Why I Built The Global Coercive Control Legislation Index
On why I created the Global Coercive Control Legislation Index in 2020, what I've watched it become and why it matters to everyone – not just survivors.
They say that necessity is the mother of invention, and that was certainly the case when I launched the Global Coercive Control Legislation Index in 2020. At the time I was receiving multitudinous inquiries — daily, from survivors, advocates, legal professionals, and researchers — asking the same question: is there existing legislation where I live? It made sense to create a single page where anyone could log on and see, plainly, the state of affairs. What they found when I launched it was, to put it plainly, a sorry picture.
The origin of the index is inseparable from a conversation I had on Twitter on October 3, 2020, with Professor Emeritus Barbara Gerbert of the University of California San Francisco. Professor Gerbert is a foundational figure in this field. At UCSF she developed the AVDR model — Ask, Validate, Document, Refer — a framework designed to support law enforcement, healthcare professionals, and others in identifying and responding to domestic violence. In 2009, Scotland’s newly formed Violence Reduction Unit adopted her model. In the decade that followed, violence rates in Scotland decreased dramatically. Twenty-five thousand Scottish police officers were trained in domestic violence and coercive control under the leadership of Superintendent Gordon McCreadie. The results are documented; the short film featuring the AVDR model in action, Harder - A Short Film About Domestic Abuse, was published by Medics Against Violence. It is less than five minutes long and worth every second of your time.
On October 3, 2020, I reached out to Professor Gerbert because she had posted about Hawaii’s newly enacted coercive control legislation — HB 2425, sponsored by Representative David Tarnas — and wanted the word to spread. I was writing about it and offered to share it across my platform. She wrote back with characteristic generosity, providing context, connecting the dots between her own research, Scotland’s implementation, and Hawaii’s legislation, and asking the question that has driven this work ever since: how do we get more states to pass and implement laws? Her work — at UCSF and beyond — is invaluable to this field.
That exchange crystallised something that remains one of the most instructive and frustrating facts in this entire area: the foundational research on coercive control was conducted primarily in the United States, by American scholars. Evan Stark’s landmark book Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life was published in 2007. Professor Gerbert’s AVDR model was developed at UCSF. And yet it was the United Kingdom — and Scotland in particular — that legislated first, informed in part by American research that American legislators had not yet acted upon. England and Wales criminalized coercive control in 2015 under Section 76 of the Serious Crime Act. Scotland passed its Domestic Abuse Act in 2018, widely regarded as the most comprehensive coercive control law in the world. The United States, where much of the intellectual architecture of this field was built, is still catching up state by state.
What the Index Is and How It Works — and What a Decade of Implementation Tells Us
The Global Coercive Control Legislation Index is a living reference document tracking the legal recognition of coercive control — in criminal law, civil protective order frameworks, and family court statutes — across jurisdictions worldwide. It covers the United Kingdom, Europe, Australia, Canada, and the United States. It draws on primary legislative sources, Council of Europe ratification data for the Istanbul Convention, and a cross-referenced approach that distinguishes between laws that have been enacted, laws that are in force, laws awaiting commencement, and proposals still moving through legislative chambers.
Methodology. For a jurisdiction to be included as having coercive control legislation, the index requires that the relevant statute either explicitly names coercive control or controlling and coercive behavior, or defines a sufficiently equivalent pattern-of-conduct framework — sustained behavior designed to limit a person’s autonomy, freedom, or access to support — in its operative provisions. A state statute that includes the word “coercion” only as an element of physical force does not qualify. A statute that defines coercive control as a pattern of behaviour interfering with free will and personal liberty, and applies that definition in the context of domestic abuse, does. Where a law addresses coercive control only in civil frameworks — protective orders, custody determinations — that distinction is noted and the applicable legal system specified. Where a law criminalizes coercive control as a standalone offense, that is specified separately, because the distinction carries significant implications for prosecution, evidence standards, and survivor access to remedy. Istanbul Convention ratifications are indexed under Article 33 — Psychological Violence — rather than as standalone coercive control legislation, because ratification creates an obligation to legislate but does not itself constitute domestic law. Entries are sourced to the primary statute or bill, not to secondary reporting. Status designations are precise: Enacted means passed into law; In Force means currently operative; Pending means introduced but not yet passed.
Tracking legislation is, however, only part of the picture — and England and Wales at the ten-year mark illustrate why. In 2025, a decade after Section 76 came into force, nearly 53,000 coercive control cases were recorded by police. Fewer than 10,000 ever reached the courts. The charge rate, given the volume of reports, is disproportionately low. Kate Brown, Chief Crown Prosecutor and national lead for domestic abuse at the CPS, explained the gap in a December 2025 interview with Sky News:
“Victims often don’t realize that what’s happening to them is criminal and is controlling. Very often these cases come to us when there has been a violent offence and the offender has been arrested for that violent offence. Then with very careful questioning the police discover that there is a whole history which shows manipulation, shows isolation, shows behaviours that are causing psychological harm.”
Nahar Choudhury, Chief Executive of Solace Women’s Aid, identified the human cost of that gap:
“One of the main issues is that people stop and remove themselves from the process before it gets to the charging point because it is so challenging and so difficult.”
These figures are not an argument against coercive control law. They are an argument for what must accompany it: mandatory professional training, survivor-centred prosecution processes, and the kind of sustained institutional commitment that Scotland built before its 2018 Act came into force rather than after. The index tracks what has been legislated. The ten-year data from England and Wales tracks what legislation alone, without that infrastructure, produces. Both sets of information contain important lessons.
What Has Changed Since 2020
Today, as I updated the Global Coercive Control Legislation Index – six years after launching it on October 20, 2020 – it was clear that substantial changes have taken place — and still not nearly enough.
When I began tracking, the United States had no state with a coercive control law in any meaningful sense. That has changed. California enacted legislation in 2021. Connecticut followed with Jennifer’s Law that same year. Washington State, Colorado, New Jersey, Hawaii — which remains the only US state to have criminalized coercive control as a standalone offence — Vermont, Massachusetts, Maine, Kentucky, and Louisiana. A USA Today report published on April 24, 2026 confirmed the current tally. Bills are active in New York, South Carolina, West Virginia, and Maryland.
Australia has moved state by state: New South Wales introduced a standalone criminal offence that commenced in July 2024; Queensland’s followed in May 2025. Canada’s Bill C-332, which would create a federal criminal offence applicable across all provinces, passed the House of Commons unanimously in June 2024 and is currently before the Senate.
Each of these entries represents years of advocacy, survivor testimony, legislative effort, and — too often — preventable deaths that made the abstraction concrete enough to generate political will.
Why This Is Everyone’s Problem
There is a persistent and damaging misconception about coercive control: that it is a private matter between two people in a relationship, that its consequences are contained within four walls, that it is not a public safety issue.
The research says otherwise, and has said so for some time.
Research has established a significant correlation between domestic violence history and mass shooting perpetration. A 2021 peer-reviewed study by Geller, Booty, and Crifasi, published in Injury Epidemiology, found that 59% of all fatal mass shootings in the United States between 2014 and 2019 were domestic violence related, and that in 68% of cases, the shooter either killed at least one intimate partner or family member, or had a documented history of domestic violence. Everytown for Gun Safety’s research has found that nearly two in three children and teenagers killed in mass shootings with four or more victims died in incidents connected to domestic violence. These are correlational findings, and the causal mechanisms between domestic violence, coercive control, and mass violence require further dedicated research. What the data does establish clearly is that the two phenomena are not separate — they share perpetrators, share warning signs, and share potential points of intervention. The question of whether earlier legal recognition of coercive control behavior would reduce the incidence of mass casualty domestic violence events is one that researchers and policymakers should be urgently pursuing. The Global Coercive Control Legislation Index is one data instrument in that larger investigation.
These are not private tragedies. They are public health emergencies wearing the disguise of private ones.
The Problem of Weaponization — and Institutional DARVO
Any honest defense of coercive control legislation has to grapple with a documented risk: that these laws can be, and have been, turned against the people they were designed to protect.
Dr. Jennifer J. Freyd, PhD, Professor Emerit of Psychology at the University of Oregon, Stanford PhD, first observed DARVO — Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender — in perpetrator responses to accountability. Today, it is a manipulation strategy well documented in the clinical literature on coercive control. Perpetrators who are skilled at controlling the narrative will, when confronted with accountability, reposition themselves as the victim and their target as the aggressor. This is not a failure of intelligence on the part of those deceived by it. It is a deliberate and practiced tactic, and it is effective precisely because coercive control, by design, leaves the survivor’s credibility degraded and their account of events already in doubt.
What is less often acknowledged is that DARVO does not only happen between individuals. It happens at the institutional level — in police interactions, in family court proceedings, in child protective services assessments — wherever a trained professional encounters a survivor whose reactive behavior looks, in isolation, like aggression. A survivor who monitored a partner’s whereabouts for safety, restricted access to finances to prevent the depletion of shared funds, or recorded threatening calls to document abuse can find these protective measures reframed as controlling behavior if the person evaluating them does not understand coercive control dynamics.
Joan Meier, founding director of the National Family Violence Law Center at George Washington University, has written and testified extensively on this problem. Kristine Lizdas at the Battered Women’s Justice Project has documented cases where coercive control statutes, imprecisely drafted or applied by untrained adjudicators, were used by perpetrators to file counter-claims against survivors.
The case of Francine Hughes illustrates what insufficient legal frameworks cost survivors, long before this was a legislative debate. In 1977, after thirteen years of severe and sustained abuse — years in which she sought help from police, courts, and social services and was repeatedly turned away — Hughes set fire to the bed in which her abuser was sleeping and surrendered herself to police. She was charged with first-degree murder. Her defense team argued that she had acted in a state of temporary insanity produced by years of coercive control and terror. She was acquitted. Her case helped shift public understanding of why survivors do not simply leave — and why, when they defend themselves, the institutional response so frequently treats them as the perpetrator.
Institutional DARVO does not require a trial to cause harm. It can occur in the first moments of a police response. When law enforcement encounters a survivor whose reactive behavior — raised voice, defensive physical response, visible distress — is mistaken for perpetrator aggression in the absence of training in coercive control dynamics, the system compounds the abuse rather than interrupting it. This is not a reason to abandon coercive control legislation. It is a precise and urgent argument for mandatory professional training as a non-negotiable condition of implementation, and for ongoing legislative review to ensure that the frameworks being built are as difficult as possible to misuse.
Scotland’s 2018 Act was preceded by extensive consultation and accompanied by dedicated training funded before the law came into force. England and Wales enacted their legislation without equivalent preparation, and the decade since has been marked by persistent implementation gaps. The lesson is clear: law without training is insufficient.
The People Who Are Not the Primary Target
One of the things that has struck me most forcefully in six years of tracking this legislation is who ends up in the casualty count. The reality is that perpetrators of coercive control do not move neatly from relationship abuse to intimate partner homicide. They often harm the people around the primary target — children, family members, suspected romantic rivals, first responders, and pets — before, alongside, or instead of the named victim.
On April 19, 2026, a man shot and killed eight children in Shreveport, Louisiana, in a mass shooting that authorities described as an entirely domestic incident. Seven of the eight were his own children. The violence began at the home of his wife Shaneiqua Pugh, who was shot first. The gunman also shot Christina Snow, the mother of three of his children. According to reports, the perpetrator had previously threatened to kill Shaneiqua, their children, and himself if she ever left him. At the time of the shooting, Shaneiqua and her husband were scheduled to appear in court the following morning to finalize their divorce.
The threat had been made. The system did not intervene before it was carried out. The incident is the deadliest mass shooting in Louisiana history and the deadliest in the United States since January 2024. More than 30% of murders in Shreveport, according to local officials, are domestic in nature. The month before Shaneiqua’s husband killed her, his ex, and the children, the Shreveport City Council had voted to withdraw from a partnership to operate a domestic violence resource centre.
Adrian Montano Medina was twenty years old when he was shot and killed in a parking lot in Howard Lake, Minnesota, in March 2023. He was killed by a coworker whose wife had told him that morning she wanted to end their marriage. The man went home, retrieved an AR-15 rifle, returned to the workplace, and shot Adrian three times in the head. Adrian was not in the relationship. He was in the blast radius of one.
Deputy Sheriff Joshua Owen was shot and killed on April 15, 2023 — his 44th birthday — while responding with colleagues to a domestic assault call in Cyrus, Minnesota. When the officers informed the man at the address that he was under arrest for domestic assault, he drew a firearm and opened fire. Deputy Owen died at hospital. He left behind a wife and a son. He had served for nearly twelve years. Two other officers were wounded in the same incident. Domestic violence calls are among the most dangerous that law enforcement responds to. The violence of coercive control does not stay contained to the room in which it began.
Coercive control occurs in same-sex relationships at rates comparable to those in heterosexual relationships — research from the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs consistently finds that 25 to 33 percent of LGBTQ people experience partner abuse in their lifetime. Where relationships are not legally recognized, or where reporting carries additional risks — of outing, of disbelief, of encountering homophobia within the systems meant to provide protection — abuse is harder to document and deaths are harder to classify accurately. The legislation this index tracks includes all intimate partner relationships regardless of gender. The legal frameworks emerging at their best do too.
The Prevention Argument
Every legislative entry in the Global Coercive Control Legislation Index represents a prevention instrument — an acknowledgment, backed by law, that the pattern of behavior preceding physical violence is itself the violence, and that it can be named, documented, and interrupted before someone dies.
Coercive control has been identified in the research as the single most consistent precursor to intimate partner homicide. It appears in the background of familicide. It is the scaffolding on which mass violence is frequently constructed, particularly when a perpetrator — facing the loss of control over a primary target through separation, divorce, or custody proceedings — decides to extend the harm outward.
The countries and states in this index that have enacted coercive control legislation have not solved the problem. Prosecution is difficult; evidence is hard to compile; judicial training remains inconsistent; and many of these laws are young enough that their full effects have not yet been studied. England and Wales criminalized this behavior in 2015 and a decade later is still grappling with training gaps and charge rates that do not reflect the scale of reporting.
But the legal recognition is of great consequence. It names what is happening. It gives survivors a framework. It gives law enforcement a basis for intervention before the call becomes the kind of call that killed Joshua Owen. It gives family courts a language for what they are seeing when a coercively controlling parent uses custody proceedings as an instrument of continued abuse. It gives coroners and investigators a lens through which to see the pattern in incidents that would otherwise be recorded as isolated.
The Global Coercive Control Index exists because that naming needs to be tracked, compared, and documented — so that advocates know where to push, legislators know where the gaps are, academics and policymakers know what has been tried and what has not, and survivors in jurisdictions where no law yet exists can see that the direction of travel, however slowly, is toward them.
How to Use This Index and How to Cite It
The Global Coercive Control Legislation Index is maintained at narcissisticabuserehab.com. It is updated as legislation moves. Each entry links to the primary source. The index is freely accessible and free to cite.
Citation format: Wakefield, Manya. (2020). The Global Coercive Control Legislation Index. Narcissistic Abuse Rehab. Updated April 2026. Retrieved from https://www.narcissisticabuserehab.com/coercive-control-legislation-index/
The index has been cited in peer-reviewed legal and academic publications, including the Southern Illinois University Law Journal and scholarship from the University of Agder. If you use it in your research or advocacy work, I ask only that you cite it accurately. Corrections, additions, and verifications from people working in specific jurisdictions are always welcome.
A Note to My Readers
If you have been here since the beginning, thank you. I hope to serve an audience for rigorous, uncompromising writing on coercive control, domestic violence legislation, and the systems that fail survivors. You came looking for that. I intend to provide it.
What I publish here will not be casual content. It will be researched, sourced, and written to a standard that holds up — the kind of writing that advocates can cite, that survivors can hand to a lawyer or a judge, and that legislators can read without finding an easy objection. That takes time, and it takes resources.
If this post has been useful to you — if the index has ever answered a question you had, if the work here has given you language for something you were struggling to name — I would be grateful if you would consider becoming a paid subscriber or a founding member.
Paid subscribers make it possible for me to continue maintaining the index, tracking legislative developments across multiple jurisdictions, and writing the long-form pieces this subject demands. Founding members make a deeper commitment to this work at a critical moment — when coercive control is finally entering the public conversation in a way it never has before, and when the quality of that conversation matters enormously.
If paid subscription is not possible for you right now, sharing this post costs nothing and reaches people who need it. Every survivor who finds the index through a shared link is a reason this exists.
This work is not finished. It will not be finished until the map is full — until the question of where coercive control is recognised in law has a different answer than the one I found when I first went looking, in the weeks that followed my conversation with Professor Barbara Gerbert in October 2020.
The legislation is moving. The conversation is widening. I would like to keep building this with you.