Thank you for the opportunity to speak to criminal coercive control offences, which criminalize a pattern of conduct that serves to entrap the victim who is a current or former intimate partner of the accused and thus eliminate their sense of freedom.
A broad range of coercive and controlling conduct may be employed, but the focus is on how the pattern of that conduct serves to subjugate, not the individual incidents by which an abuser has exercised control. That's because coercive control is concerned with the cumulative impact of the abuser's conduct on the victim. In this respect, coercive control legislation is unlike traditional criminal law, which generally responds to specific incidents of wrongful conduct, like assault, sexual assault or uttering threats.
Coercive control criminal legislation was implemented in the United Kingdom in 2015, in Scotland in 2018 and in Ireland in 2019. I can provide the committee with information on those offences and also on the Home Office's March 2021 evaluation of the U.K. offence.