The criminalisation of coercive and controlling behaviour in section 76 of the Serious Crime Act 2015 was widely heralded as a paradigm shift in the legal response to domestic abuse. For the first time, English criminal law expressly recognised that intimate partner abuse is not reducible to discrete acts of physical violence, but is more accurately understood as a sustained pattern of conduct designed to subjugate the victim. The Domestic Abuse Act 2021 (DAA 2021) extended this recognition by providing a statutory definition of domestic abuse encompassing controlling and coercive behaviour, economic abuse, and psychological harm. Yet the question of whether English criminal law adequately addresses such behaviour remains contested. This essay argues that, despite the conceptual advance represented by section 76 and the DAA 2021, English criminal law continues to fall short of adequately addressing coercive and controlling behaviour in three interlocking respects: first, the statutory architecture of section 76 imports doctrinal limitations, particularly the “serious effect” requirement and the cohabitation/personal connection threshold (the latter now amended), that obscure the relational and cumulative nature of the harm; secondly, evidential and prosecutorial practices remain ill-suited to capturing the texture of coercive control, leading to chronically low charge and conviction rates; and thirdly, the offence sits uneasily within a criminal justice system whose institutional culture, particularly within policing, frequently fails to translate statutory recognition into meaningful protection. The offence is best understood as a necessary but insufficient reform: its expressive and symbolic value is real, but its practical efficacy is undermined by both internal doctrinal weaknesses and external implementation failures.
This argument proceeds in five stages. The first situates coercive control as a theoretical and empirical phenomenon, drawing on the foundational work of Stark (2007) and subsequent feminist scholarship. The second analyses the doctrinal architecture of section 76 of the Serious Crime Act 2015 and the supplementary stalking and harassment offences. The third evaluates the DAA 2021 reforms. The fourth examines prosecutorial and evidential dynamics. The fifth considers institutional and cultural impediments to enforcement. The essay concludes that adequacy must be measured not only against the symbolic recognition of coercive control as a wrong, but against the law’s capacity to protect victims, hold perpetrators accountable, and disrupt patterns of domination. On all three measures, English criminal law remains imperfect, and the most pressing reforms are evidential and institutional rather than purely doctrinal.
Coercive control as a distinctive harm: the conceptual foundation
Any evaluation of the law’s adequacy presupposes a working account of what coercive and controlling behaviour actually is. The dominant theoretical framework, developed principally by Evan Stark, characterises coercive control as a “liberty crime” rather than an assault-based crime: it is a course of conduct through which a perpetrator establishes domination over the victim, typically through a combination of intimidation, isolation, micro-regulation of daily life, and the appropriation of the victim’s resources and agency (Stark, 2007). The harm is not adequately captured by any individual incident, however serious; it lies in the cumulative pattern and in the way that pattern reorganises the victim’s freedom, autonomy and personhood.
This conceptualisation has three significant implications for criminal law. First, it suggests that an incident-based model of criminalisation, characteristic of common law offences against the person, will systematically under-describe the wrong. A series of low-level acts, each individually trivial or even lawful, may collectively constitute a grave deprivation of liberty. Secondly, it implies that the gravamen of the offence is the impact on the victim’s autonomy, not merely physical or psychiatric injury. Thirdly, it draws attention to the gendered character of the phenomenon: empirical evidence consistently demonstrates that coercive control is overwhelmingly perpetrated by men against women, and is often deeply embedded in gendered expectations of family life (Myhill, 2015; Hester, 2013).
The pre-2015 legal landscape struggled with each of these features. Offences against the person, governed primarily by the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 and the leading authorities on psychiatric injury (R v Ireland; R v Burstow [1998] AC 147), required proof of “actual” or “grievous” bodily harm understood to include identifiable psychiatric illness. Conduct that produced fear, anxiety or chronic stress short of clinical illness was not criminalised under sections 47 or 20 of the 1861 Act. The Protection from Harassment Act 1997 (PHA 1997) provided a partial response by criminalising courses of conduct amounting to harassment or causing fear of violence, and was strengthened by the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 to include stalking offences. However, harassment law was developed primarily for ex-partner and stranger contexts; it sat awkwardly with intimate cohabiting relationships, where the pattern of control may not present as discrete unwanted contact but as enmeshed daily conduct (Bishop and Bettinson, 2018). The pre-2015 framework therefore left a substantial doctrinal gap: ongoing intimate-partner control that fell short of physical assault or recognisable psychiatric illness was largely unaddressed by the criminal law, even though it constituted, on Stark’s account, the most serious form of domestic abuse.
Recognising this gap, the Home Office consultation in 2014 (Home Office, 2014) led to the enactment of section 76 of the Serious Crime Act 2015. The provision was explicitly designed to “close the gap” identified by campaigners and to bring the law into line with the lived experience of victims. The question is whether it has done so.
Section 76 of the Serious Crime Act 2015: the doctrinal architecture and its weaknesses
The structure of the offence
Section 76(1) creates an offence where a person (A) repeatedly or continuously engages in behaviour towards another person (B) that is controlling or coercive; A and B are “personally connected” at the time of the behaviour; the behaviour has a “serious effect” on B; and A knows or ought to know that the behaviour will have a serious effect on B. “Serious effect” is defined in section 76(4) as either causing B to fear, on at least two occasions, that violence will be used against B, or causing serious alarm or distress that has a substantial adverse effect on B’s usual day-to-day activities. The offence carries a maximum penalty of five years’ imprisonment.
The architecture of the offence is, on its face, well-suited to capturing patterns of behaviour. The requirement of “repeated or continuous” conduct explicitly displaces the incident-based model and invites the prosecution to put the relationship as a whole before the court. The Home Office statutory guidance, originally issued in 2015 and updated following the DAA 2021 (Home Office, 2023), gives a non-exhaustive list of indicative behaviours including isolating the victim from sources of support, monitoring time, controlling access to finances, and using degradation and humiliation. In principle, this list captures much of what Stark identifies as the substance of coercive control.
However, the offence imports several doctrinal limitations that materially constrain its reach.
The “serious effect” requirement and the persistence of the harm-based model
The most significant limitation is the requirement, in section 76(4), that the behaviour have a “serious effect” on the victim, defined either as fear of violence on at least two occasions or as serious alarm or distress with a substantial adverse effect on day-to-day activities. This requirement reintroduces, through the back door, a harm-based model that the offence was supposedly designed to displace.
The difficulty is twofold. First, the “fear of violence” limb effectively replicates the threshold of the stalking offence under section 4 of the PHA 1997. Where coercive control involves no explicit threats of violence, but operates through subtler mechanisms of degradation, financial control, or surveillance, the prosecution must rely on the second limb. Secondly, the “serious alarm or distress” limb requires evidence that the victim experienced a particular subjective state and that this state had a “substantial adverse effect” on her usual activities. This evidential burden is significant. As Tolmie (2018) has argued in a comparative context, requiring proof of psychological harm tends to invite scrutiny of the victim’s psychological resilience, with the perverse consequence that perpetrators of victims who have managed to retain some functioning are less likely to be convicted. Wiener (2017) has similarly noted that the threshold privileges visible distress over the more insidious effects of coercive control, which may include normalisation, accommodation and the subtle reshaping of the victim’s sense of self.
The deeper conceptual difficulty is that, on Stark’s account, the wrong of coercive control lies not in the harm produced but in the deprivation of liberty. A liberty-based offence would, in principle, be made out on proof that the perpetrator’s pattern of conduct constrained the victim’s autonomy, regardless of whether the victim suffered a “substantial adverse effect” amounting to demonstrable psychiatric or behavioural harm. By retaining a harm-based threshold, section 76 partially undermines its own theoretical premise (Bettinson and Bishop, 2015). On the better view, this is the offence’s most significant doctrinal defect: it acknowledges coercive control as a course-of-conduct wrong but defines its actus reus by reference to harm rather than to liberty.
The “personal connection” requirement and the post-separation gap
Section 76(2) originally required A and B either to be in an intimate personal relationship at the time of the behaviour, or to live together and either be members of the same family or have previously been in an intimate personal relationship. This formulation produced a notorious lacuna: ex-partners who no longer cohabited fell outside the offence, even though empirical evidence demonstrates that the period immediately following separation is one of heightened risk and continuing coercive behaviour (Monckton-Smith, 2020). The Home Office consultation that preceded the DAA 2021 acknowledged this gap (Home Office, 2021), and section 68 of that Act amended section 76 to remove the cohabitation requirement, aligning the offence with the broader definition of “personally connected” in section 2 of the DAA 2021.
The amendment is welcome but incomplete. It addresses the formal scope of the offence but does not resolve the deeper conceptual issue that post-separation coercive control may operate through different mechanisms, including the use of family courts, child contact arrangements and shared parenting, that the criminal law is poorly placed to capture (Birchall and Choudhry, 2022). Family-court abuse, sometimes characterised as “litigation abuse”, is unlikely to fall comfortably within section 76 because the relevant conduct is mediated through legitimate legal processes. The reform therefore extends the offence’s reach but does not equip it to address the full repertoire of post-separation control.
Mens rea: the “ought to know” formulation
Section 76(1)(d) requires that A knows or ought to know that the behaviour will have a serious effect on B. The “ought to know” formulation is an objective standard, assessed by reference to what a reasonable person in possession of the same information would know. This is doctrinally appropriate: a subjective requirement would unduly favour defendants whose entitlement and minimisation of victims’ experiences are themselves features of coercive control. Nevertheless, in practice, the objective formulation has produced relatively little appellate clarification. The Court of Appeal’s decision in R v Challen [2019] EWCA Crim 916, while concerned with diminished responsibility on appeal against a murder conviction rather than section 76 directly, marked a significant judicial acknowledgement that coercive control could provide the context for understanding a defendant’s mental state. The case did not, however, develop the mens rea of section 76 itself, and there remains relatively limited appellate authority interpreting the offence’s elements.
The cumulative effect: a partial reform
Taken together, the architecture of section 76 represents a meaningful but incomplete codification of coercive control. The offence accepts the course-of-conduct premise but couples it with a harm-based effect requirement. It now extends to ex-partners but does not adequately capture institutionally mediated post-separation abuse. Its mens rea is appropriately objective but doctrinally underdeveloped. The offence is, in McGorrery and McMahon’s (2019) characterisation, a “first-generation” coercive control offence: an important advance, but susceptible to being out-grown as the law matures.
The Domestic Abuse Act 2021: definitional clarity without doctrinal innovation
The DAA 2021 is, for the most part, an architectural rather than a substantive reform. Section 1 provides a statutory definition of domestic abuse that includes physical or sexual abuse, violent or threatening behaviour, controlling or coercive behaviour, economic abuse, and psychological, emotional or other abuse. Section 2 defines “personally connected” expansively. Section 3 recognises children as victims of domestic abuse where they see, hear or experience the effects of abuse. The Act establishes the Domestic Abuse Commissioner (Part 2), introduces Domestic Abuse Protection Notices and Orders (Part 3), and contains a range of measures relating to family proceedings and victim support.
The Act’s principal contribution to the criminal law of coercive control is the amendment of section 76 of the 2015 Act discussed above. Beyond that, its significance lies in the symbolic and definitional consolidation of the recognition that domestic abuse encompasses non-physical forms of harm. Section 1’s express inclusion of “economic abuse”, defined in section 1(4) as behaviour that has a substantial adverse effect on the victim’s ability to acquire, use or maintain money or other property, or to obtain goods or services, is doctrinally significant because it brings within the statutory concept of domestic abuse a category of conduct that the criminal law has historically struggled to address (Sharp-Jeffs, 2022). Yet because the DAA 2021 does not create a freestanding offence of economic abuse, the practical question remains whether section 76 is capable of capturing such conduct. On the better view it is, since financial control is a paradigm coercive technique, but the “serious effect” threshold continues to apply.
The introduction of Domestic Abuse Protection Notices and Orders in Part 3 is potentially more significant in practical terms. These measures provide for protective orders that can be imposed on a civil standard of proof and breached as a criminal offence, providing a more flexible enforcement architecture than the criminal offence alone. Their efficacy will depend on operational implementation, which at the time of writing remains in pilot stages. The deeper point, however, is that Part 3 implicitly recognises that the criminal offence of coercive control is, on its own, insufficient to provide effective protection: a richer suite of protective and preventive measures is required.
The DAA 2021 therefore consolidates and clarifies but does not fundamentally rework the doctrinal foundations of section 76. It addresses some of the gaps identified above, particularly the cohabitation requirement, and it gives the broader concept of domestic abuse a statutory anchorage. It does not, however, displace the harm-based model embedded in section 76(4), nor does it create the kind of liberty-based offence that Stark’s framework suggests would be the more theoretically coherent response.
Prosecutorial and evidential dynamics: the gap between law in books and law in action
Even where the substantive law is sound, its adequacy depends on the capacity of the criminal justice system to operationalise it. On this measure, the evidence is troubling. Home Office and Office for National Statistics data consistently show that, although recorded coercive control offences have risen substantially since 2015, charge and conviction rates remain low relative to recorded incidents, and lower than for many comparable offences (ONS, 2023). The reasons for this gap are multiple but converge on a core point: coercive control is evidentially demanding to prosecute in ways that incident-based offences are not.
The evidential challenge of pattern-based offences
Proving a course of controlling or coercive behaviour requires the prosecution to assemble a pattern from disparate evidential sources: text messages, social media, financial records, witness testimony, and the victim’s own account. Each individual piece of evidence may be ambiguous; the meaning emerges from the pattern. As Bishop and Bettinson (2018) have observed, this places significant demands on investigators and prosecutors trained in incident-based investigation. There is, moreover, a structural difficulty: the natural inclination of the criminal trial process is to focus on discrete events and to test their proof beyond reasonable doubt. The relational and cumulative nature of coercive control sits awkwardly with this orientation.
Specific evidential issues include the admissibility and weight of bad character evidence under sections 98–113 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003, the use of expert evidence on coercive control, and the treatment of victim testimony where the victim has been subject to long-term psychological manipulation. The Court of Appeal in R v Conlon [2017] EWCA Crim 2450 confirmed that section 76 properly contemplates evidence of a course of conduct and rejected arguments that the offence was unworkably broad, but the broader evidential infrastructure remains underdeveloped. There is no settled framework for the use of expert evidence on coercive control comparable to that which has emerged in respect of, for example, battered woman syndrome in defence contexts.
Charging decisions and the CPS
The Crown Prosecution Service has issued legal guidance on coercive and controlling behaviour (CPS, 2023), which sets out indicators of the offence and evidential considerations. The guidance is detailed and reflects an institutional commitment to the offence. In practice, however, prosecutors face structural pressures that militate against charging coercive control. Charging decisions are made under the Code for Crown Prosecutors, which requires that there be sufficient evidence to provide a realistic prospect of conviction. The evidential burden of proving a course of conduct, combined with the “serious effect” threshold, makes coercive control charges harder to sustain than incident-based assault charges based on the same factual matrix. The result, as Walklate et al. (2018) have argued, is that prosecutors may default to charging individual physical incidents under the OAPA 1861, even where the underlying pattern is one of coercive control. The pattern is then lost in the trial process, and the conviction, if obtained, marks only the surface of the wrong.
This phenomenon, which might be termed “charging downgrade”, is not merely a technical inefficiency. It has substantive consequences. It re-incident-alises the offence; it disconnects sentencing from the gravity of the cumulative wrong; and it deprives victims of the symbolic recognition of the controlling pattern that the 2015 reform was designed to provide. The point is reinforced by Wiener’s (2017) qualitative research with police officers, which found that even after training, officers often defaulted to incident-based framings of cases that involved coercive control.
Sentencing
The Sentencing Council’s overarching principles on domestic abuse (Sentencing Council, 2018) treat the domestic context as an aggravating feature, and the Council has issued specific guidelines for the section 76 offence. The five-year maximum sentence, however, is comparatively modest given the gravity of sustained coercive control. By comparison, the offence of stalking involving fear of violence under section 4A of the PHA 1997 carries a ten-year maximum following the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 amendments. The disparity is difficult to justify, since section 76 is designed to capture conduct of equal or greater seriousness within an intimate relationship. There is therefore a strong argument that the maximum sentence under section 76 should be raised, both for proportionality and to signal the offence’s gravity.
Institutional and cultural impediments to enforcement
The third dimension of inadequacy concerns institutional culture, particularly within policing. Successive reports by HMICFRS (2014, 2019, 2021) have documented persistent failures in the police response to domestic abuse, including under-recording, under-investigation, victim-blaming, and inadequate risk assessment. The 2014 report, Everyone’s business, was unusually direct in its criticism. While subsequent reports have noted improvements, the 2021 report continued to identify substantial inconsistencies in the quality of police response across forces. The Casey Review of the Metropolitan Police (Casey, 2023), although broader in scope, identified specific cultural failings in the policing of violence against women and girls. These institutional findings are not peripheral to the question of legal adequacy; they are central to it. A statute that recognises a wrong but is enforced by an institution that systematically misperceives or minimises that wrong cannot be said to address the wrong adequately.
The empirical literature on police responses to coercive control reinforces this point. Brennan and Myhill (2022), drawing on police data, found that recorded coercive control offences are dominated by cases where physical violence is also alleged, suggesting that police continue to identify coercive control primarily through its association with physical assault rather than as a distinctive pattern. Barlow et al. (2020) similarly found that officers struggled to translate the conceptual categories of coercive control into operational practice, and that recording decisions were heavily influenced by the presence or absence of corroborating physical evidence. These findings indicate that the offence is being applied selectively and inconsistently, in ways that may reproduce rather than disrupt the incident-based logic it was designed to displace.
Compounding the institutional difficulty is the question of intersectionality. Coercive control affects women across all demographic groups, but the willingness and capacity of victims to engage with the criminal justice system is mediated by race, immigration status, disability, sexuality and class (Femi-Ajao et al., 2020). Migrant victims with insecure immigration status, in particular, may be deterred from reporting by fear of immigration consequences, despite the existence of the Domestic Violence Indefinite Leave to Remain concession and the Migrant Victims of Domestic Abuse Concession. The DAA 2021’s failure to provide stronger protections for migrant victims, including a firewall between police and immigration enforcement, has been criticised by the Domestic Abuse Commissioner (Domestic Abuse Commissioner, 2021) and represents a significant gap in the protective framework.
The defence dimension: Challen and the recognition of coercive control in defendants
An important and often under-analysed dimension of the law’s response to coercive control concerns its treatment in the criminal law of defendants who have been subjected to such control. The most prominent example is R v Challen [2019] EWCA Crim 916, where the Court of Appeal quashed Sally Challen’s murder conviction and ordered a retrial on the basis of fresh evidence concerning her diagnosis of two psychiatric conditions and the impact of her husband’s coercive control. The court was careful to confine its reasoning to diminished responsibility under section 2 of the Homicide Act 1957 (as amended) and did not endorse coercive control as an independent route to a partial defence. Nevertheless, the decision is significant for two reasons.
First, it represents a judicial acknowledgement that coercive control may be relevant to understanding a defendant’s mental state and, by implication, to the operation of partial defences. Secondly, it raises the question whether the law of loss of control under sections 54 and 55 of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009 adequately accommodates the experience of victims of coercive control who kill their abusers. The “qualifying trigger” requirements, particularly the “things said or done” trigger in section 55(4), have been criticised for their incident-based framing, which ill-fits the cumulative effect of long-term coercive control (Edwards, 2021). The courts have shown some willingness to interpret these provisions contextually, but there remains a doctrinal tension between an incident-based partial defence and a relational understanding of the conduct that triggers it. On the better view, this tension is itself an indicator of the broader doctrinal challenge: the criminal law has accepted coercive control as a wrong when committed against the defendant in section 76, but has not fully integrated that recognition into the defences available to victims who kill.
Comparative perspectives and reform options
Comparative experience offers a useful counterpoint. Scotland’s Domestic Abuse (Scotland) Act 2018 created a coercive control offence that is widely regarded as more theoretically coherent than section 76. The Scottish offence does not require proof that the behaviour had a “serious effect” on the victim, but instead asks whether a reasonable person would consider the course of behaviour likely to cause physical or psychological harm, defined inclusively to encompass fear, alarm and distress (sections 1–2 of the 2018 Act). The Scottish formulation thereby relocates the offence’s centre of gravity from the victim’s actual response to the objective character of the perpetrator’s behaviour, which Stark himself, advising on the Scottish reform, regarded as more faithful to the underlying concept of coercive control (Stark and Hester, 2019).
The Scottish model is not without its own difficulties. The first prosecutions under the 2018 Act, which came into force in April 2019, indicate that evidential challenges persist (Brooks-Hay et al., 2022). However, the structural choice to define the offence by reference to the perpetrator’s conduct rather than the victim’s response is doctrinally significant and offers a plausible reform path for English law. A reformed section 76 might similarly redefine the actus reus by reference to a course of conduct that a reasonable person would regard as controlling or coercive, dispensing with or substantially loosening the “serious effect” requirement.
Other reform options include: raising the maximum sentence to align with section 4A of the PHA 1997; creating a specific offence of post-separation coercive control or economic abuse; introducing statutory provision for expert evidence on coercive control in both prosecution and defence contexts; and introducing a firewall between police and immigration enforcement to improve access to protection for migrant victims. Each of these reforms responds to one of the inadequacies identified above, and none requires departure from established principles of criminal law.
It is, however, important to be cautious about the limits of doctrinal reform. As Tadros (2005) has argued in a different context, the criminal law’s expressive function does not always translate into protective effect. A more sharply drawn offence will not, of itself, address the institutional and cultural failings that have characterised the policing of domestic abuse. The most pressing reforms may therefore be evidential and institutional rather than doctrinal: investment in specialist domestic abuse units, the systematic use of expert evidence, structured risk assessment, and meaningful accountability for institutional failure. Doctrinal reform without institutional reform risks producing a more elegant offence that continues to be inadequately enforced.
Adequacy reconsidered: against what standard?
The argument so far has assessed the law against three standards: doctrinal coherence, prosecutorial efficacy, and institutional implementation. A final question is whether these standards capture the right concept of adequacy. Three further considerations are relevant.
First, the criminal law’s adequacy must be assessed in the context of a wider regulatory framework. Civil protective orders, family law remedies, housing law, and welfare provision all play significant roles in protecting victims of coercive control. The criminal law is not the only tool, and may not always be the most effective one. As Hoyle (2008) has argued, criminalisation can be counterproductive where it disempowers victims or removes their agency. The DAA 2021’s protective order regime reflects this insight, but the criminal offence of coercive control sits within a broader landscape that the present essay can only sketch.
Secondly, adequacy must be understood as a function of victim outcomes, not merely conviction rates. A high conviction rate that does not translate into safety, autonomy or recovery for victims is not an adequate response. The Domestic Abuse Commissioner’s reports (Domestic Abuse Commissioner, 2022, 2023) emphasise the importance of victim-centred outcomes and the persistent gap between the formal recognition of domestic abuse and the lived experience of victims navigating the system. This is a salutary reminder that legal adequacy cannot be assessed in purely doctrinal terms.
Thirdly, the criminal law’s expressive function should not be dismissed. Even where prosecutorial outcomes are imperfect, the existence of an offence of coercive control communicates a public commitment to recognising the wrong. This expressive function is not, on its own, a sufficient measure of adequacy, but it is not nothing. The argument is therefore not that section 76 has failed, but that its expressive achievement has outpaced its practical efficacy, and that the gap between the two is the proper focus of further reform.
Conclusion
English criminal law has taken significant steps towards addressing coercive and controlling behaviour in intimate relationships. Section 76 of the Serious Crime Act 2015 represents the first statutory recognition of coercive control as a distinctive criminal wrong, and the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 has consolidated and extended that recognition through a statutory definition of domestic abuse and amendments to section 76’s scope. These are real achievements, particularly in expressive and definitional terms.
However, the law is not adequate to the task it has set itself. The argument advanced here has been that adequacy fails on three fronts. Doctrinally, section 76’s “serious effect” requirement reintroduces a harm-based model that sits in tension with the offence’s theoretical premise that coercive control is a liberty-based wrong; the Scottish model offers a more coherent alternative. Evidentially, the offence’s pattern-based structure imposes investigative and prosecutorial demands that the criminal justice system has struggled to meet, leading to charging downgrade and the persistence of an incident-based logic. Institutionally, persistent failings in policing culture and practice, documented across multiple HMICFRS reports and reinforced by the Casey Review, undermine the protective effect of the offence even where its substantive elements are made out. The DAA 2021’s protective order regime and the broader recognition of economic abuse mitigate but do not resolve these difficulties.
The most important reforms, on the analysis offered here, are not the creation of further offences but the recalibration of the existing one and, more importantly, the institutional infrastructure that supports it. A reformed section 76 might dispense with the “serious effect” threshold, raise the maximum sentence to align with stalking, and clarify its application to economic abuse and post-separation conduct. Equally, however, the law’s adequacy depends on policing culture, prosecutorial training, the availability of expert evidence, and the protective architecture surrounding the offence. The criminal law cannot, on its own, dismantle coercive control; but it can, and must, do better than it currently does at recognising, prosecuting and punishing it. On the better view, then, English criminal law has begun to take coercive control seriously, but it has not yet built the doctrinal, evidential and institutional capacity to address it adequately. The reform agenda is unfinished, and the most important work remains to be done.
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