Violence against women is a national crisis in Australia. In recent years, there has been a reckoning on the inadequacy of legal responses to violence against women broadly, and coercive control specifically. Numerous commissions of inquiry have revealed the myriad ways in which current police and court responses to intimate partner violence (IPV) are failing to meet the needs of victim-survivors. A critical focus has formed on the need for states and territories to introduce a standalone offence of coercive control.
This study represents the first in-depth national examination of victim-survivors’ views on the benefits, risks and impacts of the criminalisation of coercive control. Specifically, it presents findings from 130 in-depth interviews conducted with female victim-survivors of coercive control from across Australia. Centring the views of victim-survivors, this report explores the reasons why the majority of victim-survivors who participated in this study supported the criminalisation of coercive control, their views on perpetrator accountability and the punishment of people who used coercive control, and the often-shared recognition among victim-survivors of the limits of criminalisation and the harms of the criminal legal system.
In a rapidly changing legal landscape where numerous Australian states and territories are committing to future reform, the findings from this project are vital to ensuring that the objectives of criminalisation are achieved in those states that do move to introduce standalone criminal offences of coercive control. Regardless of the approach to criminalisation adopted in each jurisdiction, the project findings are relevant to all Australian states and territories, and to comparable international jurisdictions.
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