Our position at Luke's Place is that we need to do a lot more work before we know whether criminalizing coercive control is the right way to go.
Your first comments are really important. Coercive control is a hidden kind of abuse within families. It often doesn't include any physical violence at all. Understandably, when the typical person who doesn't work in this area thinks about domestic violence or intimate partner violence, they think about the slap, the kick, the hit, the push down the stairs. Often coercive control disappears. People think of it as the back-and-forth, the natural arguments that people in a relationship have with one another, and coercive control is anything but that.
Keri will have seen lots of this at her shelter and I'm sure would have stories similar to the ones I'm going to share with you.
In a relationship of coercive control, the woman loses her sense of self, her sense of agency. She has very little autonomy, because the abuser has created an atmosphere of such fear that she knows she needs to do what he expects of her or there will be dire consequences. Often the children are brought into that coercive control as weapons, unwittingly, of course. They have no idea about the role they're playing, but the abuser may threaten the woman: “I'll take the kids if you leave me” or “I'll do this to the children if you don't do what I want.” There are threats to harm pets, financial control and social isolation. The list is long, and I'm sure many of you are familiar with it.
The issue of what we do about coercive control is very challenging. Women have said—and I've had clients who have said to me—“Why isn't there a law against that? I call the police and they say there is nothing they can do because he didn't hit me. He didn't kidnap me. He didn't confine me to the home.” They have a very strong point. On the other hand, to criminalize coercive control means that women potentially could find themselves in situations—women who are victims—of being improperly charged with that because of manipulation by the abusive spouse.
The mandatory charging policies in this country have led to just those kinds of outcomes. Policies that were intended to protect women have ended up being used against them, so when we think about coercive control, we say let's have a national discussion about this. Let's talk to survivors, victims, frontline workers, police officers, Crown attorneys, family law lawyers, judges, and Children's Aid Society representatives. Let's have a full conversation so that we can hear many perspectives before we jump to thinking that a particular outcome is the right one.