Why Some Coercive Control Cases Stall

The Gap Between Report and Charge

New data out of New South Wales, Australia, offers one of the clearest looks yet at what happens after a jurisdiction criminalizes coercive control. According to reporting by Hayley Gleeson for ABC News (Sept. 27, 2026), New South Wales police recorded 682 reports of coercive control in the first 24 months after the offense took effect in July 2024. Ninety-five percent of those reports involved a female victim. As of June 2026, 42 charges had been laid, all against men, and four defendants had been sentenced after pleading guilty. Over the same period, more than 77,000 domestic violence assaults had been recorded. In May 2025, Queensland’s coercive control legislation took effect and, as of July 2026, there were 216 defendants with 19 men convicted and sentenced to terms of imprisonment. Other Australian jurisdictions are introducing similar legislation of their own.

The reporting points to possible reasons for the differences between the two jurisdictions and the gaps between the numbers when comparing reports to convictions. Queensland’s offense covers family relationships, not only intimate partners, and its maximum penalty is 14 years against NSW’s 7, pointing to a better “return on investment” for police effort. Among other possible reasons are the mental element of the offense, difficulty collecting evidence about coercive control, “slow and ‘patchy’ responses from police,” “differences in how police are applying the laws,” and the abstract nature of coercive control in the first place. But the NSW Police Force says it provides “several phases of mandatory coercive control training” and that police are shifting the way they look at abuse, while others in the community claim the training is inadequate and there’s a lack of transparency and diversity surrounding it. The article notes that “not every victim is white, weak, meek and afraid, for instance.”

Professor Jane Wangmann of the University of Technology Sydney says the intent requirement could be keeping genuine coercive control cases from being identified and believes the laws should be expanded to include recklessness. NSW is now considering that change.

Scotland’s law already reaches recklessness and prosecutions there have been fewer than expected. In 2024, the figures show 1,039 prosecutions and 897 convicted. Chief Executive of Scottish Women’s Aid Marsha Scott attributed some of the slow uptake to police training, which she said is geared toward the letter of the law rather than coercive control itself.

Writing for Duke Law Journal in 2021, Erin Sheley examined the coercive control offense in England and Wales. That statute asks whether the behavior caused “serious alarm or distress” with a “substantial adverse effect” on the victim’s “usual day-to-day activities,” and it requires that the defendant knew or ought to have known the behavior would have a serious effect. Sheley argued that an offense written this way would raise "insurmountable due process problems" in the United States, because it does not give ordinary people fair notice of what conduct is prohibited. “A statute that ‘either forbids or requires the doing of an act in terms so vague that men of common intelligence must necessarily guess at its meaning’ violates the Due Process Clauses.” Connally v. General Construction Co., 269 U.S. 385 (1926). Sheley further cautions against the overbreadth of coercive control laws for the purpose of withstanding constitutional challenge, but notes that “[f]orty-six state stalking statutes have withstood vagueness and overbreadth challenges.” Courts generally rely, however, “in part on their requirement that the prohibited harassing conduct include at least an implied threat of physical injury or fear thereof on the part of the victim.” Finally, she says a coercive control offense build on otherwise legal conduct would face freedom-of-thought objections. She goes on to discuss evidentiary and policy problems with criminalizing coercive control.

Importantly, Sheley theorizes “solutions in other substantive offenses.” She mentions child and elder abuse, false imprisonment, blackmail, criminal conspiracy, stalking, and fraud. In her alternative borrowed from fraud, the line between immoral and criminal conduct is drawn by the defendant's specific intent to use deception to take something of value. She proposed carrying that kind of intent requirement over to coercive control: the prosecution would have to prove a pattern of coercive behavior carried out with the intent to deprive the partner of autonomy over decisions and conduct that are theirs to make. “As Professor Alex Stein notes, the essence of fraud is coercion” and is “imposed on one party by another in a superior power relation.”

For clinicians, advocates, and judicial officers, the working question is what evidence cases like this need. Turning back to Australia, Samantha Bouffler's former partner became the first person jailed under the New South Wales law, and ABC News reports that the fact so much of his abuse was carried out by text message was crucial to her case. The reporting describes him "blowing up" her phone whenever she spent time with family and friends and demanding she cut them off. Whether a statute requires intent or reaches recklessness, records that capture specific conduct repeated over time give a fact-finder something to weigh about the accused's state of mind. A note that a client "felt controlled" documents her experience; a note describing what he did, how often, and in what circumstances documents a pattern. That level of detail is what trauma-informed intake already aims for.

Sources:

Source Article: ‘I was relieved, I felt validated’: How coercive control laws are changing lives by Hayley Gleeson

Supporting Statistics: NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research - Domestic violence and coercive control

Duke Law Journal Paper: Criminalizing Coercive Control Within the Limits of Due Process by Erin Sheley