One hundred and thirty-seven women. That is how many are killed by an intimate partner or family member every single day. According to the most recent UNODC–UN Women data, approximately 50,000 women and girls were killed by an intimate partner or family member in 2024 alone.1 Not in war zones. Not by strangers. In their homes, by people who said they loved them and who they believed they could trust. And in almost every one of those relationships, before the killing, there was coercive control — the surveillance, the isolation, the financial strangling, the psychological dismantling that research now identifies as the strongest predictor of femicide. Most of the world still has no law against it.
Coercive control is not, in Evan Stark’s formulation, simply a form of violence. It is the ecosystem within which violence operates — the architecture of domination that makes a woman’s home into a place she cannot safely leave, and cannot safely stay.2 The research literature is unambiguous on what that structure leads to. The question this article addresses is a simpler and more uncomfortable one: what is the world actually doing about it?
The answer, as of 2026, is that a small number of jurisdictions are doing something meaningful — and most of the world is doing nothing. The Global Coercive Control Legislation Index, which I built in 2020 and maintain as a living reference, tracks the status of coercive control legislation in every jurisdiction where it has been proposed, enacted, or is under active consideration.3 This article provides the context the Index cannot: why this legislation matters, what it actually does when it works, and what the gaps reveal about how seriously the world takes the safety of women.
Why Coercive Control Had No Legal Name
The concept of coercive control did not arrive fully formed. Its development as a framework — as a way of understanding domestic abuse as a system of domination rather than a series of incidents — involved decades of scholarship and advocacy, and the contributions of people whose names are not always remembered alongside the theory.
Susan Schechter, the feminist organizer and social worker whose 1982 book Women and Male Violence laid much of the intellectual groundwork for the battered women’s movement, introduced the concept of coercive control to Evan Stark.4 Stark himself acknowledges this directly in Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life (Oxford University Press, 2007).5 He wanted the world to know that framework that now bears his name — and that has shaped legislation in England, Scotland, Ireland, and beyond — has a woman’s intellectual labor at its foundation. This platform is committed to naming that.
Stark’s framework represented a decisive shift. Before it, domestic violence law was organized almost entirely around incidents of physical violence. A bruise could be photographed. A hospital record could be filed. A blow could be proven. But the pattern of control — the surveillance of a partner’s phone, the management of her social connections, the regulation of her movement, the financial strangling, the psychological degradation that made her doubt her own perception of reality — left no marks that a court could see.
This gap was not accidental. As Stark argues, coercive control is structurally gendered. It creates what he calls “mini regimes of patriarchy” — personal relationships organized around male dominance and female subordination, enforced through a combination of tactics that individually may appear trivial and collectively amount to a prison without walls. Law that responded only to physical violence was law that left this invisible prison intact.
What Coercive Control Legislation Actually Does
It is worth being precise about what these laws do and do not do, because the distinction matters enormously for survivors trying to understand whether the law can help them.
There are two fundamentally different types of coercive control law.6 The first is criminal legislation — a standalone offence that allows police to arrest and prosecutors to charge someone for a sustained pattern of controlling behavior, without requiring evidence of physical assault. England and Wales enacted this in 2015 under Section 76 of the Serious Crime Act. Scotland followed in 2019 under the Domestic Abuse (Scotland) Act 2018 — a law widely regarded as the most comprehensive of its kind anywhere, covering psychological abuse, coercive and controlling behavior, and including specific protections for children. The Republic of Ireland enacted criminal coercive control in 2018. Northern Ireland completed the picture in March 2021 under the Domestic Abuse and Civil Proceedings Act (Northern Ireland) 2021 — the last jurisdiction within the UK and Ireland to do so.
The second type is civil legislation — laws that do not create a criminal charge for coercive control but incorporate it into protective order frameworks, divorce proceedings, and child custody determinations. This is the model predominant in the United States, where Hawaii stands alone as the only state to have criminalized coercive control as a standalone offence (currently as a petty misdemeanor under a pilot program). A growing number of US states — including California, Connecticut, Colorado, Massachusetts, Vermont, and Washington — have enacted civil coercive control provisions that give judges the framework to recognize controlling patterns when making custody and protective order decisions. Violation of a protective order can then lead to criminal consequences.
Both types of law matter. Civil legislation can reach survivors in civil and family court — the arena where many abusers continue their control long after separation, through lawfare and litigation abuse. Criminal legislation sends a clearer social signal: this is not a private matter. It is a crime.
The Istanbul Convention and Its Limits
Across Europe, the primary legal framework addressing coercive control is Article 33 of the Istanbul Convention — the Council of Europe’s Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence.7 8 Article 33 requires signatory states to criminalize “the intentional conduct of seriously impairing a person’s psychological integrity through coercion or threats.”
On June 28, 2023, the European Union itself ratified the Istanbul Convention — a significant milestone. But ratification and implementation are not the same thing. As of 2026, only a handful of European states have enacted legislation that specifically names and criminalizes coercive control as a pattern of behavior, as opposed to individual acts of psychological violence. Ireland stands out within Europe for using the term coercive control explicitly in its legislation, in a way that reflects the entrapment-based framework Stark describes.
The Istanbul Convention’s Article 33 is an important foundation. It is not, by itself, sufficient. A commitment on paper to criminalize psychological violence does not automatically produce police trained to recognize a pattern of isolation and financial control across eighteen months of a relationship. Training, implementation infrastructure, and cultural change are required alongside legislation — a lesson that the more established jurisdictions are still learning.
Canada: A Legislative Journey Not Yet Complete
Canada’s experience with coercive control legislation is instructive precisely because of how close it has come, and how political disruption has repeatedly intervened.
NDP Member of Parliament Laurel Collins introduced Bill C-332 in May 2023. The bill proposed amending the Criminal Code to create a specific offence of coercive control of an intimate partner. It passed the House of Commons with unanimous support from all parties on June 12, 2024 — a remarkable cross-partisan consensus.9 It then moved to the Senate, where it was in committee when Parliament prorogued in January 2025. The bill died without becoming law.
In December 2025, the federal government introduced Bill C-16, the Protecting Victims Act — a government bill that incorporates the criminalization of coercive control as one of its central provisions.10 Bill C-16 would create a new offence prohibiting patterns of coercive or controlling conduct toward an intimate partner, carrying a maximum penalty of ten years’ imprisonment. It also proposes that murder committed in the context of coercive control — femicide committed by a controlling partner — be classified as first-degree murder, regardless of whether it was planned and deliberate. That is a significant legal recognition of the femicide-coercive control connection.
As of May 2026, Bill C-16 has passed second reading in the House of Commons and has been referred to the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights. The government has built in a two-year coming-into-force window for the coercive control offence, to allow time for training police and Crown prosecutors. If it passes, Canada will join England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Northern Ireland, and parts of Australia as jurisdictions with criminal coercive control law.
Australia: A State-by-State Patchwork
Australia has approached coercive control legislation at the state level, producing a patchwork that reflects the decentralized nature of Australian law. New South Wales enacted the Crimes Legislation Amendment (Coercive Control) Act 2022, which came into force on July 1, 2024. Queensland passed Hannah’s Law — the Criminal Law (Coercive Control and Affirmative Consent) Amendment Act 2023 — which came into force on March 6, 2024. Both create criminal offences.
Victoria and Tasmania have existing family violence legislation that encompasses coercive and controlling behavior, though these are not standalone coercive control offences in the same form. South Australia has legislation pending. Western Australia has not yet acted. The result is that a woman in New South Wales has criminal law protection against coercive control that a woman in Western Australia does not.
The United States: Progress at the Margins
The United States presents a particular challenge. Federal domestic violence law — the Violence Against Women Act — does not include coercive control. Legislation is developed state by state, and the gap between states with enacted civil law and states with nothing is substantial.
Nearly a decade years of working directly with survivors of coercive control, including many in the United States, has confirmed what the research literature also shows: civil coercive control law, when well-drafted and well-implemented, can be genuinely protective in the family court arena. It gives judges a framework to understand that a father who has never struck his children may nonetheless be a danger to them — because the mother’s terror is real, because the pattern of control is real, and because coercive control is the strongest predictor of post-separation abuse.
The Marshall Project reported in June 2025 that since 2020, more than half a dozen US states have enacted coercive control laws, with bills pending in Maine, Kentucky, New York, and South Carolina, among others. Massachusetts enacted H.4744 in September 2024, making it the seventh state to classify coercive control as domestic violence. That bill is now law. South Carolina has seen multiple bills introduced in the current legislative session, driven in part by public attention to a high-profile case involving coercive control tactics.
New York has a bill pending that would make coercive control a felony — a criminal charge, not merely a civil standard. If that passes, it will join Hawaii as the only US states with criminal coercive control law.
The full, current status of every US state — and every jurisdiction worldwide where legislation has been proposed or enacted — is tracked in the Global Coercive Control Legislation Index. (Read the story of why I built it on my Substack.)
The Gap That Costs Lives
For the majority of the world’s women, coercive control remains legally invisible. Across Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and most of South America, there is no law that recognizes a sustained pattern of domination, surveillance, isolation, and psychological destruction as a form of violence warranting legal intervention. Physical violence may be prohibited — though enforcement is inconsistent — but the structure within which physical violence operates goes unnamed and unpunished.
This is not a peripheral concern. The UNODC–UN Women 2025 report documents that Africa recorded the highest rates of intimate partner and family-related femicide in 2024, at an estimated 22,600 victims. The Americas recorded high rates as well. These are not figures that exist in isolation from coercive control. Research consistently establishes that coercive control — the high-control pattern preceding lethal violence — is the strongest predictor of femicide in intimate partner relationships.11
Jurisdictions without coercive control legislation are not merely lacking a legal tool. They are missing the early intervention mechanism that allows the state to act before violence turns lethal. In a remarkable twenty percent of domestic homicides, the killing is the first act of physical violence — but those relationships were almost always characterized by years of coercive control that went unrecognized and unaddressed.
What Effective Legislation Requires
Law alone does not protect survivors. The experience of England and Wales — the first jurisdiction to criminalize coercive control, in 2015 — has been instructive on this point. Research published in 2023 by Myhill and colleagues found that specific factors impeded the successful implementation of Section 76 of the Serious Crime Act, including police knowledge, attitudes, and understanding of what coercive control actually looks like in practice.12 A pattern of behavior spread across months or years is harder to document than a bruise.
Force-wide training was found, in a separate study by Brennan and colleagues, to be associated with a statistically significant 41% increase in arrests for coercive or controlling behavior.13 Training matters. Cultural change within police forces and courts matters. Legislation is a necessary precondition — it is not a sufficient one.
Advocates in the United States have noted an additional complexity: the same law that protects survivors can, in the hands of a skilled perpetrator, be weaponized against them. DARVO — Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender — is a documented perpetrator tactic. Perpetrators of coercive control are experienced at presenting themselves as victims. Civil and criminal coercive control law requires judges and police trained to distinguish a survivor’s defensive behavior from a perpetrator’s calculated control — and this training is currently inconsistent across jurisdictions.
These are not arguments against coercive control legislation. They are arguments for doing it properly: with robust training, with clear evidentiary frameworks, with survivor-centered implementation, and with specific attention to how perpetrators may attempt to misuse the system.
The Legislation Index: A Living Document
I established the Global Coercive Control Legislation Index in 2020 as the first systematic online index of its kind. It has since been cited in peer-reviewed academic publications, including the Southern Illinois University Law Journal, Palgrave Macmillan, and the University of Agder.14 Legal scholars, advocates, policymakers, and survivors across multiple countries have used it as a reference.
The Index is a living document — updated as legislation is introduced, amended, enacted, or, in the case of Turkey’s withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention in 2021, withdrawn. It is organized by region and jurisdiction, with the status of each piece of legislation clearly indicated. Where legislation uses the Istanbul Convention’s Article 33 framework rather than a standalone coercive control offence, that distinction is recorded. Where legislation is pending, the bill number and sponsor are documented where known.
This article provides the interpretive layer the Index cannot: the conceptual framework, the historical context, the gendered analysis, and the survivor-centered perspective that explains not just what the law says, but what it means for the people it is meant to protect.
If you are a researcher, advocate, or policymaker who has cited the Index in published work and would like to be acknowledged, please contact the site with a link to your publication.
Taking Action in Your Country
If you are reading this from a jurisdiction where coercive control is not yet criminalized, your engagement with your elected representatives matters. The history of coercive control legislation is, in part, a history of survivors and advocates making the invisible visible — translating personal experience into policy language, appearing before legislative committees, writing to MPs and senators and state legislators, and insisting that what happened to them had a name and deserved a law.
The United Kingdom’s 2015 Serious Crime Act did not emerge from thin air. It emerged from years of advocacy by organizations and individuals who argued, with evidence, that the existing law was failing the women it was supposed to protect. The same is true of Scotland’s 2018 Act, Ireland’s 2018 Act, and Queensland’s Hannah’s Law. Each of these laws has a history of people who refused to let the legal system remain blind to the pattern.
If you are in recovery from coercive control and would like support, I offer a free 15-minute consultation. Further information about specialized recovery coaching.
Related Links
Frequently Asked Questions
Criminal coercive control legislation — such as that enacted in England and Wales (2015), Scotland (2019), Ireland (2018), Northern Ireland (2021), New South Wales (2024), and Queensland (2024) — creates a specific criminal offence. Police can arrest, prosecutors can charge, and courts can impose penalties including imprisonment, without requiring evidence of physical assault. Civil coercive control legislation — the model predominant in the United States — does not create a criminal charge but incorporates coercive control into protective order frameworks, divorce proceedings, and child custody determinations. A breach of a civil protective order can then lead to criminal consequences. Both types of law have significant value, particularly in the family court arena where coercive control often continues after separation.
As of May 2026, jurisdictions with standalone criminal coercive control offences include England and Wales (Serious Crime Act 2015, Section 76), Scotland (Domestic Abuse Act 2018), Republic of Ireland (Domestic Violence Act 2018, Section 39), Northern Ireland (Domestic Abuse and Civil Proceedings Act 2021), New South Wales (Crimes Legislation Amendment Act 2022, in force July 2024), and Queensland (Hannah’s Law, in force March 2024). France criminalized psychological violence within couples as early as 2010. Most European countries have ratified the Istanbul Convention’s Article 33, which requires criminalization of psychological violence. The current, complete picture is maintained in the Global Coercive Control Legislation Index.
Canada does not yet have federal criminal coercive control law, but is closer than at any previous point. Bill C-332, introduced by NDP MP Laurel Collins in 2023, passed the House of Commons unanimously in June 2024 but died in the Senate when Parliament prorogued in January 2025. In December 2025, the federal government introduced Bill C-16, the Protecting Victims Act, which includes a criminal coercive control offence carrying a maximum ten-year sentence and a first-degree murder qualifier for femicides committed in the context of coercive control. As of May 2026, the bill has passed second reading and is before the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights. The government has proposed a two-year coming-into-force window to allow police and Crown prosecutors to be trained.
As of May 2026, US states with enacted coercive control legislation include California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Vermont, and Washington. Hawaii is the only state to have criminalized coercive control — all other state laws address it in civil frameworks governing protective orders and child custody. Massachusetts enacted H.4744 in September 2024, becoming the seventh state to classify coercive control as domestic violence. Bills are actively pending in New York (where a criminal felony bill has been introduced), South Carolina, and other states. The full, current tracking is maintained in the Global Coercive Control Legislation Index.
Coercive control is the strongest research-established predictor of intimate partner homicide. In approximately twenty percent of domestic homicide cases, the killing is the first act of physical violence — but those relationships were almost always characterized by sustained coercive control that went unrecognized and unaddressed by law enforcement. According to the UNODC–UN Women 2025 report, approximately 50,000 women and girls were killed by an intimate partner or family member in 2024. Coercive control legislation provides a legal mechanism for early intervention — allowing the state to act on a pattern of domination before it escalates to lethal violence. Without it, law enforcement can only respond after injury has occurred. This platform’s Global Femicide Legislation Index tracks the parallel legislative landscape on femicide-specific law.
The Istanbul Convention — formally the Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence — is the principal international legal framework addressing gender-based violence in Europe. Article 33 requires signatory states to criminalize “the intentional conduct of seriously impairing a person’s psychological integrity through coercion or threats.” The European Union ratified the Convention on June 28, 2023. Most European countries have ratified it, though ratification is not the same as full implementation. The Republic of Ireland alone, among European states, has enacted legislation explicitly using the term “coercive control” in a way that directly reflects the entrapment-based framework described by Evan Stark. The Global Coercive Control Legislation Index distinguishes between countries whose legislation is Istanbul Convention-based and those with standalone coercive control offences.
Yes. The research literature is consistent on this point. Coercive control is overwhelmingly perpetrated by men against women. It is not a symmetrical or gender-neutral phenomenon. Evan Stark’s framework — which underlies the legislation in England, Scotland, Ireland, and beyond — holds that coercive control creates what he calls “mini regimes of patriarchy,” personal relationships organized around male dominance enforced through a combination of tactics that restrict a partner’s liberty and autonomy. Male survivors of coercive control exist and are recognized in law — the CPS in England and Wales has documented female perpetrators — but they represent a small minority of cases. This does not diminish their experience; it does mean that gendered analysis is essential to understanding coercive control as a social phenomenon and to designing legislation that addresses it effectively.
References
- UNODC & UN Women. (2025). Femicides in 2024: Global estimates of intimate partner/family member femicides. United Nations. ↩︎
- Stark, E. (2007). Coercive control: How men entrap women in personal life. Oxford University Press. ↩︎
- Wakefield, M. (2020). The Global Coercive Control Legislation Index. Narcissistic Abuse Rehab. Updated May 2026. ↩︎
- Schechter, S. (1999) Women and Male Violence: The Visions and Struggles of the Battered Women’s Movement. Sound End PR. ↩︎
- Stark. 2007. ↩︎
- McQuigg, R. J. A. (2025). Criminalizing coercive control: Cross-jurisdictional lessons. Statute Law Review, 46(1), hmaf010. https://doi.org/10.1093/slr/hmaf010 ↩︎
- Council of Europe Portal. Istanbul Convention: Action against violence against women and domestic violence. COE. ↩︎
- McGorrery, P., and McMahon, M. (2021). Criminalizing Psychological Violence in Europe: (Non-)Compliance with Article 33 of the Istanbul Convention. European Law Review. ↩︎
- Parliament of Canada. (2024). Bill C-332: An Act to amend the Criminal Code (coercive control of intimate partner), 44th Parliament, 1st Session. ↩︎
- Parliament of Canada. (2025). Bill C-16: Protecting Victims Act, 45th Parliament, 1st Session. ↩︎
- Johnson, H., Eriksson, L., Mazerolle, P., & Wortley, R. (2019). Intimate femicide: The role of coercive control. Feminist Criminology, 14(1), 3–23. https://doi.org/10.1177/1557085117701574 ↩︎
- Myhill, A., Johnson, K., McNeill, A., Critchfield, E., & Westmarland, N. (2023). “A genuine one usually sticks out a mile”: Policing coercive control in England and Wales. Policing and Society, 33(4), 398–413. https://doi.org/10.1080/10439463.2022.213437 ↩︎
- Myhill, A. and Brennan, I.R. (2021). Coercive Control: Patterns in Crimes, Arrests, and Outcomes for a New Domestic Abuse Offense. British Journal of Criminology. ↩︎
- Rajendran, P. (2024–2025). Crime or care?: International laws to address “control” in violence within domestic relationships. Southern Illinois University Law Journal, 49, 499. ↩︎
