Abstract
This paper critically examines whether criminalizing coercive control in Canada would improve legal responses to intimate partner violence or reproduce/perpetuate the “ideal victim” trap. Using Evan Stark’s conceptualization of coercive control and Nils Christie’s “ideal victim” concept as lenses, we conduct a theory-informed case study of two landmark self-defence cases to examine the sociolegal recognition of coercive control. Despite expanded discourse, the decisions largely remained incident-centered. We argue for a trauma and violence-informed approach (building on the work of Wathen & Varcoe), and, should coercive control be criminalized, we recommend delaying implementation until adequate cross-sector social service infrastructure is in place.
This paper engages with the ongoing debate over the potential criminalization of coercive control in cases of intimate partner violence (IPV) in Canada. The World Health Organization (WHO, 2024) defines IPV as behaviors by a current or former intimate partner that cause or threaten physical, sexual, or psychological harm. These behaviors can include physical and/or sexual violence, as well as psychological and/or emotional abuse, financial control/economic abuse, and technology-facilitated abuse (Douglas et al., 2019). In 2018, it was estimated that 44% of women in Canada aged 15 and older who had been in an intimate relationship reported experiencing at least one form of psychological, physical, or sexual abuse from a partner (Cotter, 2021), and more recently, UN Women (2025) reported that globally, a woman was killed by a partner or family member every 10 min. One aspect of IPV that is currently gaining attention in both sociopolitical and legal discourse across jurisdictions is coercive control, and the underpinning behaviors and tactics abusers use to intimidate, dominate, and control their intimate partners, serving to strip away their autonomy and independence (Stark, 2023).
Bill C-332 was introduced as a private member's bill on May 18, 2023, in the House of Commons by MP Laurel Collins. It aimed to amend the Criminal Code to create a new offence addressing coercive or controlling conduct that could reasonably cause a partner to fear for their safety. Bill C-332 ultimately died on the order paper following the prorogation of Parliament on January 6, 2025. In its place, on December 9, 2025, the federal government introduced Bill C-16 (Protecting Victims Act), a more expansive reform package addressing gender-based violence, child protection, delays, and victim rights. Among its many amendments, Bill C-16 would create a new Criminal Code offence prohibiting a pattern of coercive or controlling conduct toward an intimate partner. The bill also reclassifies certain homicides as first-degree murder (termed femicide when the victim is a woman) when committed in the context of coercive or controlling behavior, sexual violence, human trafficking, or hate-motivated conduct. In cases falling within these contexts, courts may impose a life sentence for manslaughter, with parole ineligibility ranging from 10 to 25 years, representing a substantial shift in sentencing severity for IPV-related homicides.
Bill C-16 also lowers the evidentiary threshold for criminal harassment, removing the requirement that the victim subjectively fear for their safety and replacing it with a reasonable-person standard requiring only that the behavior could reasonably be expected to cause such fear. Reflecting the growing prevalence and recognition of technology-facilitated abuse, Bill C-16 expands the offence of nonconsensual distribution of intimate images to include sexually explicit deepfakes and visual representations likely to be mistaken for real images of the person depicted (The Civics Project, n.d.). Additional amendments strengthen testimonial supports for victims, enhance child-protection provisions, and introduce new offences relating to the recruitment of minors and the distribution of bestiality material. Indeed, Bill C-16 represents a far broader and more punitive legislative framework than C-332, embedding coercive control not only as a standalone offence but also as an aggravating and defining factor in homicide, harassment, child protection, and technology-facilitated abuse. This expanded scope has significant implications for how coercive control may be understood, operationalized, and enforced in Canada. If Bill C-16 is passed, Canada would follow other jurisdictions, including Ireland, Northern Ireland, England and Wales, Scotland, and New South Wales, Australia, in criminalizing coercive control (Giesbrecht, 2024).
Within the context of family law, however, Canada has already formally recognized coercive control. Effective March 2021, the Divorce Act was amended to formally include “a pattern of coercive and controlling behaviour” (Department of Justice Canada, 2024; Divorce Act, R.S.C. 1985, c. 3 (2nd Supp.)) within its definition of family violence. Since these amendments came into force, most provinces and territories have also incorporated similar language into their family law statutes to guide parenting arrangements and determine the best interests of the child. This legislative framework in the Divorce Act illustrates that coercive control is not a novel concept in Canadian law, but that explicit legislative recognition and structured legal application have primarily developed within family law rather than through a discrete criminal offence.
While the webs of coercion, gaslighting, and manipulation common in abusive intimate relationships have been well-known among victim-survivors, scholars, and advocates for several decades (see, e.g., Dobash & Dobash, 1979; Pence & Paymar, 1993), Stark's (2007) definition of “coercive control” has been highly influential. Offering a conceptualization of IPV informed by decades of work with victim-survivors, advocates, and scholars, Stark (2007, 2023) defined it as a strategic course of conduct used by men to dominate and entrap their partners in intimate relationships. Stark (2023) framed it as a liberty crime, which at its core intends to deprive victim-survivors of their autonomy and freedom. To this end, abusers leverage their privileged access to five interconnected factors: the presumption of intimacy; intimate personal knowledge; assumptions of proprietariness; material benefits; and the lack of intervention by those outside the relationship (Stark, 2023, p. 259). Through a constellation of tactics such as intimidation, isolation, surveillance, and even the deprivation of basic needs like food, sleep, or financial resources, the abuser creates a state of entrapment, instilling fear and “infiltrating” their lives (Stark, 2009). Yet, coercive control can be more subtle and insidious than physical violence, especially at first, and may even be invisible to people outside the relationship (Cross, 2022b). However, when attempting to leave an abusive relationship, victim-survivors often face escalating danger, a dynamic that Stark (2023) likens to the experiences of kidnapping victims or prisoners of war, as well as an increased risk of femicide victimization.
Although anyone can experience IPV victimization, scholars consistently find that IPV is gendered. In heterosexual relationships, women disproportionately experience sexual and physical violence, predominantly perpetrated by men (Dobash & Dobash, 2004). Scholarship has also shown that women are significantly more likely to experience coercive control, while men are more likely to perpetrate it (Giesbrecht, 2024), reinforcing the gendered dynamics that underpin IPV broadly. As such, one significant critique regarding the potential criminalization of coercive control in Canada is that presently, the prospective legislation is largely gender-neutral, failing to adequately capture the gendered nature of IPV. As such, scholars have noted that if coercive control is to be criminalized, this gendered asymmetry should be made clear (Giesbrecht, 2024).
Unsurprisingly, the criminalization of coercive control is contentious and there are debates on whether this expansion of criminal law will have a positive impact (Ha, 2024). Some scholars (see, e.g., Gill & Aspinall, 2020) favor this approach, arguing that it may allow for earlier intervention in IPV cases, increase perpetrator accountability (Giesbrecht, 2024), and potentially prevent IPV from escalating and thus prevent intimate partner femicides (Stark, 2020). They further argue that criminalizing coercive control would spotlight its severity, creating a symbolic impact that could serve to shift public attitudes and potentially deter individuals from engaging in this abuse (Bishop & Bettinson, 2018).
Simultaneously, however, scholars and advocates such as Pamela Cross (2022b, 2024) and Women's Legal and Education Action Fund (LEAF) have argued that criminalizing coercive control is not the best approach to keeping women safe. It may lead to unanticipated negative outcomes for the very individuals it claims to protect, particularly for those who are marginalized by race, income, gender identity, sexual orientation, and/or disability, who are often then revictimized by the systems that claim to offer them assistance (LEAF, 2023). In an article for The Globe and Mail, scholars and legal experts Myrna Dawson and Janet Mosher (Hayes et al., 2022) both contend that victim-survivors who are most at risk require concrete resources, social support and assistance, and substantive structural reforms that offer them protection, including better risk assessment measures and increased education and awareness among both the general public and the legal system regarding IPV and the relationship between coercive control and violence. Correspondingly, when Bill C-332 was under consideration, Luke's Place Support & Resource Center for Women & Children submitted a brief to the Standing Senate Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs in December 2024, contending that among other concerns, carceral approaches to IPV are oftentimes inefficient and for the few victim-survivors who do engage the criminal legal system, they are often ineffective: “A carceral approach is expensive and does not offer either healing to survivors or a meaningful opportunity for abusers to take responsibility, heal and learn new behaviors for moving forward” (Luke's Place, 2024, p. 3).
Akin to the current discussions about criminalizing coercive control to better address IPV, there were debates about mandatory charging policies in the 1980s (Goodmark, 2023). Both the rationale that served to justify their implementation, as well as the policy outcomes are instructive to the current debates. Although mandatory charging or arrest policies differ by province and territory, each requires reasonable or reasonable and probable grounds to believe that an assault has occurred (Landau, 2000). Specifically, mandatory charging policies require police officers to lay criminal charges when responding to a domestic violence call, intending to signal to those involved as well as to the general public that IPV should be taken seriously (Grace, 2019). In theory, this signaling was positive and helped raise public awareness that IPV was not a private matter, but instead, a crime. However, in practice, this approach has resulted in dual arrests and, in some cases, the criminalization of victim-survivors who engaged in defensive violence and were misrepresented by their partners as perpetrators/primary aggressors (Goodmark, 2023; Grace, 2019). Additionally, mandatory charging policies have been particularly challenging and harmful for marginalized IPV victim-survivors such as those who are Black, Indigenous, racialized, migrants, disabled, and/or 2SLGBTQIA+ (LEAF, 2023).
The criminalization of coercive control also carries a risk of negative consequences for victim-survivors if police officers misinterpret the complex web of abuse and manipulation. Akin to the aforementioned weaponization of mandatory charging policies by those who perpetrate IPV against victim-survivors, police officers may be manipulated by abusers who weaponize victim-survivors’ survival tactics against them, wherein abusers claim the victim-survivors are the ones engaging in coercive control (Cross, 2022b; Tolmie, 2018), exacerbating the coercion and potentially subjecting victim-survivors to criminal charges. Arguably, if coercive control is criminalized, the risk of criminalizing IPV victim-survivors is even higher as individuals—including police officers—struggle to identify it (Walby & Towers, 2018). Lessons can be learned from jurisdictions where it is already criminalized. For example, 2 years after it was criminalized in England and Wales, a 2017 study involving interviews with victim-survivors, police officers, and domestic violence advisors, a senior officer leading a specialist domestic abuse unit shared that when it came to coercive control, his officers “don’t like this kind of gray area. Is it coercive control, or isn’t it? Where does coercive control sit?… What is the threshold for what is coercive control? And what constitutes a ‘normal relationship’?” (Wiener, 2017, p. 505).
Even advocates of criminalization, such as Stark (2020, p. 33), who maintain that “more law” is vital to address IPV, also acknowledge that this approach would not be successful in isolation. Coordinated efforts and assistance for IPV victim-survivors, resources, and the will of politicians and policymakers are needed to pursue gender equality and rights (Stark, 2020). Indeed, while criminalizing coercive control may form part of the response for some, and some victim-survivors may value engagement with the criminal legal system, criminal legal responses to IPV remain fragmented and cannot be regarded as a “complete solution” (Tolmie, 2018, p. 63). Most scholars agree that a multifaceted approach is needed (Ha, 2024) to address the complexities of IPV and provide preventive options (LEAF, 2023). Specifically, in practice, this means that the many social service systems IPV victim-survivors encounter must be engaged, including healthcare, education, housing, immigration, social services, and child welfare social-service systems. This need for multifaceted approaches is particularly significant for marginalized and vulnerable populations, as they are even less likely to benefit from criminal legal ones (Cross, 2024).
Circling back to Stark's (2023, p. 17) conception of coercive control, notably, he describes it as a “heuristic” grounded in the lived experiences of victim-survivors where there are blurred boundaries between the physical, sexual, and emotional/psychological harms. The abuse occurs on a continuum, and some victim-survivors experience physical violence in conjunction: “coercion entails the use of force or threats to compel or dispel a particular response” (Stark, 2023, p. 283). In contrast, however, the legal system's view of the abuse as discrete and incident-based aligns more closely with a typology perspective. Noting these conceptual differences, we critically examine a specific type of case where coercive control has been recognized—nontraditional self-defence cases in which women have killed their abusive partners—to explore whether the criminal legal system embraced the feminist heuristic or continued with the incident-based typological view of coercive control and violence.
Method and Analytic Approach
We propose that an examination of how the heuristic and typology conceptions of IPV are operationalized in the courtroom in homicide cases where coercive control was considered offers a valuable analytic opportunity to assess the potential expansion of criminal law. Given that self-defence in Canada turns on what the accused, referred to here at the “primary victim” (Douglas et al., 2021), reasonably apprehended and whether their response was necessary and proportionate in the circumstances, these cases can be viewed as a “stress test” of the criminal legal capacity to recognize the constellation of harms that can occur in IPV and the blurred boundaries between them (Sheehy, 2014). That is, these self-defence cases require one to understand the relationship history and to have knowledge of the abusive partner's past violence, threat dynamics, and constraints on escape. However, after the 1990 Supreme Court of Canada decision in [R v. Lavallée, 1990], even though courts considered context when examining the imminence of the threat, they continued to apply the typology-based, incident-centric thresholds, and disproportionately failing racialized and Indigenous women, signaling it did not lead to substantive structural changes (Sheehy, 2014; Sheehy et al., 2014).
Building on the work of Sheehy (2014) in her examination of criminal cases where women were prosecuted for killing their abusive partners, self-defence offers a logical site to examine the sociolegal recognition of coercive control. For if adjudication in criminal cases where coercive control is acknowledged through expert testimony still gravitates to incident-based thresholds and medicalized routes to partial recognition—such as a manslaughter verdict instead of an acquittal—rather than recognizing it as social entrapment (Douglas et al., 2021), it is unlikely that criminalization alone will shift legal reasoning toward a comprehensive understanding of ongoing dynamics of coercive control.
In our analysis, we conduct a theory-informed case study using Christie's (1986) “ideal victim” concept to assess whether the expansion of criminal law in Canada will likely continue with the incident-based typological view of IPV or shift to recognize the blurred boundaries between coercive control and violence. We proceed in three steps. First, we grounded the analysis by specifying the “ideal victim” (Christie, 1986) framework, using it to assess women's experiences being labeled as either “good” or “bad” victim-survivors within current social and legal responses to IPV in Canada, where coercive control is not criminalized. This allows us to establish a benchmark for how IPV is viewed in the current context. Then, continuing to draw on the ideal victim framework, we analyze narratives and testimony in two rare but high-profile court cases—R. v. Craig in Canada and R. v. Challen in England—in which victim-survivors killed their abusive partners. In both instances, expert testimony by Stark (2023) introduced the concept of coercive control to the courtroom and contributed to a partial legal recognition of this form of abuse. These cases offer insights into how understandings of coercive control might be taken up or not taken up in the criminal legal system. Lastly, building on these analyses, we explore potential implications of criminalizing coercive control in more “typical” IPV cases, including women who remain in the relationship, have not killed their abuser, are mothers, and are subjected to ongoing, deeply controlling behavior, potentially in conjunction with physical and/or sexual violence. Through the lens of the “ideal victim” (Christie, 1986), we consider who the criminalization of coercive control is most likely to benefit or exclude and offer recommendations accordingly.
Labeling Victim-Survivors as “Good” or “Bad” Victims Reflects Social Failure to Recognize Coercive Control
In his seminal victimology scholarship, Christie (1986) described a set of characteristics that make it more likely for crime victims to be deemed “legitimate” and granted “ideal” or “good” victim status by the public, media, and law enforcement officials. These “ideal victims” are more likely to be granted public sympathy, support, and resources while, conversely, “non-ideal victims” are subjected to victim-blaming, stigma, and shame (Christie, 1986). Christie (1986) contends that to garner societal sympathy, the ideal victim ought to be weak or vulnerable, engaged in a “respectable” project at the time of victimization (such as a normative and morally acceptable activity), and be blameless for their victimization (such as they did not provoke it). Meanwhile, they ought to have been victimized by a “big, bad offender” who was unknown to them (Christie, 1986). Additionally, the victim should be strong enough to advocate for themselves but not so strong that they threaten powerful interests, individuals, or institutions.
Broadly, IPV challenges the notion of the ideal victim given the ways in which it inherently departs from a number of these necessary characteristics (Duggan, 2018). IPV victim-survivors are often victimized in a “private” setting, such as their home, and it is not perpetrated by a stranger but, rather, by a current or former intimate partner. Additionally, IPV victimization often manifests as a pattern of ongoing abuse/violence rather than as a discrete, isolated incident (Cross, 2024). Moreover, previous IPV is the most significant indicator of future IPV (Stoever, 2014), and this dynamic can also render an IPV victim-survivor as a “non-ideal victim” since members of the public or law enforcement officials may erroneously believe that she had ample opportunity to “just leave” the relationship (Duggan, 2018). Finally, Christie (1986) contends that if/when a victim's experiences or narrative challenge established societal norms, powerful individuals or institutions, they are less likely to be considered “ideal” or legitimate victims. Indeed, recognizing coercive control would challenge deep-seated societal definitions of what constitutes harm, gender norms, patriarchy, and violence against women.
A victim-survivor of coercive control who does not experience physical violence, then, is even less likely to be deemed an “ideal victim,” even though they are threatened and traumatized (Goodmark, 2023). Given that the mechanisms or means of exerting coercive control are often more subtle and nuanced than physical violence, members of the public and law enforcement officials, such as police officers, may perceive these victim-survivors as even less than non-ideal victims. They often remain in abusive relationships because their partners have entrapped them socially and psychologically, and/or they fear that the abuse will escalate if they leave, and they lack a safe alternative (Douglas et al., 2021). Yet their continued presence in an abusive relationship is frequently misinterpreted as complicity or consent rather than as a rational and well-thought-out survival strategy (Hamby, 2014). In turn, this misinterpretation may further the victim-survivors’ lack of adherence to the ideal victim construct (Duggan, 2018), undermining their perceived credibility or legitimacy in the eyes of law enforcement, courts, the general public, and even some support services.
Social norms about victimhood and misunderstandings about blameworthiness play a problematic role in the context of IPV, where victim-survivors often do not conform to societal expectations of passivity, helplessness, or visible suffering. Moreover, women who face social disadvantages due to factors such as race, colonization, immigration status, disability and/or low-income may be reluctant or unable to seek support and justice through legal systems (Hamby, 2014). Victim-survivors with low social capital, such as those who are racialized, disabled, 2SLGBTQIA+, and/or economically disadvantaged, are often dismissed, ignored, or the harms they have experienced are minimized (Cross, 2024). Conversely, those with higher social capital may be scrutinized for not appearing “traumatized enough” or for not leaving sooner, which casts doubt on their victimhood (Goodmark, 2023). Even ones who actively seek protection through the criminal legal system may have their credibility questioned, especially if they remain in the relationship or return to it (Hamby, 2014). This creates a no-win situation where victim-survivors are viewed as either too powerless to be heard or too empowered to be believed. The result is a credibility trap that reinforces harmful stereotypes and excludes many victim-survivors from receiving the support they require (Cross, 2024). Significantly, the notion of an “ideal offender” (Christie, 1986) is also flawed in these cases. Abusers may not fit stereotypical profiles and often maintain a respectable public image with their behaviors in the context of the relationship often unknown to outsiders (Douglas et al., 2021; Herman, 2005).
Moreover, the legal and institutional systems that should offer protection often fail to recognize coercive control unless it escalates to physical violence (Stark, 2023). In those supposedly “less serious” cases, police often do not intervene (Serrano-Montilla et al., 2025) and courts overlook nonphysical abuse in custody decisions (Kippert, 2015). This reactive approach through the criminal legal system tends to view physical violence as distinct, isolated incidents, and it struggles to recognize ongoing patterns of behavior (Tolmie et al., 2024) as well as the blurred boundaries between coercive control and physical violence. In short, it reinforces the typology conceptualization of IPV, and unfortunately, tends to mainly validate victim-survivors who experience physical and/or sexual violence, which, at best, is inadequate and, tragically, for some, it is too late. In turn, Christie's (1986) framework is critical in exposing the ways in which current systems—especially the criminal legal system—prioritize dramatic, visible harm of those with more social capital over the chronic, less visible suffering of coercive control.
Indeed, Christie's “ideal victim” construct helps explain why victim-survivors are so often disbelieved or problematized: legitimate victim status is provided to those who appear blameless, visibly injured, and helpless. In Canada, findings from the Nova Scotia Mass Casualty Commission (MCC) offer a clear and tragic example of how this logic operates in practice (Mass Casualty Commission, 2023). In its account of the April 18–19, 2020 events where a gunman murdered 22 people, including one who was expecting a child, the MCC explicitly begins with the perpetrator's violent assault of his common-law spouse, locating IPV at the start of the public timeline, showing how what is frequently viewed as private harm was integral to the mass casualty event (Mass Casualty Commission, 2023; see also Miller-Idriss, 2024). Together with the MCC's identification of “many warning signs” and “missed opportunities to intervene” over preceding years, this framing illustrates how patterned coercive control fails to trigger legal protection precisely because, at least initially, it does not fit the ideal victim script of easily recognizable harm (Mass Casualty Commission, 2023, Volume 3, pp. 155–156).
The aftermath of the event clarifies the stakes, as the police charged the survivor. In December 2020, the RCMP laid a charge against the gunman's partner, Lisa Banfield, and others for unlawfully providing him with ammunition; the charges were later dismissed through a restorative justice process (Rhodes & Willick, 2022). As the MCC notes in its own discussion of post-event treatment of the victim-survivor, the investigation practices risked revictimizing a “key witness” to the coercive pattern that preceded the mass casualty. Taken together, the MCC's findings show how victim-survivors who do not conform to ideal victim expectations can be repositioned as suspects: when their histories are complex, their injuries are not immediately visible, or their actions do not map neatly onto the “ideal victim” template, the system may default to suspicion, penalize cooperation, and miss a critical opportunity to act. The ideal victim framework thus illuminates how credibility deficits can slide into criminalization when victim-survivors do not fit the ideal victim mould. To examine whether the criminalization of coercive control specifically might improve the application of the blurred boundaries perspective in the criminal legal system, we now turn to two landmark court cases where coercive control was considered.
Coercive Control in Legal Discourse—Two Court Cases
Stark (2023) has played a key role in shaping legal understandings of coercive control as an expert witness in several landmark cases. We focus here on two: R. v. Craig [2011] ONCA 142 in Canada and R. v. Challen [2019] EWCA Crim 916 in England. In each case, respectively, Teresa Craig and Sally Challen endured years of coercive control by their abusive partners, Jack Craig and Richard Challen, which ultimately ended when they killed the men. When Sally appealed her conviction in 2019, coercive control had been criminalized in England and Wales since 2015 as well as Scotland since 2018, but not yet in Northern Ireland, where it was in 2021, whereas it remained unrecognized in Canadian law during Teresa's 2011 appeal. In both cases, coercive control was raised through expert testimony as an explanatory factor for why the women killed their abusive partners, offering critical insights into the evolving legal and cultural recognition of coercive control in IPV. However, an extensive history of coercive control was not seen as a justification in either case; a perception of imminent harm was needed for that. Taken together, the analysis of their cases reveals the types of barriers that the criminalization of coercive control can both face and create for victim-survivors.
The Teresa Craig Case in Canada
In the Canadian case, R. v. Craig (2011), Teresa Craig, a middle-aged woman, fatally stabbed her husband, Jack Craig, after enduring years of prolonged psychological, verbal, and emotional abuse while living in extreme poverty in an RV. Teresa suffered from depression and post-traumatic stress disorder and, in turn, claimed she had acted impulsively, lacking the intent required to meet the threshold for murder. In 2008, Teresa was convicted of manslaughter after the trial judge declined to allow the jury to consider self-defence and was sentenced to 8 years in prison. On appeal, Teresa argued that the trial judge erred by excluding self-defence and evidence of her husband's violent history.
Although the Court of Appeal found there was “little physical abuse in the relationship” (R. v. Craig, 2011, para 10), it was clear that Teresa was at risk of physical harm and experienced profound fear of her partner. Jack had a volatile temper, his behavior was extremely controlling and abusive, and she knew he was capable of violence. As such, when a broader understanding of violence is applied, one that includes the full constellation of psychological, emotional, financial, and coercive harms, it becomes evident that he was, in fact, highly controlling and violent. This was consistent with what neighbors and others who knew him reported (Stark, 2023, p. 401). Unlike typical self-defence cases, Teresa's circumstances did not involve an immediate physical attack. Still, the Court of Appeal recognized that the judge in the initial trial had erred when they did not adequately account for the effect that the long-term abuse had on Teresa, taking the position that it “should have been treated as a substantial mitigating factor on sentence” (R. v. Craig, 2011, para 60). As a result, although the Ontario Court of Appeal upheld her conviction, it allowed the appeal of her sentence, and it was reduced to time served, recognizing her low risk of reoffending and the significant impact of the abuse she endured.
Coercive control was not criminalized, and the lack of a legal framework made it difficult for the court to fully appreciate the cumulative harm Teresa had endured (Sheehy, 2018). It was through the support of expert testimony from Stark that her case marked an early attempt to introduce coercive control as a legitimate explanatory framework in Canadian courts, even if the legal system was not yet fully equipped to accommodate it (Sheehy, 2018). Stark (2023, p. 394) explained how Teresa's actions were underpinned by the losses formed through years of coercive control: “Teresa took up the knife much as a kidnap victim might assault a sleeping guard, to regain her liberty, dignity, and autonomy, facets of her person that merited defending in her mind more than her physical self or ‘psychological’ self.”
The trial of Teresa Craig not only exposed the limitations of Canadian self-defence law in cases where there was ongoing coercive control but also illuminated how deeply entrenched and gendered cultural narratives about victimhood and motherhood can serve to critically shape legal outcomes. Teresa failed to meet normative ideals about both victimhood and motherhood in several ways. She was not seriously physically injured and while she had left her abusive partner for short periods, she did not leave him permanently. Perhaps most significantly, Teresa killed her husband while he slept, an act that defies the passive, reactive image of the ideal victim because there was no immediate threat. Rather, if decontextualized from the broader pattern of violence and abuse, the fact that Teresa killed her husband in his sleep violates the “legitimate” victim image since it seemingly demonstrates agency or strategic action.
In her analysis of the court transcript for R. v. Craig, Elizabeth Sheehy (2018) argues that a central battleground in the trial was whether Teresa was carrying out a respectable project and, as such, whether her actions had moral legitimacy and social value. The Crown sought to portray her as a “bad mother,” citing past statements about “wanting” to leave her son and characterizing her as selfish and emotionally detached—a narrative which served to delegitimize her actions and cast doubt on her motivations. Sheehy (2018) illuminates the ways in which Stark's testimony countered the Crown's case, reframing Teresa's actions as those of a desperate mother trying to protect her child—a statement that aligns with the literature on how children are at the forefront of every decision mothers make in the context of IPV and the ways in which they are able navigate the violence and seek safety for both themselves and their children (see, e.g., Hoffer et al., 2025; Rhodes et al., 2010). Stark emphasized Teresa's deep love for her son, her inability to abandon him, and the unbearable maternal grief she experienced when she briefly attempted to leave. This counter-narrative positioned her not as selfish, but as entrapped and fighting for her son's safety in a context where conventional avenues of escape had failed or were unattainable. Stark (2023) explained that Teresa was experiencing the “battered mother's dilemma” where an abusive man strategically connects leaving him with also abandoning her child (ren), often through means such as custody battles. This tactic is coercive because it traps abused mothers in impossible choices—if they stay, they risk being seen as failing to protect their children despite being victims of violence themselves, but if they leave, they face accusations of instability or risk losing custody. Indeed, abusive former or current partners often exploit this dilemma by manipulating children and isolating mothers, while legal and social systems often reinforce the trap by creating a double-bind and penalizing women regardless of their choices. This dilemma exemplifies how coercive control operates through domination/entrapment, and how it can be enabled or exacerbated through systemic complicity.
The Crown's success in excluding much of the evidence of Jack Craig's abusive behavior narrowed and distorted the trial's understanding of the situation (Stark, 2023). Sheehy (2018) finds that Stark's testimony attempted to fill this gap by explaining how coercive control operates through nonviolent means. However, the legal system's reliance on visible physical injuries in the context of discrete, incident-based violence meant that this broader context of abuse was only partially acknowledged. The trial judge's decision to sentence Teresa to 8 years in prison emphasized the principle of deterrence, reinforcing the perception of her as a calculating offender rather than a victim of chronic abuse (Sheehy, 2018, p. 111). In contrast, however, the Court of Appeal emphasized that Teresa was “by all accounts a decent person and a good mother” (R. v. Craig, 2011, para 4). Rejecting the trial judge's description of her actions as a “near murder,” the Court of Appeal stated it “does not give full effect to the verdict of the jury” and held that they ought to have focused on the effect of the abuse rather than its form (R. v. Craig, 2011, para 54).
Correspondingly, Sheehy (2018) argues that Teresa Craig's case underscores the urgent need to expand legal understandings of victimhood beyond the narrow legal confines and constructs. Her case demonstrates how coercive control can be debilitating and extremely harmful and yet remains poorly understood within conventional legal frameworks. The competing portrayals of Teresa as either a bad mother or a protective one are reflective of broader societal anxieties regarding women who resist victimization in ways that defy prescriptive social norms and maternal assumptions. They caution us against treating criminalization as a proxy for recognition; without shifts in evidentiary practice and institutional culture, further criminalization risks reproducing the same blind spots while extending carceral power (Slinkard, 2019).
We shift now to a different context, England and Wales, where coercive control was criminalized under section 76 of the Serious Crime Act 2015. We consider Sally Challen's case, which straddles the implementation of the legislation, with the initial trial occurring prior to criminalization and the appeal occurring afterwards. Sally's case also represents a pivotal shift towards recognizing coercive control in legal discourse, but unfortunately, it was minimized.
The Sally Challen Case in England
In R. v. Challen (2019), Sally Challen killed her husband, Richard Challen, in 2010 after enduring decades of coercive control. According to the judicial reasoning, Sally met Richard when she was 15 years old and he was 22 years old—marrying when she was 25. Over time, he isolated her, controlled her finances, dictated her social life, and subjected her to emotional manipulation and humiliation, including infidelity and gaslighting. Although she briefly left him and began divorce proceedings, she returned under emotional pressure.
As noted by Sally′s son David (Challen, 2025), the killing occurred shortly after this reunion, when Richard sent Sally out in the rain so he could call another woman. Upon returning and confronting him, Sally struck him repeatedly with a hammer. At her 2011 trial, Sally Challen's defense of diminished responsibility was unsuccessful and she was convicted of murder, receiving a life sentence with a minimum term of 22 years (later reduced to 18). In 2017, with support from Justice for Women (n.d.), other social advocates, and her family, Sally's legal team submitted new psychiatric evidence and expert analysis on coercive control. Although initially denied, her appeal was granted in 2018, and in February 2019, the Court of Appeal quashed her murder conviction, ordering a retrial. In June 2019, prosecutors accepted her plea to manslaughter. She was sentenced to 14 years and released immediately due to time served.
Expert testimony, including that of Stark (2023), helped establish that Sally had been subjected to sustained coercive control by Richard Challen, which had severely impacted her mental health and autonomy. Unlike Teresa Craig, Sally Challen's case aligned more closely with the “ideal victim” narrative during her appeal: the deterioration of her mental health was documented, her abuse was legally recognized, and public sympathy grew as her story became emblematic of systemic and structural failures to protect women from nonphysical forms of IPV. At least on the surface, the legislative changes seemed to have expanded sociolegal discourse about IPV to incorporate the blurred boundary understanding of coercive control and violence, allowing it to shift away from the deeply entrenched incident-based view of IPV that is often relied upon in legal contexts.
However, the court's decision in 2019 explicitly rested on the diagnosis that at the time of the killing, Sally reportedly had borderline dependent personality disorder and a severe mood disorder, likely bipolar affective disorder (Challen, 2025, p. 159; Storey, 2019). When delivering the unanimous judgment, although Hallett LJ acknowledged that there was evidence suggesting Sally had been in an abusive relationship marked by controlling behavior, the court clarified that it did not base its decision on coercive control (Challen, 2025, p. 196; Storey, 2019).
Indeed, although the media focused heavily on the role of coercive control in Sally Challen's relationship, the court made it clear that coercive control is not a legal defence to murder on its own (Storey, 2019). In practice, this meant that although the court acknowledged that Sally may have been in an abusive relationship, they said it was not their role to decide whether that was truly the case. As such, rather than being a case that pivoted on a newfound understanding of coercive control in legal discourse, the decision and judicial reasoning still heavily relied on psychological evidence (Stark, 2023). Ultimately, the outcome of Sally Challen's case was deemed analogous to another case in the UK, R. v. Hobson, that occurred in 1997, in which Kathleen Hobson's murder conviction was also overturned years later due to new evidence of her mental health diagnosis linked to being subjected to long-term abuse (Storey, 2019).
Deconstructing Legal Discourses Regarding Teresa and Sally's Experiences
Christie's “ideal victim” framework helps illuminate how social status, race, class, and psychological vulnerability serve to shape legal and public perceptions of women who kill their abusive partners. Both Teresa Craig and Sally Challen endured long-term coercive control from their intimate partners. Yet, the treatment they experienced by the courts and by broader society diverged. Arguably, this was in part due to the extent to which they conformed to expectations of motherhood and victimhood in social and legal discourse. Examining these two cases allows us to analyze how coercive control and “ideal victim” dynamics actually surfaced in the testimony, gatekeeping rulings, and reasoning.
Teresa was a Malaysian immigrant to Canada, who met her husband Jack Craig through a personal ad targeting “Western men who want to meet Asian women” (Stark, 2023, p. 404). From the outset, she was racialized, economically marginalized, and disadvantaged in her communication, as English was her second language—intersecting vulnerabilities which placed her in a position of profound dependency and isolation. Although Jack controlled the finances and was undeniably abusive (Stark, 2023), her continued presence in the relationship, lack of visible injuries, and the fact that she killed Jack while he slept were used to undermine her credibility. She was initially portrayed as an emotionally detached mother (Stark, 2023), and it wasn’t until after her successful appeal that the public discourse shifted (Slinkard, 2019). This is also particularly salient in contrast to Sally Challen's case, as her two sons publicly advocated for her, attending hearings, sharing evidence in support of her and the violence she experienced, providing emotional support to her, and fundamentally assisting in shifting the public narrative surrounding their mother's case (Centre for Women's Justice, 2019). Yet, for Teresa Craig, the trial judge's misapprehension of the “significance of the long history of abuse” (R. v. Craig, 2011, para 2) made it more challenging to recognize the psychological entrapment she experienced. The fact that she and her partner met through an advertisement—an atypical relationship formation at the time—along with her marginalized racial and cultural background further marked her as outside dominant social expectations of what a “real” or “legitimate” intimate relationship ought to look like. Although Teresa was resourceful and clearly a survivor, these strengths did not shield her from the structural barriers she faced, including racism, gendered expectations, and the criminal law's focus on incident-based violence or harms. Taken together, these factors made Teresa's experiences of coercive control more difficult for legal actors to recognize, understand or interpret within existing doctrinal frameworks. Fundamentally, then, Teresa Craig's case underscores the ways in which the legal system struggles to accommodate coercive control victim-survivors, especially when they do not fit dominant cultural narratives of innocence, fragility, and White femininity (Sheehy, 2018; Stark, 2023).
On the other hand, even though Sally Challen was also economically constrained with her husband Richard controlling the finances while spending lavishly on himself (Stark, 2023), she was more readily accepted as a victim during her appeal, especially by the general public. She met Richard when she was very young and vulnerable, and over time, he groomed her, shaping her sense of self around his own desires and expectations (Stark, 2023). Sally's self-worth thereby became dependent on her husband's approval, and his death left her overwhelmed by a sense of emptiness and anxiety (Stark, 2023). The psychological dependency on Richard that Sally experienced is critical for understanding why she returned to him even after initiating divorce proceedings. As a result, during her retrial, her mental health concerns and the ways in which her mental health deteriorated were well-documented, and her story resonated deeply with the public and media, who viewed her as a tragic example of a victimized woman who was subsequently failed by the system. In turn, even though the court ultimately premised its decision on psychiatric evidence, broader cultural and legal recognition of coercive control in the UK allowed her to be perceived as a victim, albeit one who was somewhat non-ideal. Fundamentally, then, one reason that Sally Challen was more readily accepted during her appeal was that because her case aligned with a broader legal and social shift in the understanding of IPV and coercive control in England. This legal reframing was amplified by sustained public advocacy from her sons (Doward, 2019), domestic violence organizations, as well as politicians, and by media coverage that portrayed her case as indicative of broader injustices against women who had experienced IPV (Davies, 2019; Oppenheim, 2019). In turn, numerous factors in Sally Challen's case served to explicitly validate her victim status. In contrast, although the abuse that Teresa Craig endured was recognized and the trial judge reportedly referred to the recognition of coercive control as “cutting edge stuff” (Sheehy, 2018, p. 111), her case did not occur within a major, wide-scale reconceptualization of abuse and coercive control among the general public, nor did it attract public campaigning or media attention (Slinkard, 2019) in a manner comparable to that in Sally Challen's case.
In both Sally Challen's and Teresa Craig's cases, Christie's (1986) ideal victim concept reveals how legal and societal recognition of victimhood is not simply premised on what happened, but who the victim is and whether their actions were in keeping with social norms and expectations. Teresa Craig's racialized identity, immigrant status, and seemingly strategic (rather than reactive) act of violence placed her squarely outside the boundaries of the “ideal victim” construct. In contrast, it appeared that Sally Challen was publicly perceived as more relatable or, at a minimum, as more visibly vulnerable and thereby garnered more social sympathy. Sally Challen was White, British, emotionally dependent on her (former) partner, and had mental health concerns. Her sons played key roles in advocating for their mother's appeal, assisting her to align with the “good mother” narrative—both in the eyes of the general public and in court (Challen, 2025), which was seemingly beneficial in the outcome of her case.
Significantly, although Stark's (2023) testimonies in both cases aligned with the blurred boundaries conception of coercive control, the courts continued to lean into existing legal discourse and the typology framework. That is, simply because an alternate view of IPV as a constellation or continuum was allowed in evidence, the legal structures and underpinning emphasis of physical violence as more serious remained. Coercive control was allowed as an explanation for Teresa Craig and Sally Challen's actions, but it was not seen as a justification. As such, their entrapment was decontextualized and seen as cursory. The discourse remained individualized, rooted in the psychological analyses of their specific situations rather than recognizing IPV as a widespread social problem. In doing so, it failed to recognize the complicity of the social structures and institutions that enabled Jack Craig and Richard Challen to impose years of coercive control on Teresa Craig and Sally Challen. Examined together, the two cases underscore the need to improve legal understandings of victimhood within IPV rather than expanding criminalization while continuing to rely on narrow, idealized notions of who deserves protection and support.
Fundamentally, however, although high-profile cases like R. v. Craig and R. v. Challen have introduced coercive control into legal discourse, they nevertheless remain exceptional. These cases both involved women who killed their abusive partners and accessed expert testimony that was able to explain how their actions occurred within a context of prolonged abuse. However, what is to be done about the far more common cases? If coercive control is criminalized, what will occur in cases involving women who remain in relationships where they endure ongoing, controlling, abusive behaviors that may or may not include physical violence? We delve into these realities and consider these important scenarios in the next section.
Criminalizing Coercive Control in “Typical” IPV Cases
As illustrated in both Teresa Craig's and Sally Challen's cases, legal discourse and logics are far more attuned to the typology view of IPV (Stark, 2023), responding to distinct or discrete incidents and episodes of violence rather than aligning with feminist understandings of IPV as patterned and ongoing constellations of abuse. While this is cause for concern, the incident-focused approach taken by the legal system is unsurprising. The legal system is designed and built to respond to discrete, isolated, chargeable incidents, and as such, it fails to use a broader entrapment framework that would take the full patterns of violence into consideration (Tolmie et al., 2024). Unfortunately, this typological framing has excluded many victim-survivors who experience a constellation of abuse that is diffuse, relational, and ongoing, yet remains nonphysical (Cross, 2024). Those who are more likely to be seen as “non-ideal” victims, such as those who do not leave, do not fight back in ways that have been deemed acceptable, and struggle with the “battered mother's dilemma,” will very likely continue to face challenges and hurdles when interacting with the criminal legal system. In this way, expanding criminal law will likely risk reinforcing the ideal victim “trap,” wherein only the most extreme, seemingly “clear cut” experiences of coercive control are validated. As a result, criminalizing coercive control risks further entrenching and institutionalizing a narrow, typological understanding of it.
The decisions made in Sally Challen and Teresa Craig's cases both illustrate that, even with some progress, the criminal process keeps pulling coercive control back into incident-based understandings of harm and violence. Courts may acknowledge patterns of domination, but they still translate them into discrete acts. In doing so, the law compresses sustained, cumulative, patterns of abuse into a handful of “events,” narrowing the scope of what counts as legally intelligible harm. This dynamic also explains why simply creating a criminal legal system-based coercive control offence is unlikely to positively transform victim-survivors’ experiences. Any such offence will still operate through the same structures of evidence, culpability, and incident-focused reasoning. As a result, many survivors will remain unsupported or unprotected, especially when reporting carries risks, or when their experiences do not map neatly onto legally recognized forms of abuse.
In contrast, trauma- and violence-informed (Wathen & Mantler, 2022; Wathen & Varcoe, 2023), survivor-centered responses that operate externally to or not solely within the criminal legal system are far better positioned to address patterns or cycles of violence. Community-based advocacy, housing, economic support, and sustained multifaceted, welfare-based services can allow service providers to recognize and compassionately respond to ongoing coercion without forcing victim-survivors into the incident-based frames that criminal law demands. These approaches meet victim-survivors where they are, responding to cumulative harm and offering supports and care that center survivor safety, well-being, and autonomy. However, organizations such as shelters, which offer these much-needed social options that more closely align with what victim-survivors report wanting from a justice response often struggle to sustain consistent funding (Ehret, 2022). Stark (2023) has noted that current IPV responses, including both shelters and the criminal legal system, tend to prioritize physical violence to the detriment of those who experience coercive control alone. While shelters and other community-based organizations working to end IPV understand the harms of coercive control, inadequate resourcing forces them to focus on those facing immediate threats, even though they recognize the issue is far broader and deeper.
If coercive control is only taken seriously in cases where it also involves or culminates in physical violence, the law will continue to privilege exceptional cases over the everyday ones. The “typical” victim-survivor who stays and needs to continuously incorporate coping and safety strategies to deal with the coercive control by her abusive partner will remain outside the frame of legal recognition. The criminalization of coercive control, in this sense, risks reinforcing the very hierarchies of credibility and deservingness that feminist advocates and scholars have long critiqued. Without a fundamental shift in how the legal system understands and responds to IPV, the promise of criminalizing coercive control may be more symbolic than substantive, offering recognition to a few “ideal” (Christie, 1986; Goodmark, 2023) victim-survivors while leaving many behind. This means that the legal system will continue to fail many who are “non-ideal victims,” especially those from Black, Indigenous, racialized, disabled, migrant, and 2SLGBTQIA+ populations. Importantly, these victim-survivors are already more likely to be neglected or encounter systemic/structural violence in formal social service systems (Cross, 2024; LEAF, 2023), and as such, their needs in the context of safety, support, and justice must be foregrounded when considering new social and legal possibilities for victim-survivors.
The risk that criminalizing coercive control will reinforce the “ideal victim” (Christie, 1986) paradigm is not merely theoretical but is grounded in precedent. The implementation of mandatory charging policies for IPV in Canada intended to signal that it is a serious crime, not a private matter, and to remove discretion from police officers who might otherwise minimize or ignore abuse (Grace, 2019). However, the outcomes of these policies have revealed a troubling pattern. Rather than offering protection to IPV victim-survivors, they often serve to harm them, exacerbating the victimization they have already experienced (Goodmark, 2023).
Mandatory charging policies require police to lay charges when responding to domestic violence calls, regardless of the victim's wishes. While this approach was intended to reduce under-enforcement, in practice, some victim-survivors have been arrested as primary aggressors, or both partners have been charged in so-called “dual arrests” (Grace, 2019; Miller, 2001). As findings from the MCC point out, these policies not only undermine women's autonomy but can further endanger them and exacerbate surveillance and scrutiny from child welfare and family law regimes (Mass Casualty Commission, 2023, Volume 3, pp. 366–367). These outcomes are especially common when the victim-survivor does not conform to the idealized image of a passive, compliant victim. Women who fight back, who are perceived as emotionally volatile or physically violent, or who have prior involvement with the legal system are more likely to be criminalized themselves.
These harmful system-based dynamics are amplified for marginalized groups (LEAF, 2023; Luke's Place, 2024). Systemic and structural racism, ableism, patriarchy, and heteronormativity all shape how police misinterpret behavior and assign blame in the context of IPV. For example, a Black woman who defends herself against a violent current or former intimate partner will be more readily perceived as the aggressor (Duhaney, 2022), especially if they are seen as abrasive or argumentative (Goodmark, 2023) due, in part, to systemic and/or structural racism. Similarly, 2SLGBTQIA+ victim-survivors may be viewed through heteronormative lenses that fail to recognize abuse dynamics in their relationships (Wildman, 2023) or view these dynamics as “legitimate,” since these relationships do not fit in the narrow confines of heterosexual relationships. These patterns suggest that criminalization, even if seemingly well-intentioned, can serve to reproduce systemic inequalities.
Indeed, Black feminist scholars have long cautioned that simply expanding criminal law responses to IPV risks reproducing and perpetuating gendered and racialized surveillance and punishment rather than offering support or safety to victim-survivors. For example, Richie's (2012) foundational work on the “prison nation” contends that criminalization disproportionately harms Black women, whose experiences of violence are shaped and influenced by state violence, structural racism, and socioeconomic precarity. Similarly, Courtney Cross (2022a) cautions that carceral systems and actors often misidentify victim-survivors as perpetrators, especially women who are Indigenous, Black, or migrants. These critiques highlight that in the absence of systemic and structural investments in immigration protection, housing and income security, and culturally safe and relevant services, criminalization of coercive control risks further entrenching the very conditions of state and social control that Black feminist theorists have identified as forms of systemic and structural violence against women of color.
Implications and Future Directions
If coercive control is criminalized without addressing underlying issues of discrimination and social inequality, and it fails to consider the full context in which the victim-survivors are “entrapped” (Tolmie et al., 2024), harms are likely to continue and/or victim-survivors will be revictimized when they interact with the criminal legal system. It will be particularly challenging for those who are from communities that are already over-policed and over-criminalized (Tolmie et al., 2024). The legal system's reliance on incident-based logics means that much coercive control is likely to be dismissed, minimized, or to go unrecognized entirely. The extreme, well-documented coercive control cases that are accompanied by physical violence (as well as evidence or “proof” of this physical violence) will continue to draw legal resources and recourse. Yet, victim-survivors who remain in the relationship, who lack clear “evidence,” or who do not fit the image of the ideal victim (Christie, 1986) may be disbelieved, dismissed, or even punished/criminalized. In this way, the expansion of criminal law risks further entrenching a hierarchy of victimhood, where only the most sympathetic cases receive protection.
One final critical concern in the potential criminalization of coercive control is how abusers may exploit the legal system to further entrench their power. Abusers are often adept manipulators, not only of their partners, but of systems and institutions as well (Douglas et al., 2019; Luke's Place, 2024). They learn to navigate and manipulate systems, identify loopholes or systemic gaps, and present themselves as reliable, rational, and composed (see, e.g., Reeves et al., 2025)—traits aligning closely with how the legal system tends to assess credibility. In contrast, victim-survivors may appear emotional, inconsistent, noncompliant, or uncooperative, especially after experiencing prolonged trauma and abuse, making them more vulnerable to disbelief or mischaracterization (Cross, 2024). This is often one of the points at which the legal discourse draws from psychological expertise. The legal reasoning in the verdict for Sally Challen's appeal offers a clear example of this dynamic.
If coercive control becomes a criminal offense in Canada, those who perpetrate IPV against current or former intimate partners may weaponize this new legal tool against them (Luke's Place, 2024). For instance, they might falsely accuse their partners of coercive control, presenting themselves as the victim in order to threaten, discredit, or punish the actual victim-survivor. This would be particularly concerning in custody disputes where allegations of coercive control could be strategically deployed to undermine a mother's credibility or maternal fitness (Stark, 2023). Given that many victim-survivors already face skepticism when reporting abuse, which often discourages them from coming forward in the first place, the addition of a complex and often seemingly invisible form of harm to the Criminal Code could open new opportunities for abusers to manipulate the legal system-based outcomes in their favor.
Moreover, those who perpetrate violence frequently possess more social, economic, and institutional capital than the women they abuse. They may have stable employment, community standing, or legal representation, and they can leverage these resources to present a more convincing narrative in court (Cross, 2024; Herman 2005). Victim-survivors, especially those who are racialized, poor, disabled, or otherwise marginalized, may not be able to access these supports and face additional barriers to being believed. In this context, the criminalization of coercive control could serve to reinforce existing power imbalances, allowing abusers to co-opt the language of victimhood while continuing to exert control through legal means. Rather than offering protection, then, criminalization could provide abusers with new tools to surveil, punish, and silence their partners (LEAF, 2023), especially those who do not conform to the ideal victim construct. This underscores the need for caution and critical reflection before embracing criminalization as a solution to coercive control. The findings from the Mass Casualty Commission (2023) serve as a stark reminder that coercive control can simmer and build in an abusive relationship and then spill over/erupt into violence that not only affects those directly in the violent relationship but also those in their community, with devastating consequences.
In order to properly address these gaps, we must move toward a preventative and inclusive model (Cross, 2024). While coercive control must be recognized in legal and social discourse, our analysis suggests that rather than expanding criminal law, a comprehensive understanding of coercive control ought to be integrated into policy frameworks to acknowledge the range of ways psychological and physical abuse manifest in the context of IPV. Significantly, this integration would require building social support systems that validate victim-survivors’ experiences before they reach a crisis point. Only then can we begin to dismantle the narrow confines of the “ideal victim” (Christie, 1986) and create a more just, survivor-centered response to IPV, including for coercive control.
One potential evidence-based approach to better supporting IPV victim-survivors, including those who are experiencing coercive control, is through the integration of the principles of trauma- and violence-informed care (TVIC) into both legal and social responses (Wathen & Mantler, 2022; Wathen & Varcoe, 2023). TVIC is premised on four key principles: (1) understanding trauma and violence and their impacts on individuals’ lives and behaviors, (2) creating culturally, emotionally, and physically safe environments for service users and service providers, (3) fostering chances for collaboration, choice, and connection, and (4) providing capacity-building, strengths-based approaches to support service users (Wathen & Varcoe, 2023, pp. 75–76). Incorporating the principles of TVIC into legal or legal system-based responses could help ensure that they are survivor-centered, just, and ideally, more effective than if coercive control was to be criminalized in the absence of any survivor-centered, explicitly trauma- and violence-informed principles. In particular, if the principles of TVIC were incorporated in a manner that appreciates the significance of the social context in which IPV is occurring (Tolmie et al., 2024), there is a chance that the criminal legal system's response could better reflect the lived realities of victim-survivors, reduce the risk of their re-traumatization, and promote safer, more supportive engagement with the legal system.
If the socio-political will and momentum to criminalize coercive control continues in Canada and legislation is passed, the potential benefits of TVIC and the broader entrapment framework (Tolmie et al., 2024) should not be set aside. Careful consideration is needed, and following the lead of other jurisdictions, such as Scotland and New South Wales, Australia, it would be prudent to delay the implementation of the legislation in order to ensure the system is ready (Luke's Place, 2024). Notably, Bill C-16 includes a provision to delay implementation for up to 2 years. Correspondingly, Luke's Place (2024, p. 4, emphasis in original) specifically recommends: “that government build the infrastructure needed to support survivors of IPV to engage meaningfully with the criminal system
Nevertheless, we must remain mindful that legal systems cannot be expected to address injustices before those injustices are acknowledged and recognized by society (Hudson, 2006, p. 30). As such, integrating TVIC into criminal legal discourse might help to shift legal responses toward recognizing the blurred boundaries (Stark, 2023) that often characterize IPV. TVIC acknowledges the complex realities faced by victim-survivors, who frequently engage with multiple systems such as healthcare, child welfare, immigration, housing, and social services. This model could emphasize cross-sector collaboration and recognize that criminalization alone is insufficient. TVIC also calls for inclusive access to support for marginalized populations, including Black, Indigenous, racialized, disabled, and 2SLGBTQIA+ communities, who may not seek help through the criminal legal system (Duhaney, 2022; Varcoe et al., 2021; Wildman, 2023). Confronting the limitations of incident-based perspectives and acknowledging the seriousness of nonphysical forms of abuse would require a significant shift in current legal discourse while also ensuring that systems are not manipulated by perpetrators and victim-survivors are offered the comprehensive support and access to safety they require.
Conclusion
The push to criminalize coercive control in Canada offers a much-needed opportunity to critically reflect on what has worked so far on the pathways to addressing and preventing IPV, and what has not. The expansion of criminal law to include coercive control would present both meaningful opportunities and significant challenges. On the one hand, it would serve as a powerful public acknowledgment of the serious and very real harms coercive control causes to victim-survivors, reinforcing that such behavior is not only unacceptable, but criminal. In theory, this symbolic recognition could potentially serve to shift public attitudes, validate victim-survivors’ experiences, and potentially deter perpetrators—an argument that served, in part, as a basis for the creation/implementation of Canadian mandatory charging policies (Brown, 2002).
However, the effectiveness of such legislation is heavily dependent on a broader transformation in legal discourse and practice. Discursive shifts in the criminal legal system occur through a complex interplay of institutional practices, discourse, and power dynamics. These shifts often begin with changes in how legal professionals, including lawmakers, police officers, and judges, understand and interpret social problems, legal norms, and individual behavior. To this end, if legal professionals are not adequately trained to recognize coercive control and/or if they view it as less serious than physical violence, the harm and trauma experienced by victim-survivors could be exacerbated by the legal system's failure to act appropriately, swiftly, and with compassion. Of additional concern, those who perpetrate coercive control could pre-emptively falsely accuse their partner of engaging in/perpetrating coercive control against them, switching the narrative so that they are incorrectly perceived by the legal system as the victim. This intentional misinterpretation would inaccurately document the abuse, misrepresenting the perpetrator as the victim within the legal system, and could subsequently be used against the actual victim-survivor to negatively impact their safety, security, and access to supports.
Our analysis of two legal cases where expert testimony by Dr. Evan Stark allowed for an understanding of how the boundaries between coercion, control and physical violence can blur within the context of IPV suggests that while expanding criminal law to include coercive control could offer a meaningful legal resource for women experiencing this form of IPV, in that it could improve social discourse and understanding about the patterned and coercive dynamics of IPV, the legislation would be insufficient in isolation. In both court cases, the women had endured prolonged coercive control before ultimately killing their partners, making these instances highly exceptional. However, drawing on the insights provided by those cases enabled an exploration of more common scenarios through the lens of Christie's (1986) concept of the ideal victim. The lessons from these court cases raise concerns that further criminalization without a full and nuanced understanding of coercive control could harm victim-survivors by reinforcing rigid, typological legal frameworks. Bill C-16 would introduce a broader and more punitive legislative framework to address IPV, and it must not be assumed that simply expanding the carceral net would align with, let alone facilitate, a necessary discursive shift away from conceptualizing IPV as a set of discrete incidents. Incorporating TVIC alongside legal approaches may help the legal system respond in a survivor-centered manner—although this is certainly not guaranteed and would require further examination. While not fully eschewing the criminal legal system, anti-violence and ameliorative efforts for victim-survivors throughout the social ecology, including in workplaces and media, must continue. This would involve recognizing the diverse ways trauma impacts victim-survivors’ lives and behaviors, while also aiming to reduce re-victimization and address systemic and structural inequities that shape how abuse is experienced and addressed.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank the reviewers for their thoughtful and insightful feedback. We dedicate this work to all those who experience intimate partner violence, especially those who have not yet received the support they need. This work is done in recognition of your experiences, and it reflects our commitment to advancing justice, understanding, and systemic change. This study is based on publicly available literature and does not involve original data collection.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.