What is coercive control?

Coercive control is a pattern of behaviour - not a single incident - where one person dominates another through fear, manipulation, isolation, and control over everyday life.

It can include threats, surveillance, financial restriction, and violence, but it doesn't need to include any of these to be real and damaging.

The law has caught up with this, slowly. In 2013, England became the first country in the world to recognise coercive control within its definition of domestic abuse.

Today, the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 (which applies in England and Wales) defines abusive behaviour as including physical or sexual abuse, violent or threatening behaviour, controlling or coercive behaviour, economic abuse, and psychological or emotional abuse. It makes clear that even a single incident can count, though coercive control usually isn't a single incident at all.

Separately, section 76 of the Serious Crime Act 2015 created a specific criminal offence of controlling or coercive behaviour between people who are "personally connected" - partners, family members, people who share a child. A senior judge has described criminalising this behaviour as "a societal shift" - putting a name to a kind of harm that had been ruining lives while remaining unrecognised, often even by the people living through it.

That's the gap this website exists to close: between what the law now says, and what people actually recognise when they're living inside it.