That is another excellent question.
I am working with police forces right now across Canada and I give them scenarios. I'm hosting workshops with police forces and I'm doing this across Canada. I'm giving them scenarios where it's a story about a man and a woman who are in a relationship and there are different things happening, not necessarily physical violence but an accumulation of different situations that are going to end up having a tremendous impact on the person who is controlled. The person is going to be controlled in their daily activities. They are going to be prevented from doing certain things.
When you present this to police officers, they are going to tell you, “What am I supposed to do with this? I know this is part of violence, but there are no offences in the Criminal Code that would allow me to pursue charges in this particular situation.”
Basically, police officers are responding to a domestic dispute call. They show up in the residence. What they have to do is determine whether this is intimate partner violence or just an argument between two adults. How do they do that? They look at the tools they have. They look at the Criminal Code, the offences they have within that, and the risk assessment tools they can use. Unfortunately, they can only assess what is providing physical evidence.
If you look at the Home Office, in England and Wales they have developed a whole series of behaviours that are going to be encompassed under coercive control. As well, for police in England they're using a particular assessment tool that is going to look at different forms of behaviour that are going to be combined to be considered coercive control.
I know it's an abstraction when we talk about coercive control, but it's real. People are victimized; people are dying because of coercive control. Women are killed because they are under the control of a partner, and I can talk for longer about that.