Can family abuse be halted by psychological intimidation laws? These states are trying

Some states are banking on the idea that you can stop domestic violence even before it leads to blows. The controversial, fledgling approach to domestic violence prosecution wants to make family psychological intimidation illegal.

Such laws are coming under the national spotlight after a Louisiana man fatally shot his seven children and their cousin on April 19. He's just one of the nation’s millions of family and domestic violence abusers, a crisis affecting an estimated 10 million victims every year, according to the National Institutes of Health.

Nearly a dozen U.S. states now have or are now pushing for laws that define domestic violence more fully and take into account notions of power and control long held in domestic violence circles. So-called "coercive control laws" target offenders who intentionally aim to control partners or family members through fear, intimidation, surveillance, gaslighting and other nonphysically abusive behavior.

Coercive control refers to a pattern of acts and behaviors used by an abuser to limit another person’s freedom and control their life. Such mental abuse, lawmakers argue, becomes the seedling for physical or sexual violence.

“It incapacitates people from taking care of themselves and entraps them so they can’t protect their kids,” said Joan Meier, founding director of the National Family Violence Law Center and a professor of clinical law at George Washington University. “It’s an inextricable net that closes in on them so they can’t move in any direction without some fallout from the abuser.”

The concept has been criminalized in Hawaii and incorporated into family or civil court definitions of domestic violence in states such as California, Connecticut, Colorado, Hawaii, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Vermont. Others are pending in New York and Maryland.

It's a new and still contested legal attack on America's domestic violence problem.

On April 19 in Shreveport, Louisiana, police say Shamar Elkins shot the mother of his children and another woman, in addition to his seven children and one of their cousins, in a predawn rampage that culminated in his death. While authorities haven’t yet said what precipitated the shooting, they described it as a "tragic domestic violence incident." 

Up to 1 in 4 women and 1 in 9 men are victims of domestic violence, according to a 2023 NIH study, though many incidents likely go unreported.

In addition to sexual and physical violence, examples of abuse include stalking and psychological aggression, the study said. The issue has broad effects, affecting not just the victim but families, coworkers and community while harming mental and physical health, causing decreased productivity and decreasing one’s quality of life.

According to the study, the economic cost to the nation of domestic and family violence is estimated at more than $12 billion each year.

What is coercive control?

Types of coercive control, according to WomensLaw.org, include emotional abuse, limiting access to or threatening to harm one’s family or friends, using technology to track a person’s movements or behavior, controlling a person’s finances or personal choices, or threatening to publicly share one’s private information or intimate images.

“These actions are about gaining power, not about showing love or concern,” the organization said. “Even if the abuser is not using physical or sexual abuse as part of the pattern of coercive control, it is still a serious form of abuse.”

An 11-city study published in the American Journal of Public Health in 2003 found that the lives of women who attempted to leave abusive relationships were most at risk when trying to leave “highly controlling” male partners.

Such behavior systematically chips away at a person’s autonomy, Meier said. Abusers often employ fear, humiliation and isolation to not only limit one’s movements but to control the outside narrative.

“Coercive controllers are very good at convincing the rest of the world that you’re crazy when you’re not,” she said.

California case shows how one law works

California Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed Senate Bill 1141 into law, permitting family courts to consider coercive control a form of domestic violence. The bill, brought by Sen. Susan Rubio, describes coercive control as “a pattern of behavior that unreasonably interferes with a person’s free will and personal liberty.”

According to the California Women’s Law Center, the law proved effective in a 2023 case involving a Santa Clara County software engineer who had compiled a pages-long list of instructions and demands with which his wife had to comply – “right down to the way she was supposed to wash the dishes,” the center quoted Superior Court Judge Vanessa Zecher as saying.

Additionally, the woman was required to meet her husband at the same time every evening to ensure she had met his demands, the law center said, adding that court documents described how he would complain about her “transgressions” such as waking up or providing breakfast “a few minutes later than promised.”

According to the wife’s testimony, the law center said, the woman found the treatment “demoralizing, demeaning and exhausting.” Zecher, it said, ruled the behavior coercive-control domestic violence because it impeded the woman’s right to “freedom of thought, action and decision-making.”

“When a human being has to worry about or consider an intimate partner’s reaction in every facet of their life, including whether the intimate partner approves of that action, then that human being really is not free in either decision-making or movement,” the center quoted Zecher as saying before she entered a permanent restraining order against the husband for coercive control domestic abuse.

'Too often it backfires'

According to the Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system, Hawaii lawmakers in 2021 made the concept a petty misdemeanor on a pilot-program basis. But little to no data exists about its implementation, Meier said, and elsewhere the concept’s legal applications are too new and too difficult to measure, given that many family courts don’t make such proceedings public and don’t compile such data themselves.

The notion has found more acceptance overseas, she said: Australia and the United Kingdom have criminalized coercive control, while a bill is pending in Canada.

That the United States is moving so slowly to criminalize it is ironic, Meier said, given that its elements have long been key considerations for those in the domestic violence field. Still, it wasn’t until sociologist Evan Stark’s book “Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life” appeared in 2007 that advocates seriously began to consider its application in legal settings, she said.

One reason the adoption of coercive control consideration has been slow is that the concept can be unjustly applied to victims themselves. Judges, too, have been hesitant to consider something that isn’t codified in law.

“Too often it backfires on women,” Meier said. “You might see victims doing things like telling their partner not to go see so-and-so anymore because they always get drunk with that person – or they’re controlling access to their child, trying to manage the disturbing aspects of their partner’s behavior. Those things can look like control, so if you’re not careful, people can slap the label where it really doesn’t apply.”