a car or the home of a friend or relative you trust.
• Copies of documents. Identity papers, a passport, and legal documents such as any protective order or custody agreement, held separately from the originals.
• A support network. Know who can help and which exit is safe, and keep a list of numbers for police, the domestic abuse line and a hospital. Agreeing a code word that signals you need help now is part of the standard guidance.
• Online safety. Do not leave the plan anywhere the other person can reach. Guidance suggests using a public library computer or a friend's device for research.
• Children. Teach them what number to call in an emergency and what to say, including a name, address and phone number.

The framing used by UK support organizations is that careful planning matters precisely because the other person's behavior can keep creating risk after separation.

On the digital side there is one instruction that runs against instinct. If you find stalkerware on your device, do not delete it right away. The Coalition Against Stalkerware, an international group whose members include the National Network to End Domestic Violence and several security companies, gives three reasons in its guidance for survivors. Deleting the app deletes the evidence with it, and if you are considering a report you may need law enforcement's help with that evidence. Removal may cause greater harm, because the app can alert the abuser immediately, and in a domestic abuse situation that can provoke them and leave the survivor in more danger. So the recommendation is to contact a local victim support organization or law enforcement first, and to treat a plan as including a completely new device, police involvement if you choose it, and a move to a safer physical location.

What counts as technology-facilitated abuse is also written down. The Home Office guidance lists hacking and monitoring of email, social media and calls; coercing a victim into sharing passwords; locking a victim out of accounts, replying on their behalf, or creating fake ones; accessing digital medical records and health accounts to change prescriptions, cancel appointments or use the contents as leverage; spyware and GPS trackers on phones, computers, wearables, cars, pets, children and their belongings; smart watches and smart home devices such as speakers, locks, lights and heating used to monitor, control or threaten; hidden cameras and smart doorbells; and harassment or monitoring carried out through a third party, which is how abuse continues after a victim blocks the abuser.

A UK survey cited in the same guidance found 16 percent of women and 10 percent of men had experienced at least one behavior suggesting online abuse or harassment from a current or former partner, rising to 22 percent among women aged 18 to 34. Among women who experienced technology-facilitated abuse on social media, 94 percent had also experienced other forms of domestic abuse. Technology problems in this context do not arrive as a separate problem. Free resources for survivors come from the Safety Net Project at techsafety.org and from stopstalkerware.org.

Money does not resolve at separation either. The Home Office guidance notes that economic abuse can start, continue or intensify after a relationship ends, because once physical proximity is gone it may be close to the only means of control left. The examples given include deliberately and unreasonably drawing out proceedings to increase legal costs, stopping mortgage payments for no reason, unreasonably obstructing a court's property order, misusing joint accounts, failing to pay agreed child maintenance or paying it irregularly or conditioning it on contact, and demanding money in exchange for time with children.

One finding from a 2020 UK survey is worth keeping. Seventeen percent of women and 16 percent of men reported experiencing economic abuse. People over 70 were the least likely to say they had experienced it, at 8 percent, but when asked about specific behaviors, 28 percent said they had. People do not have a name for what happened to them. The gap between that 8 and that 28 is more or less the subject of this article. In the same survey, 57 percent of economic abuse victims had debt or had been in debt and 26 percent saw their credit score affected, which limits the ability to leave in the first place and later shows up as being unable to open financial products or reestablish income. The guidance instructs services to refer victims to money and debt advice and to tell them to ask their own bank what support it offers. The UK also has a dedicated financial support line for domestic abuse victims.

Who does this happen to?

Two facts belong together, and quoting either one alone distorts it.

Statistics consistently show women are disproportionately affected. The Home Office guidance acknowledges that anyone can be a victim of domestic abuse and then puts the numbers next to it. Crime survey estimates for the year to March 2022 put lifetime experience of domestic abuse at 29.3 percent of women aged 16 and over and 14.1 percent of men, around one in seven. Of police-recorded domestic abuse offenses in that year, 74.1 percent of victims were women and 25.9 percent men. Across the three years to March 2021, 72 percent of domestic homicide victims were women. Among defendants charged with coercive control where sex was recorded, 98 percent were men.

Men and LGBT+ victims exist, and some countries run dedicated services for them. England and Wales have a men's advice line and an LGBT+ domestic abuse helpline, each run by a separate organization. In South Korea, counseling for male victims accounted for 6.3 percent of the 1366 line's 2024 caseload, 18,362 contacts. Whether Korea has dedicated men's or LGBT+ lines was not established here, which is not the same as establishing that it does not.

Which warning signs mean asking for help now?

This section is not a tool for deciding whether you are in danger. It is a list of what research and agencies have identified as risk factors. If any of it is familiar, the useful next step is one of the contacts above rather than a private assessment. For immediate danger, 911 in the US, 999 in the UK, 112 in South Korea.

The strongest evidence concerns strangulation. A case-control study comparing 506 completed and attempted homicide cases with 427 abused controls found prior non-fatal strangulation reported by 10 percent of controls, 45 percent of attempted homicide cases and 43 percent of homicide cases. The authors reported that prior non-fatal strangulation was associated with more than six times the odds of attempted homicide and more than seven times the odds of completed homicide. Those numbers are not a formula for calculating personal risk. What they did do is change law. Since June 7, 2022 non-fatal strangulation has been a separate offense in England and Wales, and proof of harm is not one of its elements, which means it can be made out with no visible injury. For anyone who hesitated to report because nothing showed, that provision is itself the information.

Separation is treated as a risk factor for the reasons set out above.

On weapons and threats, a multisite case-control study in the United States reported the perpetrator's access to a gun, a history of threatening with a weapon, the presence of the perpetrator's stepchild in the home, and estrangement in particular from a controlling partner as risk factors for intimate partner femicide. The firearm item comes from the American context. A history of threatening with a weapon sits on the same list regardless of what the weapon is.

Researchers have also studied what precedes a killing. One review of femicide cases set out a theoretical framework tracking a repeated progression, and placed a history of control and stalking at its first stage. This article does not reproduce the stage list. Publishing the stages invites readers to score their own relationship against it, which is the thing we are trying not to do.

One last line from the guidance. Because of the nature of control, the choices available to a victim narrow. "Why didn't you leave" is that structure turned upside down.

Frequently asked questions

Frequently asked

Is coercive control a crime in the United States?

No federal offense appears in the sources reviewed for this article, and the confirmed examples are at state level. Connecticut expanded its definition of domestic violence to include coercive control in 2021, though whether that provision is criminal or governs restraining orders could not be settled here. For state-specific procedure, WomensLaw.org keeps guides by state.

What does "serious effect" actually mean in the English offense?

The statute gives two routes. Either the behavior causes the victim to fear that violence will be used against them on at least two occasions, or it causes serious alarm or distress with a substantial adverse effect on their usual day-to-day activities. Both are about effect on the person, not about the severity of any single act.

Does the law require a diagnosis for the person doing this?

No. None of the statutes reviewed here makes a psychiatric diagnosis part of the offense. They ask what the pattern of conduct was and what effect it had. That is the practical answer to the question about whether a partner is a narcissist: the courts that handle this are not asking it.

Why do so few reports end in charges?

In England and Wales, 3.7 percent of recorded coercive control offenses in the year to March 2022 led to a charge, and 53.9 percent closed under evidential difficulties. A pattern is harder to evidence than a single incident, which is why the government guidance goes into unusual detail about keeping records and about what a statement needs to convey.

Can I record my partner?

It depends where you live. In the United States more than ten states require every party's consent rather than one, so check your state's rule. In the family courts of England and Wales covert recordings are neither banned nor automatically admitted, and the court's permission is required to rely on one.

I found tracking software on my phone. Should I delete it?

The Coalition Against Stalkerware advises against deleting it immediately. Removing it destroys evidence and can alert the abuser instantly, which in an abusive situation can escalate the danger. Their guidance is to contact a local victim support organization or law enforcement first, and to consider getting an entirely new device as part of a plan.