When I was a little girl, I heard this kind of thing frequently – ‘Eat your crusts, or your hair won’t get curly, (I wanted curly hair and had straight hair); ‘Eat your carrots and you’ll see in the dark’ (who doesn’t want to see in the dark?); ‘Eat your greens, or you won’t grown up big and strong’ (what child doesn’t want to be ‘big and strong’); ‘Go so sleep/be good now, or Father Christmas won’t come’ (‘I don’t care about Father Christmas coming’ said no child ever, and that ruse worked for weeks); ‘If you tidy your room, we can go to the park’;  when you’ve done your chores you can (insert whatever the child has asked to do); ‘if you don’t do x you can’t do y’. All of these things were designed to engender some level of fear in me, even if it was just the fear that I wouldn’t get to do something I’d set my heart on doing – fear that I would argue was not displaced or unwarranted.
As a parent, I used many of the same tactics along with the reverse – ‘No, you can’t have Brussels sprouts or broccoli. They are for grown-ups and you’re not big enough yet.’ That tactic, more often than not, illicited ‘Oh, PLEASE! I AM big enough and I WILL eat them all!’ and they vanished off the plate in short order.
As a new bride, more than one person – always a married woman – advised me, ‘if you want something, make sure your husband thinks it’s his idea.’ (That was so long ago, no-one had a ‘partner’, but I don’t doubt it happens today.)
As a young mother, conversations at the school gates, on occasion, involved a regaling of how one husband/partner or another, the poor sap, had been persuaded/duped into paying for this-that-or-the-other, or been brow-beaten in one-way-or-another into something he didn’t want, and sometimes the story was regaled with great glee as if it was some huge joke or victory.
So what is coercive control? Is it any or none of the above?
Much is being made of how (rightly) domestic abuse is not always violent and doesn’t always leave cuts or bruises. So is coercive control always under the guise of threats? The dictionary defines coercion as ‘to persuade (an unwilling person) to do something that they are not willing to do, using force or threats’ and the law defines coercive control (put simply) as ‘a type of domestic abuse involving behaviour designed to manipulate the way the victim acts, thinks and feels’, (isn’t that what much of parenting is about?).
The CPS states:
‘In many cases the conduct might seem innocent – especially if considered in isolation of other incidents – and the victim may not be aware of, or be ready to acknowledge, abusive behaviour. The consideration of the cumulative impact of CCB and the pattern of behaviour within the context of the relationship is crucial. This approach will support the prosecutor to assess effectively whether a pattern of behaviour amounts to fear that violence will be carried out; or if serious alarm or distress leading to a substantial adverse effect on usual day-to-day activities.’
Permission, no less, to re-write history and the PROSECUTOR will decide on fear, alarm or distress.
We all persuade and control other human beings all the time. It’s part of human interaction from the cradle to the grave. Children play off one parent against the other to try get what they want, parents manipulate their children to get them to do what they need to do using all kinds of threats and sanctions, and almost every human relationship has its share of manipulation and control.
How often do children ‘try it on’ to see if they can get out of school, or chores, or anything else they don’t want to do? How often do parents bribe their children in order to get them to do what they need to do? How often do husbands and wives negotiate the terms of their daily lives and relationships, sometimes with out-and-out threats –‘If you do x, I will do Y’, or ‘if you don’t do x I won’t do y’. Manipulative? Yes. Designed to create a level of fear? Undoubtedly, if the threat is something the person doesn’t want to happen, minor or major. Criminal? Probably not for the vast majority of the time.
Within relationships the clichés abound – ‘She wears the pants in that household.’ ‘He’s completely henpecked’ and we have all kinds of adjectives that describe bossy and belligerent women who use bullying tactics, (one might even say coercive control), to get their own way. Harridan, shrew, fishwife, virago, nag, martinet, tartar to name but a few which have been popular across the centuries, demonstrating that their existence is commonplace, yet few women endure the experience of a court case as a result and there are few adjectives acknowledging such behaviour in men.
Interestingly, there appears to be no female equivalent of ‘a hen-pecked husband’. The bullied husband is often seen as weak and/or a target for amusement and ridicule, where as a bullied wife is instantly seen as abused/battered and in need of help and support.
Women’s groups insist that males are overall the major perpetrators by a long way citing CCB statistics, (detailed below), and completely neglecting the fact that males are very reticent about reporting abuse of any type and they lobby the government to that effect. Even Richard Spencer, whose wife Sheree was only jailed for 4 years in 2023 for 20 years of horrendous abuse and coercive control did not report the abuse himself and it was a friend of his who some would say, saved his life by doing so.
In the UK, Section 76 of the Serious Crime Act 2015, which created the offence of controlling or coercive behaviour in an intimate or family relationship (CCB), was widened in 2021 to remove the cohabitation requirement and so allow prosecutions where it could be shown that CCB had taken place after separation of the parties. The number of CCB offences have increased year on year since its inception but are still much lower than the numbers of other domestic abuse-related offences and this appears to be of great concern to women’s domestic abuse agencies who see the number of prosecutions as ‘disappointingly low’, with Women’s Aid in particular seeing it through the lens of male violence against women. Of course, this is in spite of the law being un-gendered and domestic violence against men being recorded as VAWG, thus rendering male victims invisible.
Moreover, young people are being told that things such as ‘keeping you away from friends and family’, telling you what you can do or where you can go’, ‘watching your social media accounts, i.e. keeping track of who likes your posts or who messages you’, ‘using technology to track your movements and activities’, and ‘insisting that you give them your passwords to your email or your social media accounts’ are all forms of coercive control, yet all of these things are things that a concerned parent might need to do to keep an unruly and strong-willed teenager safe. It’s small comfort to tell parents ‘it would never come to that if you have good reason’. It could, would and undoubtedly does given the level of subjectivity that the authorities can apply and the numbers of false allegations of all sorts of crimes levied against unwitting and loving parents.
Yet, as aforesaid, we have it clearly recognised in society that women manipulate men, often have primary control of the household, and it’s becoming increasingly apparent that men are on the receiving end of all types of abuse as much as women are, but in 2022 there were, in England and Wales, 3,082 females and 36,459 males prosecuted for CCB with 73.3% and 77.2% convicted respectively.
Coercive control against men is minimised and such behaviour against women is magnified. What starts off as ‘Isn’t he sweet? He wants me to text him to let him know I got home safely,’ (concern for safety is generally an act of love), too easily becomes ‘He was controlling me; he wanted to know where I was every moment.’ Even the first flush of love, which can bring constant contact, gifts, and so on, has been red-flagged as ‘love-bombing’ and an effort to control. Men are run ragged taking second and third jobs to pay off credit cards run up by their girlfriends/partners’/wives who say ‘I didn’t MEAN to!’ and that becomes ‘he wouldn’t let me spend any money’. Genuine and reasonable concerns about almost anything can all too easily become – ‘he wouldn’t let me see my friends/family; he wouldn’t let me .........’ which, if they reach the level of criminality, should be brought to the criminal court but are too often used as accusation in the Family Court and acted upon without foundation.
It speaks volumes that the number of CCB cases has virtually doubled year on year, are overwhelmingly brought against men and yet women’s groups are complaining that there are too few.
Is it any less controlling for a woman to bully her boyfriend/partner/husband into buying things that he cannot afford for her? To demand holidays, accommodation, clothes, etc, etc, out of any kind of proportion to their household income? (One look at an evening’s TV advertising demonstrates the emphasis on women’s personal spending.)
Is it any less criminal for women to actually manipulate her boyfriend/partner/husband, as I was advised to do all those years ago into doing what SHE wants? Is it coercive control to steer one’s partner away from friends and relatives who exert undue and negative influence? (They wouldn’t let us visit my family – until it’s revealed that the reason was that the children were afraid of an alcoholic grandparent.)
Of course, as I said in the first place, we all manipulate other people all the time, mostly for good reason and sometimes for bad. The problems come when the bad is ascribed almost exclusively to males and the good almost exclusively to females and when the ‘control’ is manufactured for other reasons and in retrospect.
It’s all very well for the CPS to state that ‘A pattern of CCB can be well established before a single incident is reported. In many cases the conduct might seem innocent – especially if considered in isolation of other incidents – and the victim may not be aware of, or ready to acknowledge, abusive behaviour.’
It seems to me that the whole notion of ‘coercive control’ is 1) far too subjective and, 2) open to interpretation. Put this alongside the whole remit of the CPS to ‘build cases’ and ‘bring prosecutions’ and the penchant for women’s organisations to convince women that they are victims when they don’t consider themselves to be, and the law is treading on very dangerous ground.
That is not to say that coercive control is never a dangerous and damaging form of abuse. Sheree Spencer is testament to that, but there were plenty of laws that would have seen her jailed for multiple crimes, and it’s clear that her status as a female gave her a relative pass, given the severity of Richard’s injuries and the lightness of her sentence.
Once more it seems that the Domestic Abuse lobby has lobbied itself into dangerous territory, with loose language and a gender bias that threatens to criminalise the most innocent of interactions between men and women, and potentially children and their parents. Children are already citing their ‘right to play’ as a reason to ignore a bedtime and women are already complaining that men want little to do with them. (What happened to chivalry? This was the plaintive cry on X recently.)
Coercive Control laws and the drive to criminalise yet more people, mainly men, is potentially another nail in the coffin of healthy human relationships.
By Felicity Stryjak
Felicity Stryjak is retired having worn many hats in her life so far, teacher and paralegal among them. She was born in Torquay in 1953 and has lived in a variety of interesting places both in the UK and abroad. She intends Scotland to be her final place of abode.
Please let us know if you think that there is a mistake in this article, explaining what you think is wrong and why. We will correct any errors as soon as possible.