Coercive control laws are failing to close the evidence gap for women living inside it.
Earlier this year, a woman in Brisbane, Australia spent months compiling 90 pages of evidence against her ex-partner. She linked every item directly to Queensland's coercive control legislation. When she presented it to police, she was told it looked like "miscommunication”. Queensland Police reviewed the case and determined there was insufficient evidence to support criminal charges (Levy & van Vonderen, 2026).
She had done precisely what the legislation asked of her. The infrastructure of burden of proof, however, wasn't designed to receive it.
Queensland's full coercive control provisions commenced in May 2025. In the ten months to March 2026, police recorded 327 reported offences (Levy & van Vonderen, 2026). The number of charges laid from those reports is yet to be made publicly available with the ABC, when seeking that data in April 2026, being told the request would take up to eight weeks to finalise. NSW, which criminalised coercive control in July 2024 as the first Australian jurisdiction to do so, recorded 297 incidents in its first year and, of those, laid only nine charges (National Criminal Lawyers Australia, 2025).
Two jurisdictions, two datasets, but the same issue.
Defining the mismatch
Coercive control is a pattern offence. NSW and Queensland legislation both require proof of a course of conduct — sustained controlling or coercive behaviour that accumulates over time and restricts the victim-survivor's autonomy, freedom, or sense of reality (Crimes Act 1900 (NSW), s 54D; Criminal Code Act 1899 (Qld), s 315I). The pattern is the offence, not any individual act.
The question the new laws ask is: what happened across time, across domains of daily life, and what was the cumulative effect of the alleged perpetrator’s course-of-conduct?
This is structurally different from the incident-based model police are accustomed to working within: what happened, when, and who did it. NSW's first conviction under the provisions, in February 2026, relied heavily on digital records — text messages and call logs documenting the pattern across time (Wolters Kluwer, 2026). That evidence existed independent of the woman’s ability to narrate it. The Brisbane victim-survivor, referred to under an alias of Stephanie in the ABC article, had compiled 90 pages. Most people living inside coercive abuse will not have either.
The Queensland Police Union has said plainly that these investigations are complex and time-consuming, that no extra resources have been allocated, and that "police cannot police every single person's living room" (Levy & van Vonderen, 2026). That isn’t a criticism of the intent of the legislation, but rather an accurate description of a resource and design problem that legislation alone fails to solve.
Why victim-survivors often can’t provide a ‘course-of-conduct’ account
The neurobiological effects of sustained coercive abuse directly affect the capacity to construct the linear, time-sequenced account an incident-based system demands for a prosecution.
Chronic exposure to coercive abuse is associated with changes to the brain; specifically to the hippocampus, amygdala, and prefrontal cortex; regions responsible for memory encoding, emotional regulation, and executive function (Lohmann et al., 2023; van der Kolk, 2014). Hypervigilance orients the nervous system toward immediate threat rather than narrative organisation. Cortisol-mediated stress responses during trauma exposure disrupt the sequential encoding of memory. Women living inside coercive control frequently describe brain fog, confusion, difficulty recalling events in sequence, and difficulty making decisions. Of course they do and not because nothing happened, but because the brain under chronic threat moves into survival mode and doesn’t store experience the way a courtroom expects it to be presented (Herman, 1992).
Unfortunately, from a policing perspective focusing on is there enough for a conviction, a confused woman unable to identify the patterns of coercion suddenly becomes an unreliable ‘witness’ with a credibility problem. In reality, it’s a neurobiological outcome of the actual conduct the law is trying to prosecute.
The cognitive fusion coercive abuse produces — where the woman’s interpretation of her own experience has been progressively moulded by her coercive partner’s framing of it — compounds this. The Brisbane woman had compiled 90 pages and presented them directly to police. The response reframed her documented account back into a perceptual problem between herself and her ex-partner; a case of ‘he said/she said’ (Levy & van Vonderen, 2026). That reframe isn’t incidental to coercive control. It is its mechanism happening in real time.
The covert shift that perpetrator intervention misses
There is a further complication that receives much less attention than it warrants in policy and sector discussions.
When perpetrators engage with behaviour change programs, the controlling pattern often doesn’t stop. Research on perpetrator intervention programs has found significant limitations in using reoffending rates as the primary measure of success, partly because what changes is often the appearance of the conduct rather than its function (ANROWS, 2024). What was overt becomes covert. Visible evidence of harm reduces. Outward physical and violent control attempts that are objectively identifiable to both the woman being controlled and others, moves to subtle forms of control. Financial restriction becomes harder to track. Social isolation becomes more plausibly deniable. Reality distortion becomes more refined.
The harm continues. It just becomes hidden; even to the woman being harmed.
This matters because covert coercion maintains the same neurobiological and psychological effects on women as overt coercion. The cognitive fog deepens. She is now inside a pattern that is harder to name, harder to describe, and harder to bring to a system that was already struggling to receive it.
Directing primary systemic attention and funding only toward perpetrator behaviour change, without giving vwomen the knowledge, means and the tools to recognise and track the patterns of what’s happening, addresses the surface presentation of the problem. It doesn’t interrupt the pattern or prevent significant psychological and emotional harm to the women living inside coercively controlling dynamics.
What changes when the pattern becomes visible
When a woman has access to a structured framework for observing and recording behavioural patterns across the domains of her daily life — financial, social, physical, informational, reproductive, psychological — before she reaches crisis point, two things can happen. The pattern becomes visible to her, which begins to disrupt the cognitive fusion coercive abuse has built around her perception. She starts to second-guess herself less. She begins to blame herself less. She’s able to connect the dots between her partner’s behaviour, whether overt or covert, and the psychological, emotional and physical harm she’s experiencing. And she generates a record: a documented sequence across identifiable domains of conduct, over time, that isn’t dependent only on retrieving trauma-encoded memory under interview conditions after crisis events.
The Relationship Coercion Mapping Framework (RCMF™) provides this structure, tracking behavioural patterns across ten life domains — including how access to information and the construction of shared reality (commonly referred to as trauma bonding) is managed in the relationship, which is frequently where the cognitive fog originates — and identifying the regulatory functions those patterns serve rather than any reliance on women determining their partner’s intent; a preoccupation that leads women to become stuck.
From an operational perspective, police can recommend a self-administered mapping tool, and it’s accompanying screener, of this kind to women when they presents but can’t yet provide a structured account. The documentation it generates is the kind of pattern record the legislation requires; contemporaneous in nature that for her make patterns of coercive behaviour visible; and for prosecutors, clarifies the existence of a course-of-conduct. She builds it herself, before crisis, in real time and across time.
The question the data raises
Nine charges from 297 recorded incidents in NSW. No published charges or convictions data yet from Queensland — the figures so difficult to retrieve that a formal media request carries an eight-week turnaround. Again this isn’t a failure of legislative intent. It reflects what happens when a pattern offence meets an infrastructure not aligned to each woman’s experience of coercive control, at a time when she is least able to construct the account the system needs at the moment she first reports.
Legislation names the conduct but it doesn’t generate the evidence. What generates it is the woman experiencing it, and her capacity to recognise and track the patterns of coercion — and that requires a tool designed for that specific purpose, available well before the point of crisis.
The evidence-informed Relationship Clarity Mapping program for women living inside, or recovering from, coercive control in intimate partner relationships (based upon the RCM framework), releasing through WiseWOMAN Studio in June 2026, is designed for that purpose. If you’d like to know more about the program or the Relationship Clarity Mapping screening assessment tool, please reach out to me at email admin@wisewomanstudio.com or you’re welcome to subscribe at wisewomanstudio.com.
References
ANROWS. (2024). Evaluating behaviour change programs for men who use domestic and family violence: Key findings and future directions. Australia's National Research Organisation for Women's Safety. https://www.anrows.org.au/publication/evaluating-behaviour-change-programs-for-men-who-use-domestic-and-family-violence-key-findings-and-future-directions/
Crimes Act 1900 (NSW), s 54D.
Criminal Code Act 1899 (Qld), s 315I.
Herman, J. L. (1992). Trauma and Recovery. Basic Books.
Levy, A., & van Vonderen, J. (2026, April 30). 'Too hard to prove': Concerns raised after one year of coercive control laws in Queensland. ABC News. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05-01/concerns-raised-qld-coercive-control-laws-one-year/106616588
Lohmann, S., Cowlishaw, S., Ney, L., O'Donnell, M., & Felmingham, K. (2023). The trauma and mental health impacts of coercive control: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse. https://doi.org/10.1177/15248380231162972
National Criminal Lawyers Australia. (2025). 1 year of coercive control laws in NSW: What's changed, what's working, and what's next. https://www.nationalcriminallawyers.com.au/1-year-of-coercive-control-laws-in-nsw-whats-changed-whats-working-and-whats-next/
van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking.
Wolters Kluwer. (2026). Coercive control: Lessons from NSW's first jail sentence and law reform.
https://www.wolterskluwer.com/en-au/expert-insights/coercive-control