Colorado Is About to Vote on a Coercive Control Bill. Here's What's at Stake.
The Senate vote is May 11. You need to know what's in this bill — and who's trying to stop it.
You would have to live it to believe what coercive control looks like from the inside. The monitoring. The isolation. The slow erosion of your sense of reality until you can’t trust your own perceptions. The way your world shrinks — your family, your friendships, your freedom to move through a day without accounting for yourself. The threats to ruin your reputation, take your children, or harm the people you love if you try to leave. The way your body knows before your mind does — your blood loud in your veins at the sound of their footsteps in the hallway, their car in the driveway.
And then you walk into the courtroom. The person who did all of that is calm, composed, and completely confident — because the institution is built for them, not for you.
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Colorado’s HB26-1309 is trying to fix that second part It’s a bill that would require family courts to determine whether coercive control occurred before applying the standard custody analysis — not bury it as one factor among many, but put it first. If a court finds domestic violence by a preponderance of the evidence, a legal presumption activates: it is presumed not to be in the child’s best interests to award that parent custody.
The Senate votes on Monday, May 11. The legislative session ends May 13.
The window is three days.
What This Bill Actually Does
HB26-1309’s definition of domestic violence includes coercive control, economic abuse, technological abuse, health-related abuse, stalking, sexual assault, and human trafficking. That list matters. Family courts have historically been built around an incident model — discrete acts of physical violence that can be documented, reported, and weighed. Coercive control doesn’t produce police reports. It produces anxiety, self-doubt, and a learned helplessness that looks, to an untrained judicial eye, like a difficult personality.
The bill also addresses something survivors of reproductive coercion will recognize immediately. It includes, within its definition of health-related abuse, controlling or preventing access to reproductive healthcare — including contraceptive use and control of pregnancy outcomes. Reproductive coercion is a documented dimension of coercive control. It belongs in this framework.
And the bill raises the bar for mental health professionals involved in these cases. Anyone working with a party found to have committed domestic violence must have specialized training in treating domestic violence survivors and must have completed a 52-week domestic violence abuser intervention program. That is a meaningful floor.
Who Is Opposing It and Why
On May 8, the Colorado Catholic Conference issued a joint letter from four bishops, urging the faithful to call their senators and vote no on HB26-1309 before passage.
Their first objection is about legislative drafting: they argue the bill’s coercive control definition is broad enough to apply to parents who don’t affirm a child’s gender identity, potentially triggering custody loss. This is a real tension in coercive control legislation generally. Definitions broad enough to capture the lived reality of survivors are also definitions that will be tested at the margins. The answer to that is precise drafting and judicial guidance — not defeating the underlying framework.
Their second objection concerns the reproductive coercion provision. They argue that a father who opposes his partner’s abortion decision could be classified as an abuser under the bill’s health-related abuse language. The bill’s actual language targets control and interference — blocking access, using intimidation, coercing outcomes through physical harm or threat. Disagreement is not coercion. Advocacy is not coercion. But the framing of this objection follows a pattern that anyone who has worked in this field will recognize: the reframing of coercive behavior as a rights issue.
That argument has slowed protective legislation in jurisdiction after jurisdiction. Meanwhile, according to UNODC and UN Women’s 2025 femicide report, a woman or girl is killed by an intimate partner or family member every ten minutes — 50,000 in 2024 alone, with no sign of real progress. Nevertheless, the same arguments will be used again wherever the next coercive control bill is introduced.
Why This Vote Matters Beyond Colorado
If HB26-1309 passes, it becomes a model. A state that formally made coercive control a legal predicate in family court — with evidentiary standards, written judicial findings, and a presumption that shifts the burden onto the party found to have committed abuse. Other legislatures will look at it.
If it fails, that failure is also a model. The arguments used to defeat it will travel. The coalition that defeated it will be available for the next fight.
My years of direct work with survivors of coercive control — including the most severe and treatment-resistant presentations — confirms what the research already shows: the post-separation period is the most dangerous The courtroom becomes the new arena for control when physical access is removed. Vexatious litigation, weaponized parenting time, financial attrition — these are not edge cases. They are the norm in the population this platform serves.
Legislation that requires courts to see that pattern — before anything else — is worth fighting for.
Colorado Already Knows the Cost
Colorado already knows what is at stake when courts get this wrong.
The state’s own 2024 domestic violence fatality report — published by the Attorney General’s office — documented eight children killed as collateral victims of domestic violence last year. Every one of them was under the age of eight. Five were killed while their parents were in active custody disputes — at the exact moment the legal system was supposed to be protecting them.
Nationally, the Center for Judicial Excellence has tracked more than 900 children killed by a parent in the context of divorce, separation, or custody proceedings since 2008.
Other states have already written those deaths into law. Piqui’s Law in California is named for a five-year-old boy suffocated by his father during a custody dispute in 2017 — after his mother’s warnings to the court went unheeded. Greyson’s Law in Florida is named for a four-year-old boy shot by his father in 2021 during court-ordered visitation — while his mother’s domestic violence injunction sat unanswered.
These laws exist because children died in the gap between what a protective parent knew and what the court was willing to see. HB26-1309 is Colorado’s chance to close that gap. The question on May 11 is whether the Senate will take it.
What You Can Do
If you are in Colorado: Contact your state senator before Monday. Find your legislator at leg.colorado.gov/find-my-legislator. A call is faster than an email and just as effective. You don’t need a long message: I support HB26-1309. Please vote yes.
If you are not in Colorado: Share this post. The survivors in your life who are navigating family court need to know this fight is happening — and what the pattern of opposition looks like, so they can recognize it wherever they are.
Final Thoughts
My hope is that by the time this session closes on May 13, Colorado will have a place in the Global Coercive Control Legislation Index I built six years ago. Not as a data point — as a turning point.
Because what HB26-1309 represents, at its core, is a court system finally required to see the pattern before the pattern ends in tragedy. Femicide, filicide, and familicide are among the most predictable crimes in the world.1 2 3 4
After all these years, I am still brought to tears by the preventable tragedies I have witnessed — cases where the absence of coercive control legislation was the difference between life and death.
We know the warning signs. We know the escalation trajectory. We know that coercive control is not a precursor to lethal violence — it is lethal violence in its early stages.
What survivors and the people who work alongside them have needed, for a very long time, is a legal framework that knows that too. Colorado has the chance to build one.
All eyes on Monday’s vote—I’m fully locked in.
Johnson, H., Eriksson, L., Mazerolle, P., and Wortley, R. “Intimate femicide: The role of coercive control.” Feminist Criminology 14, no. 1 (2019): 3-23.
Tyson, D., 2020. Coercive control and intimate partner homicide. In Criminalising coercive control: Family violence and the criminal law (pp. 73-90). Singapore: Springer Singapore.
Chambers, L., Zweep, D. and Verrelli, N., 2018. Paternal filicide and coercive control: Reviewing the evidence in Cotton v Berry. UBCL Rev., 51, p.671.
Johnson, C.H., 2023. Familicide as a Form of Abuse. In Gender-based violence: A comprehensive guide (pp. 153-165). Cham: Springer International Publishing.
This sounds like an example of two groups — women’s and children’s safety advocates, and the Catholic church — who have basically the same goals but won’t listen to each other enough to come to consensus.