The Serious Crime Act 2015 received Royal Assent on 3 March 2015 and coercive control became a criminal offence as of 29 December 2015.
The government’s new coercive or controlling behaviour offence will mean victims who experience the type of behaviour that stops short of serious physical violence, but amounts to extreme psychological and emotional abuse, can bring their perpetrators to justice and the offence will carry a maximum of 5 years’ imprisonment, a fine or both.
The new coercive or controlling behaviour offence should help protect victims who would otherwise be subjected to sustained patterns of abuse that can lead to total control of their lives by the perpetrator.
Coercive or controlling behaviour does not relate to a single incident, it is a purposeful pattern of incidents that occur over time in order for one individual to exert power, control or coercion over another. The new offence aims to close a gap in the law around patterns of coercive and controlling behaviour during a relationship between intimate partners, former partners who still live together, or family members.
There has been a mixed reaction to the introduction of the law, domestic violence professionals welcome the law however; there is a concern that the new law will not be properly utilised as recent HMIC inspections of police forces highlighted police failings in dealing with the basics in domestic abuse cases.
Frontline police officers are concerned that this is yet one more law that has been introduced for which there has been little or no training and an additional burden in light of 20% cuts in police resources where the police are being asked to do more with less.
Initial enquiries by Domestic Abuse Watch reveal that the preparation or the introduction of the new law by police forces varies considerably and the College of Policing sent out a training package to police forces very late with insufficient time for it to be introduced in training.
Our enquiries also revealed that some forces have been ahead of the game and introduced training in advance of the legislation coming into force however; the majority of police forces have not introduced any specific training on coercive control or use the College of Policing training package.
We conducted some Freedom of Information requests and it is apparent that the new law is not being used other than in some token cases.
If anyone wishes to supply any additinal information in the interim we would be pleased to hear from you.
As expected, individuals and businesses have taken advantage of the oversight by the College of Policing and are now providing training to various police forces or running conferences.
The largest number of complaints concern inconsistency and a reluctance to investigate coercive control cases due to the length of time such enquiries take and a lack of knowledge and experience by officers.
We would like to see domestic abuse units dealing with such crimes however; the majority of cases are still being dealt with by uniformed patrol officers who are unlikely to have the knowledge, skills, experience to investigate cases of coercive control.