Criminalize Coercive Control USA
Criminalize Coercive Control USA
The Issue
This petition seeks your support in our effort to get coercive control of domestic partners criminalized.
One day in 2020, my brother's wife called his boss 149 times, demanding to speak to him. It was the proverbial last straw. He had finally had enough and walked out on his lucrative and successful job, never to be seen alive again. He was loved and admired by everyone, except his wife, who tortured him through coercive control for years. My brother was found a week later having taken his own life. His suicide note painfully pointed towards the relentless abuse from his wife. The note, along with an inside perspective of what it’s like to be controlled in this way, are available on season two of a podcast I created: www.isolatedpodcast.com All names and identifying information have been changed, including my name, due to the vengeful and retaliatory personality of my brother's wife. E-mail exchanges between the couple, interviews with friends and neighbors, along with police records, illustrate what BMC Public Health stated in an article as “making a person subordinate or dependent by isolating them from sources of support, exploiting their resources and capacities for personal gain, depriving them of the means needed for independence, resistance, and escape, and regulating their everyday lives”. [1]
But it’s so much worse than that when you get a chance to read the actual word-for-word exchanges between a controller and the victim. Coercive control is a slow burn that turns into such a raging fire that it cannot be put out by the victim. It is an unrelenting avalanche of denigration, control, isolation, loss of livelihood, blackmail and parent alienation. As my brother put it in his suicide note, a “scorched earth campaign to blame and reduce me to nothing.”
Tania Tetlow, a previous law professor at Tulane University made a compelling argument for states to pass laws “banning torture by private actors”, primarily as a better way to address domestic violence. “The biggest risk of lethality with domestic violence is not measured by the level of violence; it’s about the level of control,” she said. “That is a bigger indicator of the chance that someone will murder their victim.” Tetlow concludes, “Describing domestic violence as torture focuses the criminal justice system and the public on the defendant’s clear premeditation and culpability. We see batterers as merely angry, whereas we acknowledge torturers as cruel.” [2] I would encourage you to read her entire eye-opening article. After writing my brother’s story, cruel and remorseless described his wife. In fact, psychologists and psychiatrists alike speak to the fact that a coercive, manipulative abuser who is also a parent, will likely turn their finely honed skills onto the child most like the spouse, once the spouse is gone. Criminalizing this abuse will also protect children.
We can no longer hide behind the errant notion that victims of domestic abuse can just leave their abusers. Abused partners are targeted and groomed, similar to a cult victim. They are built up initially to the point of complete love, trust, and reliance on their partner, only to then be belittled and maligned, beat down into nothing….trying desperately to please the unpleasable in an effort to gain even a morsel of love or kindness again. Their children are used as pawns, they are isolated from their family and friends, and their partners have taken over financial control. I believe parental alienation is a form of coercive control and is running rampant. Coercive control can happen so slowly you don’t even realize it until it’s too late. These men and women are not weak or simple. They are successful, smart, kind and loving. Some of them are even police officers or military officers.
San Ramon police were called out to my brother's house for a domestic disturbances, as well as his wife's altercations with neighbors, at least 22 times prior to his suicide. His wife was unhindered in her abuse. The board members at his job consulted an attorney regarding a cease to contact order for his wife because she continually harassed staff after trashing my brother's office and being arrested. She was unhindered in her abuse. My brother's son called 911 because his mother was throwing things and screaming at his dad, who was then sliced and bloody and in need of stitches. My brother's wife was arrested, and yet unhindered in her abuse. She relentlessly called, texted, and e-mailed him, often several times a minute. If he didn’t answer she threatened to call his boss and accuse him of child abuse or alcoholism, as well as the police. She stole his keys, blocked his car so he couldn’t get to work, cut up all his clothes, black-mailed him into doing whatever suited her, refusing to use any of her paychecks to pay bills until he complied, impersonated him, enslaved him, made him sleep in his car, deprived him of showers and then called him disgusting. She alienated their kids from him and from extended family. She alienated my brother from us. HOW is this not criminal?
CTCADV.org states that 1 in 2 women and 1 in 2 men have experienced psychological aggression by an intimate partner and 1 in 3 women and 1 in 2 men have experienced coercive control by an intimate partner in their lifetime [3], yet there are no laws to cover it, other than it being a reason to file a restraining order. Many of the abused say that non-physical abuse is far worse for them and their children to live with than the physical abuse, due to stigma and difficulty in detection, safe access to reporting and aftercare resources being limited.
It is imperative that abuse be seen as a pattern crime, such as stalking. Any one act taken in isolation may not seem that harmful, but it is patterned and relentless with malicious intent, having a horrific cumulative effect on the victim. The US National Library of Medicine posted an Abstract stating “Numerous studies have demonstrated that coercive control is more strongly associated with suicidal ideation than other forms of intimate partner violence”. [4]
Adding coercive control to the definition of domestic violence was a start, but nowhere near powerful enough! My brother had a restraining order against his wife. She still called, she still sent texts, and she still physically violated the order, then threatened his livelihood and reputation should he call the police. She would bring their children along, saying that should he call the cops he would be doing so against his own children and they would then want nothing to do with him.
Coercive control is systematic and relentless. The same tactics used by cult leaders are used by these abusers. The same deprogramming techniques used for cult followers are used for targets of coercive control, if they can get away from the abuse long enough. If the target is not absolutely cut off from the abuser, deprogramming will not work. That’s why a law criminalizing coercive control and punishable by meaningful jail time is so important, giving a victim time to get counseling, rebuild financially and reconnect with family, friends, and other support. Adding coercive control to the definition of domestic violence does little to help the targets of the tortuous existence they are forced to endure because the abuse does and will continue.
In 2015, England and Wales became the first nations to criminalize controlling behavior between intimate partners, making it punishable by up to 5 years in jail. In 2019 Ireland and Scotland followed suit. Professor Barbara Gerbert, at the Division of Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco, said “The results in Scotland are showing remarkable statistics. In the 10 plus years since they have had these protections on the books, overall domestic violence has decreased dramatically.”[5]
Stalking is described as “the unwanted pursuit of another person. Examples of this type of behavior include following a person, appearing at a person's home or place of business, making harassing phone calls, leaving written messages or objects, or vandalizing a person's property” [6] and is a crime, unless it happens between domestic partners. That is illogical. It damages the victim in exactly the same way, except that it is harder to avoid such abuse in an intimate partner environment where phones, the internet, cars, and finances are wedded together. My brother experienced years of all of these aspects of his abusers' torture, including three GPS tackers hidden in his car.
Blackmail is considered a crime, but not within the confines of an intimate partnership. Is being in a committed relationship a free-for-all of criminal activity that is somehow no longer criminal because you love the person who is hurting you?
I urge you to take all of this into consideration. A law criminalizing coercive control against an intimate partner should also state very clearly the evidence needed to convict in a court of law; phone records, social media accounts, emails, testimony from friends, family members, neighbors, colleagues, bosses, teachers. Of great concern in accumulating such evidence is the illegality in California of recording someone without their consent. It should be admissible evidence in any domestic abuse case.
Also of note, a Time article stated in regards to the Scotland law criminalizing coercive control, “The Scottish law also includes provisions for police to charge perpetrators of physical and psychological abuse together under a single crime, reflecting the growing understanding of domestic abuse as a pattern, rather than a series of single incidents. Stark calls it the “gold standard” and says it provides a better blueprint to other countries considering an overhaul of their domestic abuse legislation.” [6]
Senate Bill No. 1141, which added coercive control to the family code, making it a valid reason for a restraining order if proof of a pattern of coercion could be proven, was completely ineffectual in my brother’s case. What coercive control is really like and how extremely difficult it is to escape, should be studied and applied to domestic abuse legislation. Please listen to season two of Isolated Podcast or read the transcripts on our website at www.isolatedpodcast.com
Thank you in advance for your consideration in signing this petition in support of criminalizing coercive control.
[1] https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-021-12232-3
[2] https://wmlawreview.org/sites/default/files/4-Tetlow.pdf
[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5658049/
[6] https://time.com/5610016/coercive-control-domestic-violence/
243
The Issue
This petition seeks your support in our effort to get coercive control of domestic partners criminalized.
One day in 2020, my brother's wife called his boss 149 times, demanding to speak to him. It was the proverbial last straw. He had finally had enough and walked out on his lucrative and successful job, never to be seen alive again. He was loved and admired by everyone, except his wife, who tortured him through coercive control for years. My brother was found a week later having taken his own life. His suicide note painfully pointed towards the relentless abuse from his wife. The note, along with an inside perspective of what it’s like to be controlled in this way, are available on season two of a podcast I created: www.isolatedpodcast.com All names and identifying information have been changed, including my name, due to the vengeful and retaliatory personality of my brother's wife. E-mail exchanges between the couple, interviews with friends and neighbors, along with police records, illustrate what BMC Public Health stated in an article as “making a person subordinate or dependent by isolating them from sources of support, exploiting their resources and capacities for personal gain, depriving them of the means needed for independence, resistance, and escape, and regulating their everyday lives”. [1]
But it’s so much worse than that when you get a chance to read the actual word-for-word exchanges between a controller and the victim. Coercive control is a slow burn that turns into such a raging fire that it cannot be put out by the victim. It is an unrelenting avalanche of denigration, control, isolation, loss of livelihood, blackmail and parent alienation. As my brother put it in his suicide note, a “scorched earth campaign to blame and reduce me to nothing.”
Tania Tetlow, a previous law professor at Tulane University made a compelling argument for states to pass laws “banning torture by private actors”, primarily as a better way to address domestic violence. “The biggest risk of lethality with domestic violence is not measured by the level of violence; it’s about the level of control,” she said. “That is a bigger indicator of the chance that someone will murder their victim.” Tetlow concludes, “Describing domestic violence as torture focuses the criminal justice system and the public on the defendant’s clear premeditation and culpability. We see batterers as merely angry, whereas we acknowledge torturers as cruel.” [2] I would encourage you to read her entire eye-opening article. After writing my brother’s story, cruel and remorseless described his wife. In fact, psychologists and psychiatrists alike speak to the fact that a coercive, manipulative abuser who is also a parent, will likely turn their finely honed skills onto the child most like the spouse, once the spouse is gone. Criminalizing this abuse will also protect children.
We can no longer hide behind the errant notion that victims of domestic abuse can just leave their abusers. Abused partners are targeted and groomed, similar to a cult victim. They are built up initially to the point of complete love, trust, and reliance on their partner, only to then be belittled and maligned, beat down into nothing….trying desperately to please the unpleasable in an effort to gain even a morsel of love or kindness again. Their children are used as pawns, they are isolated from their family and friends, and their partners have taken over financial control. I believe parental alienation is a form of coercive control and is running rampant. Coercive control can happen so slowly you don’t even realize it until it’s too late. These men and women are not weak or simple. They are successful, smart, kind and loving. Some of them are even police officers or military officers.
San Ramon police were called out to my brother's house for a domestic disturbances, as well as his wife's altercations with neighbors, at least 22 times prior to his suicide. His wife was unhindered in her abuse. The board members at his job consulted an attorney regarding a cease to contact order for his wife because she continually harassed staff after trashing my brother's office and being arrested. She was unhindered in her abuse. My brother's son called 911 because his mother was throwing things and screaming at his dad, who was then sliced and bloody and in need of stitches. My brother's wife was arrested, and yet unhindered in her abuse. She relentlessly called, texted, and e-mailed him, often several times a minute. If he didn’t answer she threatened to call his boss and accuse him of child abuse or alcoholism, as well as the police. She stole his keys, blocked his car so he couldn’t get to work, cut up all his clothes, black-mailed him into doing whatever suited her, refusing to use any of her paychecks to pay bills until he complied, impersonated him, enslaved him, made him sleep in his car, deprived him of showers and then called him disgusting. She alienated their kids from him and from extended family. She alienated my brother from us. HOW is this not criminal?
CTCADV.org states that 1 in 2 women and 1 in 2 men have experienced psychological aggression by an intimate partner and 1 in 3 women and 1 in 2 men have experienced coercive control by an intimate partner in their lifetime [3], yet there are no laws to cover it, other than it being a reason to file a restraining order. Many of the abused say that non-physical abuse is far worse for them and their children to live with than the physical abuse, due to stigma and difficulty in detection, safe access to reporting and aftercare resources being limited.
It is imperative that abuse be seen as a pattern crime, such as stalking. Any one act taken in isolation may not seem that harmful, but it is patterned and relentless with malicious intent, having a horrific cumulative effect on the victim. The US National Library of Medicine posted an Abstract stating “Numerous studies have demonstrated that coercive control is more strongly associated with suicidal ideation than other forms of intimate partner violence”. [4]
Adding coercive control to the definition of domestic violence was a start, but nowhere near powerful enough! My brother had a restraining order against his wife. She still called, she still sent texts, and she still physically violated the order, then threatened his livelihood and reputation should he call the police. She would bring their children along, saying that should he call the cops he would be doing so against his own children and they would then want nothing to do with him.
Coercive control is systematic and relentless. The same tactics used by cult leaders are used by these abusers. The same deprogramming techniques used for cult followers are used for targets of coercive control, if they can get away from the abuse long enough. If the target is not absolutely cut off from the abuser, deprogramming will not work. That’s why a law criminalizing coercive control and punishable by meaningful jail time is so important, giving a victim time to get counseling, rebuild financially and reconnect with family, friends, and other support. Adding coercive control to the definition of domestic violence does little to help the targets of the tortuous existence they are forced to endure because the abuse does and will continue.
In 2015, England and Wales became the first nations to criminalize controlling behavior between intimate partners, making it punishable by up to 5 years in jail. In 2019 Ireland and Scotland followed suit. Professor Barbara Gerbert, at the Division of Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco, said “The results in Scotland are showing remarkable statistics. In the 10 plus years since they have had these protections on the books, overall domestic violence has decreased dramatically.”[5]
Stalking is described as “the unwanted pursuit of another person. Examples of this type of behavior include following a person, appearing at a person's home or place of business, making harassing phone calls, leaving written messages or objects, or vandalizing a person's property” [6] and is a crime, unless it happens between domestic partners. That is illogical. It damages the victim in exactly the same way, except that it is harder to avoid such abuse in an intimate partner environment where phones, the internet, cars, and finances are wedded together. My brother experienced years of all of these aspects of his abusers' torture, including three GPS tackers hidden in his car.
Blackmail is considered a crime, but not within the confines of an intimate partnership. Is being in a committed relationship a free-for-all of criminal activity that is somehow no longer criminal because you love the person who is hurting you?
I urge you to take all of this into consideration. A law criminalizing coercive control against an intimate partner should also state very clearly the evidence needed to convict in a court of law; phone records, social media accounts, emails, testimony from friends, family members, neighbors, colleagues, bosses, teachers. Of great concern in accumulating such evidence is the illegality in California of recording someone without their consent. It should be admissible evidence in any domestic abuse case.
Also of note, a Time article stated in regards to the Scotland law criminalizing coercive control, “The Scottish law also includes provisions for police to charge perpetrators of physical and psychological abuse together under a single crime, reflecting the growing understanding of domestic abuse as a pattern, rather than a series of single incidents. Stark calls it the “gold standard” and says it provides a better blueprint to other countries considering an overhaul of their domestic abuse legislation.” [6]
Senate Bill No. 1141, which added coercive control to the family code, making it a valid reason for a restraining order if proof of a pattern of coercion could be proven, was completely ineffectual in my brother’s case. What coercive control is really like and how extremely difficult it is to escape, should be studied and applied to domestic abuse legislation. Please listen to season two of Isolated Podcast or read the transcripts on our website at www.isolatedpodcast.com
Thank you in advance for your consideration in signing this petition in support of criminalizing coercive control.
[1] https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-021-12232-3
[2] https://wmlawreview.org/sites/default/files/4-Tetlow.pdf
[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5658049/
[6] https://time.com/5610016/coercive-control-domestic-violence/
243
Petition Updates
Share this petition
Petition created on March 30, 2022