Coercive control con job

Here are some of the absolute gems.

The effrontery of Evan Stark

Let's start with the man who made the whole thing up. Oh yes, coercive control was only invented in 2007, not that long ago. It was proposed not by an eminent criminologist or similar expert but rather a feminist academic working in women's studies.

Evan Stark's reason for concocting coercive control is most revealing. In his book, Coercive Control: The Entrapment of Women in Personal Life, Stark argued the domestic violence industry was running into problems because of mounting evidence that men and women are equally violent. So, he decided to come up with something new. He took ideas that had been floating around in the domestic violence industry about patterns of "patriarchal terrorism" and invented a brand-new form of domestic "violence" he called "coercive control" which he claimed men started to use to control their relationships after society moved on from the systematic, widespread "wife torture" of the past, due to women's liberation eroding men's sex-based patriarchal privilege. How's that for barking mad ideological claptrap?

Proposing new laws for coercive control proved a brilliant career move - Evan Stark quickly became the pinup boy for the feminist movement, travelling from country to country promoting this inventive means of targeting men.

Even though everyone knows that both men and women use controlling behaviours Stark declared that people should "take on faith" that "the pattern of intimidation, isolation, and control . . . is unique to men's abuse of women."

But the real power in Stark's idea is that he was promoting this as a new criminal offence, which make these laws a far more effective weapon to use against men than the old violence protections orders used for domestic violence. On the basis of the flimsiest evidence describing behaviours that can't even be properly defined, and that victims may not even see as a problem, men would be sent to prison.

Within a decade, Stark's ideas were incorporated into new laws criminalizing coercive control across the UK, and he was playing a key role in pushing for similar laws in Canada, New Zealand, and here, in Queensland and NSW.

The laws didn't work

Interestingly, the laws were a dismal failure when first introduced. In Tasmania they went to all the effort to get laws criminalizing this type of emotional abuse introduced in 2004, apparently a world-first, and they sank without a trace. There wasn't a single prosecution in the first three years after enactment!

It turned out everyone had great difficulty proving a man guilty when no one was really sure what he was supposed to have done wrong. Lawyers weren't keen on getting involved in fighting over these slippery cases and overburdened police actively resisted having another bucketload of work land in their laps.

It was only when local lawmakers tinkered with the legislation to try to clarify what they were talking about and introduced training programs to teach the police to target men more efficiently that numbers of convictions gradually started to go up.