In our opinion, we do not think that creating a new offence of coercive control gets to the root causes of coercive control. We also have some questions about how evidentiary collection would work and how certain victims may be perceived, especially if they are indigenous and Black women, who are often labelled as more aggressive or perceived as more aggressive.
For that reason, we make recommendations about taking a proactive approach of focusing on prevention and providing mandatory and ongoing training to law enforcement, Crowns and judges on what coercive control actually looks like, as well as systemic bias, so that can be recognized.