Coercive control often precedes, or occurs in conjunction with, physical or sexual assault, and can be just as traumatic and harmful – sometimes even more so. Yet for many reasons it is rarely discussed within the context of family or intimate partner violence.

One reason is its insidious subtlety. Many aforementioned behaviours are frequently excused as “normal” jealousies that prove how much a perpetrator loves their partner.

While few people would interpret a punch as an expression of affection, many more might believe a spouse who says he “loves you so much”, he wants you to stay at home all the time.

Sometimes this misunderstanding is shored up by “love-bombing”, or over-the-top demonstrations of affection that serve to manipulate victims.

All this can add up to a situation of crippling stress, anxiety and vulnerability – and a loss of the self.

“He brought me so low, below myself, that the idea of leaving him and having to work myself back up just seemed impossible,” said musician FKA twigs last year about her experience of coercive control at the hands of partner Shia LaBeouf.

RECOGNISING COERCIVE CONTROL AS FAMILY VIOLENCE

Women’s rights organisations around the world have long asked for coercive control to be made a criminal offence. Their advocacy efforts were successful in the United Kingdom.

In 2015, England and Wales legally defined coercive control and made it an offence. Scotland and Northern Ireland have more recently done this too, and similar efforts are being driven elsewhere around the world, reflecting an ongoing paradigm shift in understanding.

Singapore needs to keep up with such a shift. So far, though, we seem to be falling behind.

In early 2020, the Government formed a taskforce to study the issue of family violence in Singapore and to make recommendations to prevent or reduce its occurrence, support victims and rehabilitate perpetrators.

In September, the Taskforce on Family Violence presented its report and made 16 recommendations, all of which are commendable and necessary as we strive to eliminate domestic violence. But while the Taskforce spoke of the need to study “emerging trends” in family violence, the report disappointingly made no mention of coercive control.

While the report recommends for public communication campaigns to “unpack different types of abuse and what they entail, including physical abuse, emotional abuse, sexual abuse, and neglect”, not much was said about the tactics of manipulative emotional abuse and control that often predict physical abuse.

Conceiving of violence as episodic incidents instead of a pattern of behaviours obscures its true nature, confuses victims (who may think “my situation can’t be that bad – at least he doesn’t hit me”) and allows perpetrators to escape accountability.

This traditional narrow view leads the criminal justice system to fragment longstanding patterns into individual interactions to prosecute.

This thinking seeps into the way social workers may approach family violence situations, when the time between outbursts of physical violence is sometimes viewed as a break from violence entirely, and a chance for victims to recuperate – yet other forms of abuse, such as humiliation and isolation, may well continue in that period.

We need publicity campaigns that list the many forms of coercive control so that people can recognise them in a partner. The publicity campaigns should help people realise they do not have to stay in abusive relationships, that there is help and support to get out of these situations.

But we also need recognition in our laws of coercive control so that there is scope for intervention by the authorities.

Without this legal definition of what constitutes coercive control, victims may not feel confident they will be believed if they speak up and seek help, and so they stay trapped, suffering in silence, in their abusive relationships.

HOW TO PREVENT COERCIVE CONTROL

There may be some hesitation to criminalise coercive control because of the challenge of proving it. Much will of course have to depend on the testimony of the victim.

Yet this can be backed up by evidence of controlling and abusive behaviour in emails and phone messages, and by the testimony of family members, friends, colleagues and perhaps also neighbours.

Social workers and police officers will need to be trained to spot tell-tale signs of controlling behaviour in a household and the unspoken messages in a victim’s body language.

Research is needed, and much discussion and debate, before we can come up with a suitable conceptual and legal framework for dealing with emotional abuse and coercive control. It is an effort we must make if we are to get to the heart of family violence and have any hope of one day ending partner abuse.

Our understanding of abusive relationships and what we can and should about them is constantly evolving. It was not long ago the police were powerless to intervene in instances of domestic violence unless there were broken bones or other “grievous hurt”.

As a society, as a judicial system, we were simply blind to the reality of domestic abuse, the shocking violence that goes on behind closed doors.

The Women’s Charter was passed in 1961, but Personal Protection Orders, which today are the first line of defence against family violence, only came about later when the Charter was amended in 1980. And it was only last year, in January 2020, that marital rape became a crime.

The Government will present its White Paper on gender equality early next year. Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong has indicated that family violence is a key area the paper will cover.

I look forward to proposals that will be today as progressive as the Women’s Charter was when it was first passed in 1961.

I look forward to recognition in the White Paper of the vital importance of understanding and criminalising coercive control.

* Pseudonyms were used in this commentary.

Margaret Thomas, President, AWARE.