It's not enough to plug the gap: coercive control and the criminal law

This study is a review of section 76 Serious Crime Act 2015 (section 76), a law that makes ‘controlling or coercive behaviour’ a criminal offence in England and Wales. It is the first comprehensive review of the new law, and as the UK is leading the way on coercive control legislation it will generate significant national and international interest. It is part doctrinal and part empirical in scope, and answers the research question: does the criminal law in England and Wales capture coercive control effectively?

The thesis begins with an exposition of coercive control before examining the criminal law. This allows for an initial assessment of coercive control outside of the domain of the criminal law in chapter three. I build on the existing literature, and on focus groups and semi structured qualitative interviews conducted with survivors and their closest advisors, to present a model of control that explains how perpetrator behaviour that is physically, sexually and emotionally abusive supports a strategy of domination.

Chapters four to seven then turn to the criminal law itself. In them, I set the implementation of section 76 into context by reviewing it, together with the other three pieces of legislation that are available to police and prosecutors to capture the different manifestations of coercive control. In each chapter the doctrinal review is given depth and context via the inclusion of data from interviews and focus groups conducted with the judiciary and the police. In the final chapter eight, I conclude that despite the introduction of section 76, the crime is not properly labelled and the harms inflicted are not properly captured - while section 76 marks progress, it is clear that there is more work to be done.