Government moves on coercive control

Penrith dentist Preethi Reddy. Picture: Facebook

Coercive control is a systematic attack on liberty. Until recently, coercive control was not a well-known phenomenon. It’s insidious domestic abuse, involving systematic patterns of behaviour with the cumulative effect of denying victims their independence and autonomy. The abuse can include physical, sexual, psychological or financial abuse.

It doesn’t manifest in the same way each time, or even in physical symptoms each time.

Abusers often take pains to isolate victim-survivors from friends, family and support systems, making detection even harder.

It’s not as easy to detect as bruises or broken bones, but coercive control can be deadly.

It’s a proven precursor to domestic violence deaths. Of 112 intimate partner domestic violence homicides that occurred in NSW between 2008 and 2016, the Domestic Violence Death Review Team found that there was an intimate partner abuser who used coercive, controlling behaviours in every case bar one.

Coercive control is difficult to identify, difficult to legislate and difficult to prosecute.

But these challenges are no excuse for not acting.

Horrific murders in recent years, including Hannah Clarke and her three children and Sydney dentist Preethi Reddy, put the spotlight on this insidious form of abuse.

Today, the NSW government will introduce a bill to parliament to create a new stand-alone offence of coercive control.

This will make it an offence to intentionally carry out abusive behaviours repeatedly or continuously towards a current or former intimate partner, with a maximum sentence of seven years’ imprisonment.

The perpetrator doesn’t need to repeat the same type of abuse. There need not be an unbroken series of behaviour.

Abusive behaviour involves violence, threats or intimidation and/or coercion or control of the person against whom the behaviour is directed.

The NSW government is gravely aware that any legislation has to be approached with great care and caution, to ensure it doesn’t unintentionally put in further danger those in our community we’re seeking to help. This bill is calibrated to avoid overreach, by capturing only conduct of the very serious standard deserving criminal sanction.

The bill is the product of years of research and consideration. We undertook at least seven rounds of consultation in the last two and a half years alone, including a discussion paper, parliamentary inquiry and exposure draft bill. We’ve listened carefully to the lived experiences shared by victim-survivors and the insights and diverse views of expert stakeholders.

In October 2020 I moved for a Parliamentary Joint Select Committee on Coercive Control. Over nine months, it received more than 150 written submissions, heard from more than 70 stakeholders and conducted regional meetings.

The Committee represented a wide spectrum of the NSW parliament (Liberal, National, Labor, Green and One Nation parties). It unanimously recommended criminalising coercive control.

In December 2021 the NSW Government committed to criminalise coercive control in intimate partner relationships and to release a public exposure bill for consultation.

We received almost 200 submissions on the exposure draft bill we released in July 2022 – three times the submissions Scotland received on its draft bill.

We conducted almost 30 roundtables with specialised stakeholders, including the domestic and family violence sector, legal sector, Aboriginal communities and Aboriginal-led organisations, and culturally and linguistically diverse communities.

Throughout this extensive process, the NSW government developed a bespoke bill tailored for our state’s unique and diverse society, including the need not to exacerbate the over-representation of Aboriginal people in our criminal justice system.

In acting to criminalise coercive control, we’ve had the benefit of years of case law, literature and subsequent reviews on different models of legislation, including in England, Wales, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Tasmania.

Reasonable minds differ on the best way to legislate, or indeed whether to legislate at all, and on precisely what any offence of coercive control should look like. This is shown by the divergent evidence heard by the Joint Select Committee, and again in the NSW government’s consultation on three iterations of an exposure draft bill throughout 2022. It’s also shown by Scotland, England and Wales, Northern Ireland and Ireland, France, Portugal, Sweden and some US states taking varying different approaches in drafting of their respective coercive control legislation.

Once passed, there will be at least a further 14 1/2 months, and up to 19 1/2 months, before the laws commence, to allow plenty of time for training, resourcing, education and community awareness raising, guided by a multidisciplinary task force.

These landmark reforms are crucial to ensuring we recognise in law a pattern of behaviour identified as a precursor to domestic violence deaths and which is obnoxious in its own right.

The NSW parliament deals with many important matters each day, but none is more important than personal safety. This bill could literally mean the difference between life and death.

Mark Speakman is NSW Attorney-General.