Criminalizing Coercive Control
Why punishment cannot deliver what safety requires
In November 2025, the Standing Committee on the Status of Women released its report, “Coercive Control in Canada.” One of the significant elements of the report is the discussion about whether and how coercive control can be criminalized. Recommendation 7 of the report is:
That the Government of Canada continue to support efforts to criminalize coercive control in Canada, and that appropriate education initiatives and training related to recognizing and responding to coercive control for police and professionals in the justice system are established prior to the coming into force of any criminal legislation, while respecting the jurisdiction of, and in consultation and collaboration with, provinces, territories and Indigenous Peoples and governments.
The report is frank about some of the differences in the views of the witnesses who appeared before the Committee. Some identified criminalization as a recognition, validation, and sound new intervention to protect victims. Others see criminalization as punitive, risky, re-traumatizing for victims, and potentially counter-productive, particularly for marginalized women. These disagreements reflect a deeper question: what do we believe criminalization is capable of delivering?
Women who’ve lived through abuse hear our own lives reflected in the debates. Recognition is progress but criminalization is something different. It promises more than it can deliver.
It is often the instinct of lawmakers to reach for punishment. Once a harm is widely named, the next move is to ask which offence might fit, which sentence might apply, and how the criminal law can express the moral condemnation the public demands. This is understandable. Coercive control destroys autonomy, collapses selfhood, and often escalates into physical danger. Naming it is necessary. But criminalizing it is not, on its own, a solution. In fact, criminalization may repeat the very patterns of domination it claims to challenge.
The Carceral Reflex
When a society becomes anxious, it reaches for bars, for handcuffs, for removal. The carceral reflex reassures those who are safe already while doing little for those who are not. It responds to complex relational harm with the bluntest tool the state possesses.
The carceral system has never been neutral. Poor men, racialized men, and Indigenous men are already punished more harshly for the same acts. Poor women and children bear the downstream effects of incarceration through lost income, increased precarity, and heightened risk of post-separation violence once the man is released. These truths are not abstractions. They are woven through every study of inequality and punishment.
Coercive control laws are nuanced, hard to identify and may be used against victims themselves. Coercive control is made of patterns, not incidents. The behaviours that constitute it are often subtle, relational, cumulative, and deeply contextual. The Standing Committee report shows that several witnesses warned that criminal law is built to respond to clear, observable events, whereas coercive control unfolds over time through isolation, monitoring, economic restriction, humiliation, immigration threats, or subtle psychological degradation. These patterns can be invisible to outsiders. They can also be misread when a victim resists, fights back, or appears angry or unstable after years of abuse. What looks like aggression can be a trauma response, a boundary, or an attempt to escape.
Witnesses stressed that the criminal system is not well equipped to interpret this kind of evidence and that police, lawyers, and judges may fall back on stereotypes about who looks like a victim and who looks like a perpetrator. Racialized women, Indigenous women, disabled women, migrant women, and women with mental health, substance abuse, or sex trade histories are especially vulnerable to being misidentified. If the law is adopted without training and without structural reform, the person who finally reaches for voice may be the one charged. The threat of criminal sanction may become a new tool for abusers, who already manipulate systems like family court, child welfare, and the criminal law to maintain power.
This is the core contradiction raised to the committee. These risks do not fall evenly. A law written to protect could instead be used to criminalize the person it was designed to help.
The women most likely to be harmed by criminalization are the women already harmed by criminal law. Women who are not White, or who appear drunk, unkempt, hostile, involved in sex trades, are treated as harshly as men. The likelihood of being sent to an Ontario prison is about five times higher for Indigenous women and seven times higher for Black women than for women who are White. By contrast, judges are lenient and chivalrous with women who fit the traditional female stereotype. In this context, a coercive control charge risks expanding the same pipeline rather than interrupting it.
Criminalizing coercive control would add a new offence to a system already marked by discrimination and disbelief. The risk is that it would target the wrong men, miss the right ones, and leave women navigating the same disbelief at every institutional doorway.
The Problem of Proof
Coercive control is not an incident. It is a pattern. It is a climate of domination. It is the slow shrinking of another person’s world. It unfolds through everyday habits: surveillance, criticism, isolation, financial control, sexual pressure, manipulation of children, quiet threats that rarely appear on the police report. It is a regime rather than a moment.
Criminal law adjudicates moments. It demands dates, acts, and clean narratives. It is built for incident, not pattern. Courts still discount women’s testimony when it is nonlinear or emotional, where the credibility deficit for women is marked. Trauma is read as unreliability rather than evidence.
A criminal conviction requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt. That is the highest standard in law. It is not enough to show that abuse was likely, sustained, or cumulative. The Crown must prove each element with certainty, in a way that leaves no reasonable alternative explanation. Coercive control, however, is cumulative by nature. It is made of dozens of acts that may seem innocuous in isolation. It is the climate not the weather, the water torture of hundreds of drops.
To secure a conviction a woman must translate years of subtle domination into discrete prosecutable events. She must speak with composure while describing the very experiences that shattered it. She must withstand cross examination designed to expose any inconsistency, no matter how human.
We know this threshold has already limited enforcement in the United Kingdom. In 2019-2020, almost 25,000 offences were recorded, yet only 1,100 prosecutions followed, and roughly half of those secured convictions. This is criminalization of a pattern that cannot be reliably proven. The gap is not theoretical. It is evidentiary.
If Canada criminalizes coercive control, we will inherit this evidentiary collapse. The result is predictable. Few charges. Even fewer convictions. A new theatre of disbelief. A new cycle of disappointment.
The Carceral State and the Coercive Household
Evan Stark, the sociologist and forensic social worker who first defined coercive control as a pattern of domination, and a crime against liberty rather than a series of violent incidents, taught us that coercive control is the private version of state domination. It is governance at the scale of two bodies. The carceral state is the public version. Both rely on surveillance, containment, discipline, and the power to define truth. Both structure themselves around obedience. Both punish those who resist.
Indigenous women and Indigenous legal advocates have raised this concern directly. They know that the state can replicate the harms it claims to resolve. They know that the prison does not dismantle domination. It extends it. For many Indigenous communities the carceral system is already the primary source of violence displacement and family rupture. To answer private coercion with public coercion is not safety. It is escalation.
Indigenous law already offers a different path. Section 718.2(e) of the Criminal Code and the Supreme Court decisions in Gladue and Ipeelee remind us that incarceration must be a last resort, and that colonial punishment often compounds the harm it claims to heal. Indigenous justice traditions centre repair, accountability, kinship, and the restoration of balance. Violence grows from disconnection. Safety grows from relationship, resources, land, and community. Not removal. When Indigenous women warn that criminalization may replicate coercion rather than end it, they speak from centuries of experience with a state that punishes rather than protects.
This parallel is what troubles me most. To respond to coercive control with incarceration is to answer the private regime with the public one. It is to take a woman who has lived under domination, and hand her case to the institution that dominates most efficiently. It is to transform her partner’s coercion into the state’s coercion, leaving her still governed by fear.
Women do not want to be moved from one domination to another. They want safety, recognition, and freedom.
Uneven Costs to Women and Children
Incarceration destabilizes families economically. Many women stay with abusive partners because they rely on them financially. When the man is imprisoned, income disappears. Poverty deepens. The child’s life becomes more precarious. Trauma compounds trauma. The child loses a parent, loses stability, and gains a mark of stigma. A child’s safety is not secured by a cell. It is secured by housing, income, food, school, and the ongoing presence of a non-violent parent. Incarceration of a parent is not protection. It is a new form of exposure to harm.
There is also the reality that most men are released. Once released, many feel humiliated, resentful, and entitled to reassert control. Research from multiple jurisdictions confirms that post-incarceration violence often escalates rather than diminishes. Prison interrupts a pattern. It does not transform it. It suspends control but it does not end it.
What Criminalization Cannot Do
Criminalization cannot teach empathy.
It cannot change family roles.
It cannot house a woman who must leave.
It cannot pay the rent or secure a safe school for her child.
It cannot provide long-term financial security.
It cannot ensure that police will respond with care rather than suspicion.
It cannot fix disbelief in family court.
It cannot dismantle the credibility culture that punishes women for surviving.
It cannot heal trauma.
It cannot reimagine masculinity.
It cannot teach men how to love.
Criminalization can only punish after the harm is done. It does nothing for prevention. It does nothing for transformation. It does nothing for the everyday moral work required to change a culture of domination into care.
A Different Vocabulary of Safety
If we truly want to address coercive control, we need a different architecture of response. We need approaches that do not mirror the coercion they seek to end.
We need stable housing so that women can leave safely and stay gone.
We need income supports that recognise the economic dimension of abuse.
We need trauma-informed courts that understand nonlinear memory, dissociation, and the bodily legacy of fear.
We need education for judges, police, health care providers, lawyers, and mediators that replaces suspicion with comprehension.
We need deeply funded community programmes that work with men not only to punish but to transform.
We need the courage to imagine justice outside the cage.
Indigenous justice practitioners have modelled this for a long time, working through restoration and balance rather than disappearance and shame.
The most promising work I have seen comes from practitioners who understand accountability as a moral opening rather than a spectacle of punishment. Tod Augusta Scott is the clinical director of the Bridges Institute in Nova Scotia, where he has spent more than two decades working with men who have used violence and with the families affected by it. His practice combines narrative therapy with restorative principles, asking men not only to stop the behaviour but to understand the harm, take responsibility for it, and participate in repair. He insists on repair. His method refuses domination and refuses despair. It is slow, relational, and grounded in dignity. That is what transformation looks like.
Transformation is not born in the courtroom. It grows where dignity is restored.
The Ethics of Care
We must decide whether we want a system that punishes or a system that protects. The two are not the same. Protection requires attention to housing, income, childcare, cultural safety, and mental health. Punishment requires only walls. Canada has become comfortable with walls. It has not invested with equal comfort in care.
Every time budgets expand for policing while shrinking for housing, we reveal what we value. Every time we build more prisons instead of more childcare spaces, we choose fear over imagination. Every time we reach for the criminal law first, we confirm that we cannot picture safety without control.
But women know another truth. Endurance is not obedience. Silence is not consent. Safety is not the absence of bruises. Safety is dignity in practice. It is material, relational, and shared.
My Position
I want coercive control recognized. I want it named. I want its patterns understood. I want courts to stop asking why she stayed and start asking why he kept her in place. I want children protected from the quiet cruelty that never makes a headline.
But I do not want this recognition handed to the carceral state. The cage is not the cure. The cage is another version of the problem.
Coercive control shrinks the world of the dominated person until she becomes a version of herself built to survive. Criminalization risks shrinking her world again, this time through poverty, procedures, and disbelief. The state that arrests her partner may still doubt her in family court. It may still expose her to economic destitution. It may still refuse her housing. It may still deny her the very social support that would have allowed her to leave years earlier.
Indigenous justice models remind us that safety grows from relationship resources and repair, not from disappearance.
We cannot punish our way to safety.
We cannot prosecute our way to freedom.
We cannot incarcerate our way to care.
If coercive control is a regime, then our response must be structural, not simply penal. The way out is not through the cage but through investment in the social conditions that make autonomy possible: income, housing, childcare, trauma care, cultural healing, and the rebuilding of trust.
That is the horizon we must reach for, even when Parliament reaches for the Criminal Code.
The opposite of coercive control is not punishment.
The opposite of coercive control is freedom.