October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month

In Virginia, domestic violence is defined as an act of violence, force, or threat that results in bodily injury or places one in reasonable apprehension of death, sexual assault, or bodily injury.

But what about behavior that doesn’t fall within this definition? You may have heard about the horrific tragedy in which Virginia’s former lieutenant governor murdered his wife and then killed himself, while their children were in the home.

The husband’s declining mental health and financial troubles, including the ending of his once promising political career after sexual assault accusations, played a role in this story. But some of his actions before this event were very troubling. These include purchasing a firearm using funds his wife had set aside for the children’s activities; and fabricating a story that his wife had assaulted him (police learned it was false when they reviewed video footage).

Some of these actions fall into a category known as “coercive control,” which is not easy to define, and can make people – even the victim – doubt that abuse is really happening.

Coercive control is a pattern of actions that are intended to curtail another person’s freedom or strip away their sense of self. Coercive control can include violence, domination, intimidation, isolation, and/or control that unreasonably interferes with the free will and personal liberty of another person. Behaviors that may add up to coercive control include a pattern of:

• making threats about the person or those they care about, including children and pets;
• derogatory remarks about the person or those they care about;
• gaslighting (making someone doubt their own experience);
• depriving a family or household member of shelter, food, or other basic necessities;
• isolating the person by controlling who they can see or talk to;
• financial abuse (preventing someone from earning money, or controlling access to shared family assets);
• stalking, including monitoring a person’s whereabouts; 
• threatening to share private information about the victim; 
• subjecting a person to unwanted sexual behaviors or threats of a sexual nature;
• restricting access to healthcare, including mental health, and reproductive coercion (forcing a person to become pregnant, or forcing them to have an abortion);
• using the court system to harass;
• making it appear the victim is the one at fault.

Coercive control may include or escalate into violent acts. Coercive control can erode a victim’s mental health, causing PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), depression, and other problems.  This can make it even more difficult for a victim to be believed. It can impact outcomes in divorce and custody cases: often, a spouse who engages in coercive control is more likely to be believed in court and to gain custody of children – whom they may subject to similar patterns of behavior. 

Modern technology has expanded coercive control into the digital realm. Consider recently-publicized cases where abusers have used tracking devices – or even illegally gained access to surveillance cameras – to track their partners. Or used digital home technology to spy on victims or change settings on thermostats and other devices to show they can control from afar. 

Current Virginia laws don’t address this behavior. Should Virginia amend its state code to include it? Several states have already done so. But we must be sure we get it right: the Battered Women’s Justice Project (BWJP) warns that, “courts do not have a sufficient understanding of intimate partner violence to properly assess the nuances of coercive control… and too little data exists to support the hoped-for benefits of coercive control codification. Until these issues are addressed, BWJP discourages the codification of coercive control.”

Since 2022, the Virginia General Assembly has looked to develop a legal definition of coercive control. This has been difficult, because (as noted above) an overly-broad definition may inadvertently end up allowing an abuser to use it against the very victim the law was intended to protect – if judges don’t fully understand the context, nuance, or dynamics of coercive control. 

Virginia is taking a cautious approach. A Coercive Control Work Group, with judges, advocates, survivors, agency representatives, and the legal community, including legal aid attorneys, is reviewing other states’ definitions and developing a definition of coercive control for Virginia in the context of child custody.

We hope this careful and thorough work will allow the legislature to create a legal framework to hold abusers responsible for their behavior, and prevent future tragedies, or incorrect custody decisions.