Thank you. That's an excellent question.
The offence has been carefully crafted to criminalize engaging in a pattern of coercive or controlling conduct, either with the intent to cause the accused's intimate partner to believe their physical or psychological safety is threatened or with recklessness as to whether that pattern of conduct could have this effect. That is the mental element of the offence. The act element is, as I've said, engaging in a pattern of coercive or controlling conduct.
The offence would define a pattern of coercive or controlling conduct as any combination or repeated instances of three types of conduct: violent conduct, including any attempted or threatened violence towards the intimate partner, the intimate partner's child, their animal or anyone known to them; coercing or attempting to coerce the intimate partner to engage in sexual activity; or conduct that could, in all the circumstances, reasonably be expected to cause the intimate partner to believe their physical or psychological safety is threatened. We refer to that as conduct that threatens safety.
The first two types of conduct are criminal in and of themselves. The third type of conduct addresses all forms of subtle coercive conduct that could be engaged in by an abuser, provided that a reasonable person in the victim's position would believe their physical or psychological safety was threatened. In order to give that provision life, the legislation includes a non-exhaustive, illustrative list of different types of coercive conduct. That list is taken from the lived experiences of survivors of coercive control.
The approach is consistent with Scotland's approach. Stakeholders have told us that this is the gold standard, because it doesn't require the victim to testify that they actually feared for their safety. That is the critical element.