Sarah* is smart, attractive and educated. She earns good money, comes from a loving family, and has close, supportive friends. She was also in a coercive control relationship for 16 years.
Her partner told her what she should wear, where she could go, and with whom she could associate. He told her she was a bad wife, a bad mother and a bad person. He wore her down to the point that he infected her thoughts.
“If all you’re hearing is that you’re bad at everything, it becomes the voice in your head,” Sarah says. Sarah* says that for a long time, she failed to recognise the non-violent abuse. Credit: Louie Douvis His physical abuse of her was criminal.
But there was no law against isolating her, monitoring her, or humiliating her. There was no law against staging such an intense inquisition of her every move whenever she left the house that it became easier to stay home. That will change from Monday when NSW’s coercive control laws come into force.
The new laws are a major shift in the state’s response to domestic violence. They widen the justice system’s focus from a specific incident – a slap, a push – to patterns of abuse that might not involve physical contact, but still leave people trapped in a nightmare. Coercive control could involve forcing a partner to beg for money.
It could involve electronically tracking them (abusers sometimes plant them in children’s teddy bears). It might involve threatening to distribute intimate images or harming the childre.
