In a stuffy, overheated courtroom, a jury of 10 women and two men are watching baby monitor footage of an infant happily kicking its feet in a quilt-lined crib. The parents are off-camera, but their voices are audible, and the baby seems to be following their movements with its eyes.
The mother’s hands become visible as she goes to touch the baby, before she backs away suddenly. A while later a male voice is heard saying: “Fuck you, you little fucking troll, you absolute bitch.” The baby flaps its arms up and down, while a soft toy, propped up at the end of the cradle, stares on blankly.
This is day four of a trial of the baby’s father, who has been charged with coercive and controlling behaviour towards the child’s mother. For several days, the jury has been sifting through the most intimate details of the couple’s short marriage, trying to assess whether the husband’s behaviour towards his wife has been just unpleasant or criminally abusive.
Evidence from the baby monitor catches noises of furniture being broken, the father swearing again, but now the defence barrister is arguing that these are simply images of sleep-deprived parents bickering as they are woken by a restless baby.
“When he’s in that state he throws things. If you’re in the way you’re going to be hit,” says the child’s mother, Anna (whose name, like all those in this piece, has been changed).
“What’s being suggested is that he threw something, but not at you. Do you accept that?” asks the defence barrister.
“No. He threw it at me,” she says, beginning to cry. Anna is giving evidence from behind a screen in the witness box, visible to the judge and jury, but not to the press bench or her ex-husband, Paul, who is sitting in the dock, in a fresh white shirt, his head cocked to one side, his face stern and sceptical as he listens.
To find a defendant guilty of coercive or controlling behaviour, a relatively new form of domestic abuse recognised in 2015, a jury must be convinced that the victim has been subjected to a pattern of behaviour that may include their partner isolating them from friends and family, and taking control over their finances, over where they can go, who they see, what they eat. The abuse can include telling them they are worthless, physically intimidating them, destroying household goods and threatening harm.
In order to persuade the jury, Anna must lay out the most painful moments of her relationship with Paul in front of the courtroom. It is clear that she is finding the process very upsetting. She is someone who has held senior, well-paid jobs, and mostly sounds authoritative and convincing, but at times she seems scared and edges near to tears as the defence barrister’s questions become more and more sardonic.
Since the offence was put on the statute books as section 76 of the Serious Crime Act 2015, only 1,816 defendants (98% of them men) have been found guilty. Police are beginning to show increased willingness to record the crime, with 43,774 instances in the year ending March 2023 (up from just 4,246 in the year ending March 2017), but only a tiny proportion of cases get to trial.
It has proved difficult to secure convictions – not least because this is a crime that does not involve violence: victims have no bruises, so the search for evidence is more complex and time-consuming. Public and professional awareness of the issue remains low. Throughout the prosecution process, police, potential witnesses and barristers still say: “But he didn’t hit you, did he?” Often the victim herself finds it hard to understand that this consistently mean behaviour represents a criminal offence.
Anna and Paul’s case is not newsworthy like those involving Ryan Giggs, the former Manchester United and Wales player, and Manchester United’s Mason Greenwood; in recent years, both footballers were charged with coercive or controlling behaviour offences, but neither was found guilty. In Giggs’s case the jury was discharged after failing to reach a verdict and a second trial was abandoned because his ex-partner no longer wished to give evidence; in Greenwood’s case charges were dropped after the complainant withdrew her cooperation and new material came to light.
Today, I’m the only journalist in the court. Watching for only three days of a lengthy trial, it is startling how many intensely private details of the couple’s relationship have to be laid in front of the jury.
The prosecution barrister has already opened the case by detailing the threatening behaviour that Paul displayed towards Anna during their marriage, the occasions when it is alleged that objects were thrown in her direction; when she has alleged he was verbally abusive and physically intimidating, breaking things when he was angry.
Now the defence barrister is trying to paint a different picture, undermining her allegations, highlighting evidence suggesting that for much of her marriage she had been demonstrably happy. “You told us that Paul could be loving, caring and attentive?” the defence barrister asks. “So there were good times?”
“Yes, absolutely,” Anna agrees. “If it was bad all the time, you would have to be a masochist to stay.”
“Unfortunately, the nature of the case means we are focusing on the bad times. But there were good times as well as bad times?”
Anna persists in trying to explain her husband’s unpredictable behaviour. “I would say: ‘It’s a beautiful day, let’s go for a family walk.’ He would say: ‘You’re a moron, it’s cold, everyone is ill.’ It was like walking on eggshells all the time.”
When the offence of coercive or controlling behaviour came into force, it was welcomed as a radical way of rethinking attitudes towards domestic abuse. England and Wales was the first jurisdiction to introduce the offence, steered by Theresa May when she was home secretary; subsequently, a handful of other countries have begun bringing in similar legislation.
Awareness of the offence is gradually growing. The Archers plotline involving Rob Titchener’s insidious abuse of Helen Archer introduced the concept and an understanding of gaslighting (where a victim is made to question their own sanity and memories) to millions of BBC Radio 4 listeners. In February 2023, the former Metropolitan police officer David Carrick was successfully convicted of coercive and controlling behaviour (alongside 48 rapes and other offences); he pleaded guilty to offences relating to women he was in relationships with, including locking them in small cupboards and whistling at them as if they were dogs. But the prosecution rate is still very low. For the year ending March 2022, 3.7% of recorded crimes of controlling or coercive behaviour resulted in a charge, compared with 6.7% for all domestic abuse-related offences. More than 50% of cases were dropped because of evidential difficulties, often because the victim decided not to support the action.
The stubbornly low number of prosecutions has dismayed campaigners, who have also been irritated by the way the statute was formulated. In England and Wales, coercive control legislation has to work alongside “existing laws on violence which were drafted by a bunch of Victorian men in 1861 and were really designed to combat pub fights and street brawls”, says Cassandra Wiener, author of Coercive Control and the Criminal Law, and senior lecturer in law at the City Law School in London. “What we’ve ended up with in England and Wales is a hotchpotch, where police still have to prosecute sexual and physical assault separately, using laws that don’t fit.” Scotland took longer to consult on reforms to its domestic abuse legislation and rewrote the statute book to introduce a comprehensive domestic abuse offence with coercive control at its centre, incorporating sexual, physical and non-physical forms of abuse.
Wiener is also disappointed by the maximum five-year sentence, “which positions coercive control automatically as a low-level offence, which is totally out of step with what survivors tell us about their experience”. She points to poor police training and low resourcing of domestic abuse units, making it hard for officers to embark on protracted investigations that require gathering evidence of a pattern of abuse over time.
“It’s a very big shift for the criminal justice system to move away from prosecuting single incidents of crime to investigating patterns of behaviour; it’s much more complicated than just turning up to a scene of a crime and photographing it,” says Lucy Hadley, head of policy at Women’s Aid, noting that strong cases rely on a mix of evidence from mobile phone records, texts and emails, and witness statements from friends and family members. “Increasingly stretched resources mean so-called weaker cases are dropped.”
The charity Surviving Economic Abuse analysed 810 controlling or coercive behaviour cases reported by the media in the nine years since the legislation was launched. Its report notes how perpetrators thwart their partner’s ability to lead independent lives. One victim (or victim-survivor, as the report classifies them) was unable to attend a job interview because her partner threw coffee over her interview clothes. Another perpetrator prevented his partner from getting to university by taking the keys to the car. Bleach was poured on the clothes of one woman; cat waste was smeared on the clothing of another; one man ripped up his girlfriend’s NHS ambulance worker uniform. Incessantly being phoned and messaged at work, in some cases more than 100 times a day, led some women to give up their jobs.
One perpetrator hid gold coins around the house for his partner to “discover” as she did the housework, the study notes. When he got home, he would hold out his hand for the coins; if she had not found the correct number, it would mean she had not cleaned properly, and he would punish her. The report cited one case where the perpetrator would take his partner’s finger while she was asleep to unlock her phone and go through her messages. In another, a perpetrator told his partner she could not sleep in the bed or on the sofa, because they belonged to him; she had to sleep on the floor. There were frequent examples of men destroying objects their partners valued; one man cut the tops off the plants his partner had been growing. “It was like being back in 1930 when I was the housewife and he said if I answered him back, he would smash up my house or break sentimental things like photos and jewellery,” one woman said. Most of these cases resulted in convictions.
Yet police officers have often struggled to determine whether behaviour is criminally abusive because, unlike with a punch, there are no clear lines and many grey areas. Kate Brown, chief crown prosecutor for the south-east, says the challenge is to distinguish between partners who can occasionally be bad-tempered or mean, and people who are guilty of coercive control. “Lots of us make compromises in our lives, but I guess the difference with the controlling and coercive behaviour is: if the victim doesn’t go along with the rules that have been devised, there are consequences. They’re fearful of the impact of not following the rules.”
Like most women subjected to this abuse, Vera (not her real name), didn’t realise that it amounted to a crime until a friend advised her to seek help from Women’s Aid. She described how her husband would routinely take her phone away at night and return it to her in the morning, and would frequently smash it to prevent her from having contact with her family. Although she was working, she had to give him her salary, and was allocated an allowance of £5 a week: “I would have to beg him for money every week if I needed more. He didn’t like it if I watched television; he said it was lazy. He would go through the bins, look at the wrappers to see what I’d eaten and tell me off for eating things that would make me put on weight. He counted the tins in the cupboard to make sure I wasn’t eating what was in them. Women’s Aid told me to contact the police, but they decided not to prosecute. They said: if you’d had a black eye, then we could have done something. They brought him in for interview, but he denied it all and they couldn’t find enough evidence. He started saying I was the abuser. It was really disappointing.”
In a rare successful prosecution, Greta recently saw her partner convicted and jailed for coercive and controlling behaviour, a success she attributes to the exemplary response of officers at a local police station, and to her own work in documenting the abuse, storing emails, diary notes and WhatsApp messages that later helped provide evidence of a long-term pattern of abuse.
The officer at the front desk of the small police station recognised that something was seriously wrong when she went to the counter and said she needed to talk to someone about what was going on at home. “He said: ‘Stay right there. Don’t leave. Please don’t leave,’” she remembers, crying at the memory of his kindness. “I think he knew that women often leave.”
He was right to sense her uncertainty. This was the second time she had tried to report her partner; on the first occasion she sat in her car for two hours outside the station, failing to persuade herself to go in. “At that point I still couldn’t convince myself that it was that bad and that anyone would believe me.”
Understandably Greta isn’t initially that desperate to talk about what she went through, because she is still picking up the pieces of her life, trying to rebuild security for her children as a single parent, with their father serving nine months in prison. But she eventually agrees to describe what happened to her, hoping to explain to other women that there is a path out of even the most extreme coercive relationships. We talk in her new house, which she has made warm and homely in the wake of the disasters that came before. There are piles of children’s shoes and school bags, but there is also visible security – a large guard dog and cameras, ready to protect her from future surprise visits from her ex-partner once he is released.
Sending the father of your children to prison is a hugely difficult step to take. “I feel conflicted all the time about whether I did the right thing; I feel guilt that he has ended up where he is,” she says. “I have very complex feelings about it.”
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Greta’s experience of court was traumatising. She also gave evidence from behind a screen, but says: “I could still hear him whispering to his barrister. It was horrible.” She thought her partner’s legal team was very aggressive towards her and felt they were asking questions that suggested she was lying. “It was awful to hear a defence barrister imply that you are lying, trying to present it as your fault. It felt abusive, exactly the same kind of thing he would do. They challenged everything I said. They said: ‘But he didn’t hit you, did he?’ I said: ‘But I’m not here because I said he hit me.’ They went on: ‘But he didn’t touch you?’” She felt the barrister was trying to convince the magistrate that it wasn’t abuse because it wasn’t physical.
Sometimes she was so stressed she felt as though her ears had stopped working. “I think it was the nervousness. I knew the barrister was talking to me, but my brain wasn’t processing. I couldn’t hear what was being said.”
Like Anna, Greta is a well-educated graduate, who comes across as determined and independent. The ordeal of the trial caused her to lose two stone, but she manages to find enough dark humour in the experience to laugh as she recounts what she has been through; she cries only a few times, not from self-pity, but mostly from a sense of rage and frustration with herself for her slowness in understanding what was happening to her, and occasionally at the memory of people who have been kind to her. She is taken aback by her own tears, after years of training herself to minimise the horror.
Sometimes, particularly at the start, her partner was really nice. Greta and Victor met at work, started going out very quickly and within a few months he had moved into her house. “In retrospect, I’m not sure how he ended up moving in; it was so fast, madness.” She can’t entirely remember what she saw in him. “He was quite nice-looking, quite pleasant and polite, outgoing, happy to chat and talk.”
Often perpetrators can be very manipulative, engaging in “love bombing” their partners, particularly initially, the Crown Prosecution Service notes in updated guidance on the offence, as a way to confuse victims, gain more control and minimise the likelihood of detection and punishment. Love bombing is a form of grooming that may involve big, ostentatious gestures of affection – sending flowers and presents, while behaving very differently when not being watched.
To begin with, “everything seemed normal, until suddenly it wasn’t”, she says. Because they worked at the same place, they would often have lunch together; he would get cross if she was too busy. “There would be an underlying tension. He would get upset if I was on the phone to friends and family; he would stew about it.” He became increasingly critical – telling her she had mown the lawn the wrong way, packed the dishwasher incorrectly. To begin with, she stuck up for herself and would ask: “Is the Queen coming round? So why does it matter if the grass isn’t in a straight line?” But it was gradually very undermining. “I didn’t change the bed covers enough. I didn’t clean the kitchen surfaces properly. It got to the point where I didn’t believe I could do anything right.
“When he was annoyed, he used to scream and shout, effing and blinding. It was intimidating, and I’d try to say: ‘Calm down, calm down.’ He’d follow me to wherever I was to carry on screaming. I told myself it was just normal, that people argue when they move in together.” Sometimes he would block the door to stop her leaving the room so that he could continue to shout at her.
He began to control where she went and which friends she saw, initially in such a subtle way it took her a while to realise what he was doing. “He never said: ‘No, you can’t go out, you can’t do that.’ It was more: ‘Why would you want to?’” Going out became so complicated that she started making excuses for why she couldn’t join colleagues for work drinks and parties, and “eventually they stopped asking me”.
“I want a partner who respects me and what I say, and you don’t at all,” he messaged her, in one of many WhatsApp messages detailing his dissatisfaction with her. In others, he threatens to break her phone in two if she again fails to answer his calls.
If he had hit her, it would have been simpler, Greta thinks, because she would have known she needed to leave. Instead, his unkind behaviour was confusing. “It felt hard to know what’s normal and what’s abuse. I’d forget, or make myself forget the lower-level stuff. Sometimes, he’d pretend he hadn’t shouted, or he would say: ‘Well no, I didn’t say that.’ I genuinely stopped knowing which way was up.” Later, she understood this to be classic gaslighting behaviour, but at the time she wasn’t versed in the vocabulary of abuse.
It was when she was pregnant with their first child that his behaviour became impossible to ignore. His fury was unpredictable and irrational. Not long after their baby was born, they were at the health centre waiting for an appointment, and Victor was rude to a member of staff. Greta can’t remember the precise details, but the health visitor marked on her file that she might be a victim of domestic abuse, and later put her in touch with Women’s Aid. She was puzzled, because she didn’t classify what she was experiencing as abuse. “I wasn’t a physical victim, so I felt I’d be wasting their time.” She was offered a place in a refuge, but declined it. Sometime after this, she started storing bullying WhatsApp messages from him, creating a file of evidence for possible future use.
Victor linked a doorbell camera to his phone to monitor what time she got home from work (extreme surveillance is another characteristic feature of this kind of abuse). Things deteriorated when Greta was pregnant with her second child. One night Victor threatened to kill the family’s puppy because it had chewed some cigarettes. “He came upstairs screaming that he was going to string the dog up. He said: ‘I’m going to kill him and bury him in the garden.’ When we were at court, his defence lawyer said he’d said, ‘I’m going to kill that dog,’ in an affectionate way. But it wasn’t like that.” She slept on the floor next to the dog all night to make sure it was safe. “I was genuinely terrified. It was a turning point.”
He got rid of their rabbit one weekend, and Greta still has no idea where it went. One night he lost his temper and violently pulled a set of headphones from her head, making her frightened that the abuse could become physical; she became worried for her children. She spent a day at her desk galvanising herself to act, and finally drove to the local police station and reported his behaviour.
She spent two hours explaining to two officers why she felt in danger. “At no point did I feel that they didn’t believe me, or that they were going to dismiss what I was saying. It felt such a relief.” Her partner was arrested within a few hours; a year later, he was found guilty of coercive and controlling behaviour by three magistrates and given a nine-month custodial sentence.
It has been hard to explain his absence to her children. “I told them: ‘A judge has decided that your dad needs to be put in jail.’ It was very hard,” she says. “There are no real winners in this situation.”
Back in the courtroom for Anna and Paul’s case, the jury are taken through dozens of pages from holiday photograph albums that Anna made when she believed – or was trying to believe – her marriage was going to work.
The court is silent as 12 jurors rustle through smiling family scenes of Christmases and trips abroad. The defendant, sitting in the dock, licks his fingers to make turning the pages easier.
“There you all are, relaxing,” the defence barrister says, accusingly. “There you both are, clowning around.” The holidays are expensive, in exotic locations; the jury study the pictures, apparently fascinated by the glamour. There is a guilty voyeurism in being forced to absorb the details of an expensive wedding and to chew over a marriage swiftly turning sour.
He reads out affectionate text messages the couple sent each other. Anna is audibly frustrated by his approach. “There will be nice messages and there will be nice photos – that’s not why we’re here.” She tries to explain that her ex-husband’s behaviour was frightening because it was so mercurial. “Sometimes he would say, ‘Oh of course, honey.’ Sometimes he would call me a useless fucking bitch.”
His behaviour changed for the better, she told the court, when other people were around; when they were alone, it could become more alarming. “The point is that when, for whatever reason, he wasn’t in a good mood, he would instantly snap and he would become violent and scary,” she says. “When he was in a bad mood, he would really let you know. He would slam doors. Paul blamed me for everything, so when he knows he has done something bad, he lashes out first – the first defence is to attack.” He was hostile to her family, and she began to see less of them. Her mother noticed the changed behaviour and worried, but she too was becoming frightened of Paul and felt unable to interfere.
In the aftermath of violent outbursts, he would often suggest Anna was to blame. “Afterwards he would say: ‘You overreacted, it’s all your fault; look what you made me do.’” The jury studies her, trying to assess where the threshold between normal behaviour and coercive control should lie.
At the end of the trial, Paul is found not guilty. His defence statement rejects the suggestion “that he engaged – either repeatedly or continuously or at all – in any controlling or coercive behaviour towards the complainant”. Instead, he says he was the victim of the complainant’s abuse, adding that he believes that his wife “has fabricated, exaggerated or misrepresented events in their relationship and has deliberately miscast him in order to paint a false and negative picture of their relationship”.
Anna was unaware of the existence of the concept of coercive and controlling behaviour until she reported his behaviour to the police, and charges were lodged. She is positive about the support she has received from the police throughout the proceedings, but dubious about whether she would advise other women to go to court. “It was so retraumatising,” she says after the case, devastated by the conclusion. The couple are no longer together, but are embroiled in parallel legal proceedings in the family courts over access to their child.
Greta feels happier since the successful prosecution, but says the experience has changed her fundamentally. “I’m an entirely different person to who I was. I don’t trust anyone. I find it hard to speak to new people. I avoid conflict at all costs.
“He made me believe I was utterly incapable of doing anything, but I’m not,” she says, pointing out that she has kept up her high-pressure job, successfully moved house and recently plumbed in her own washing machine. “I do things my own way now. I pack the dishwasher how I want; I mow my lawn in circles.”