Manslaughter by Coercive Control: The Femicides the Count Leaves Out

In England and Wales, more women now die by suicide after coercive control than are killed by their partners. After a landmark case in Scotland, the law is only beginning to call that what it is.

Content note: This article discusses and describes sensitive topics. If you are currently experiencing abuse or are in early recovery from coercive control, please read with care, or seek support from Samaritans.

For the second year running, the suicides outnumbered the killings.

In the year to March 2025, police in England and Wales recorded 347 domestic abuse-related deaths — the highest the national Domestic Homicide Project has counted, and an increase of 85 on the year before.¹ Most of that increase was not homicide. It was suicide: women who endured coercive control and then died by their own hand. Across the project’s five-year dataset, suspected victim suicides now sit alongside domestic homicides as one of the two largest categories of death — and for two years in a row, the suicides have come out ahead.²

Read that again, because almost no one reports it.³ We count the women a man strangles or stabs. We are only just beginning to count the women he drives to the bridge, the overdose, the point of no return. They die by their own hand, and the system has long filed them under private tragedy rather than gender-based violence. The man who built the cage walks away, often never questioned.

These deaths are not a footnote to femicide. They are femicide — the part the count leaves out.

Coercive Control and Femicide Go Hand in Hand

Here is the figure that should end the debate. In 88% of those suspected suicide cases, police already had a record of domestic abuse against the victim before she died.⁴

Eighty-eight percent. The warning was on file. The pattern of coercive control was known. And still the deaths came.

That single statistic dismantles the idea that these suicides are private, unforeseeable, nobody’s fault. They are the opposite of unforeseeable. They are the visible end of a documented process — and the points where someone could have intervened were there, recorded, in black and white.

Find out if coercive control legislation exists in your area by visiting the Global Coercive Control Legislation Index.

What Drives a Woman to That Edge

These deaths are not, at root, about mental illness in the way we usually mean it. They are the end point of coercive control.

Coercive control works by closing every exit. It isolates a woman from the people who might help her, drains her finances so she cannot leave, monitors her movements, and rewrites her sense of reality until she no longer trusts her own judgment. In the most severe cases, the perpetrator’s goal is stated outright. In my own practice, I have heard survivors describe being told they were worthless, that their children would be better off without them, that they should go ahead and do it. Over time, the perpetrator’s voice becomes the voice in the victim’s own head. Eventually, for some women, the act follows.

This is not a woman choosing death. It is a woman who has had every other choice taken from her. The control is the cause. The suicide is the consequence. And the person who engineered the entrapment bears responsibility for where it led.

I have written in detail about these terminal patterns, and the campaign to make the law recognize them, on Narcissistic Abuse Rehab.

Read more: Manslaughter by Coercive Control.

A Crime With No Name

Manslaughter by coercive control names a principle: that a perpetrator whose sustained controlling behavior drives a person to take her own life can bear criminal responsibility for that death, even though he did not physically cause it.

The trouble is that, in England and Wales, no such offense exists on the books. As of publication, there is no statute called “manslaughter by coercive control.” Prosecutors must instead route these cases through the ordinary common law of manslaughter, proving that the perpetrator’s unlawful conduct caused the death — an evidential bar so high that it has almost never been cleared. Only three men in the UK have ever been charged with manslaughter following a partner’s suicide. Until recently, only a handful of such prosecutions have ever succeeded in England and Wales: Nicholas Allen, in 2017, and Ryan Wellings in 2025.⁵ ⁶

That is the gap families are fighting to close. After her 23-year-old daughter Chloe took her own life following a year of coercive control, Sharon Holland campaigned for a specific statutory offence — so that what happened to Chloe would have a name in law, and a consequence.⁷ The government declined, arguing existing law already covers it. In practice, existing law almost never does.

Scotland Just Drew the Line

Then, on March 3, 2026, at the High Court in Glasgow, something happened that had never happened in Scotland before.

Lee Milne was convicted of culpable homicide — the Scots equivalent of manslaughter — for the death of his wife, Kimberly.⁸ She was 28. She died on July 27, 2023 after jumping from a bridge over the A90 in Dundee. Her husband had subjected her to eighteen months of abuse: he choked her, knocked her unconscious, controlled her money, cut her off from her family, locked her in their home. The prosecutor told the court he had deliberately and ruthlessly exploited her vulnerabilities, and that this made him culpable for her decision to end her own life. The jury agreed. He was sentenced to eight years, with a further three-year extension.⁹

The judge, Lady Drummond, said it plainly: domestic abuse is rarely about one incident, and it is not only about violent acts. It includes the subtler, equally harmful exertions of power and control that run through a relationship.¹⁰

It was the first prosecution of its kind in Scotland.¹¹ It will not be the last.

Why This Matters Beyond the Courtroom

A conviction does not bring Kimberly or Chloe back. No verdict ever will. But these cases establish the principle the law looked away from for so long: that you can kill someone without laying a hand on them in the final moment, and that the slow violence of coercive control can be just as lethal as the fast violence of a weapon.

That principle is what closes the gap. It tells investigators to look at an apparent suicide and ask what came before it — which is exactly the change now underway, as police begin checking for a history of coercive control at the scene of unexpected deaths. It tells perpetrators that destroying a woman by degrees is not a loophole. And it tells survivors, and the people who love them, that what is being done has a name and, increasingly, a consequence.

It also points to where the real work is — upstream, before the edge. In nearly nine of ten of these deaths, the abuse was already known. The chance to act came long before the tragedy.

The Map of Who Sees It

This is why I track the law, country by country. Femicide — including the deaths that come at a woman’s own hand after a sustained campaign of coercive control — is only now being written into legislation, and the picture is uneven and changing fast.

The Global Femicide Legislation Index tracks where the law recognizes these killings for what they are. Coercive-control-driven death sits right at the frontier of that recognition: a few jurisdictions are beginning to prosecute it, most have not even named it. The gap between what is happening and what the law sees is exactly the gap this work exists to close.

See where your country stands in the Global Femicide Legislation Index.

The count is starting to catch up with the truth. The year the suicides outnumbered the killings — for the second time running — was the year it became impossible to keep calling these deaths anything other than what they are.

1. N/A. (2026, April 28). Improvements in recognition of suicide-domestic abuse link. National Police Chief’s Council.

2. Hoeger, K., Gutierrez-Munoz, C., Tisi, R. Sadullah, A. Gudgeon, G., Whitaker, A. (2026). Domestic Homicides and Suspected Victim Suicides 2020-2025 Year 5 Report. National Centre for Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) and Public Protection.

3. Martin, A-C. (2024, November 17). The hidden death toll of domestic abuse: ‘There are more suicides than killings. Why isn’t more being done?’ The Independent.

4. Bates, L. Hoeger, K., Stoneman, M-J., Whitaker, A. (2022). Domestic Homicides and Suspected Victim Suicides During the Covid-19 Pandemic 2020-2021. Vulnerability Knowledge and Practice Programme.

5. Rea, H. (2025, March 25). The Domestic Homicide Project Report – March 2025. Olliers Solicitors.

6. Brown, M. (2025, January 13). How Ryan Welling made Kiena Dawes’ life a nightmare. The Guardian.

7. Wakefield, M. (2023, December 8). Manslaughter by Coercive Control: UK Law Reform 2026. Narcissistic Abuse Rehab.

8. N/A. (2026, April 10). Domestic abuser who caused death of wife sentenced following landmark prosecution. Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service.

9. N/A. (2026, May 11). Landmark case in Scotland on domestic abuse and suicide. Public and Commercial Services Union.

10. Beaton, C. (2026, March 6). Lord advocate hails domestic abuser’s landmark conviction for culpable homicide. Scottish Legal News.

11. McKelvie, G., Al-Othman, H. (2026, April 11). Kimberly’s story: the tragedy that changed British legal history. The Guardian.