What the new coercive control laws can’t do
This year the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) will be added to the list of Australian states and territories legislating coercive control as a criminal offence. The Crimes (Coercive Control) Amendment Act passed the Assembly in late 2024 and commences after a twelve-month implementation period with the legislation to be reviewed two years after commencement.
The ACT is not first. New South Wales has had a standalone coercive control offence since July 2024 and begins its statutory review of that legislation this year. South Australia's Criminal Law Consolidation (Coercive Control) Amendment legislation passed state parliament in 2025 and is in pre-commencement consultation. Queensland legislated affirmative consent and coercive control changes in 2024. Victoria has a bill before parliament. The states and territories are not moving in lockstep, but they are moving in the same direction. The right direction.
What this means to the public is that a category of harm that was diffuse and contested ten years ago is now recognised for what it always should have been, a crime. A pattern of harmful behaviour that can now be prosecuted as a course of conduct. The law has finally caught up with what victim-survivors and the sector have been describing for decades: that the worst harm in coercive relationships isn’t captured by a single act, but rather it’s the intentional structure that an abuser uses across time to control the autonomy of another.
This is progress that deserves acknowledgement. It also has significant limits.
What the law can do
A criminal offence creates a category. It tells the public, the police, the courts, and the perpetrator that a pattern of controlling behaviour is reportable and prosecutable. It changes the conversation about what counts as harm in an intimate relationship and removes the requirement that a single incident be severe enough to count, because the offence is the pattern itself.
For victims of harm already supported by services and already engaged with police or the courts, the new legislation provides a path that didn’t exist before. For the broader public, it shifts the threshold at which coercive behaviour becomes a matter of social and legal seriousness rather than a private ‘difficult’ relationship between a couple. This will save lives.
Early NSW data suggests prosecutions are progressing slowly, as is expected for new offence categories, but the cultural shift is already measurable: women, family members and their friends are reporting earlier, with more confidence that the experience they are describing is something the system now recognises. Women are beginning to use the words ‘coercive control’ to describe their experiences.
Concerningly, however, women are also telling me that when they use the words with police, they are still being met with resistance and suspicion that somehow they’re weaponizing legal terminology that they’ve heard in the media rather than what was intended by the sector: to give language to the experience of the accrued harms of coercion that, over time, erodes independence, choice and sense-of-identity.
What the law can’t do
A criminal offence can’t reach into a relationship and tell the woman inside it what’s happening to her. It can’t connect the dots between the often subtle control behaviours by a partner to the impacts on her psychological, emotional, and physical health.
This is the gap that no piece of legislation can close. The law operates from the outside. It identifies a pattern of behaviour by reference to its observable features: abusive behaviours, a course of conduct, an intent to control or coerce, measurable harm, a reasonable person standard and sufficient evidence to establish beyond reasonable doubt. These are appropriate categories for a court, but they aren’t categories that a woman embedded inside a coercive relationship has access to.
The reason for this is operational, not personal. Coercive relationships function by altering what the person inside them can perceive and exists outside of checklists of red flags. The patterns are gradual. Reality-testing is degraded systematically. The behaviour is often presented by a coercive partner as being ‘protective’ and from inside a relationship that, at times, also contains real warmth and apparent connection, particularly in its early phase. The cognitive and neurobiological conditions a woman is experiences in these relationships are designed (sometimes deliberately, sometimes through learned behaviour on the part of the person harming her), to make the pattern unrecognisable to her.
The result is a recognisable pattern when objectively viewed from outside the relationship, and a confusing and unpredictable ‘non-pattern’ to the woman subjected to it. The law can describe the first, but it can’t give her access to the second. Often until substantial and significant harm has occurred. Or worse.
The translation problem
When women read the new offence definitions, two reactions are common. The first: yes, that is what’s happening to me. The second: I’m not sure if what’s happening to me counts. One cognitive legacy of coercion is self-doubt. Consistent gaslighting by a coercive partner has taught her not to trust her own perceptions.
Both reactions are predictable and are produced by the same conditions. The legal language describes conceptual behaviour at the level of a defined offence category: coercion, control, course of conduct, abusive behaviour. The lived experience occurs at the level of moment-to-moment reality: an argument she doesn’t understand; a withdrawal of warmth she can’t trace to a cause; a request she made that’s now somehow her fault; a financial decision she’s not allowed to see; a friendship or outside interest she’s stopped maintaining because it’s easier than explaining why she wants to go.
The translation between those two levels doesn’t happen automatically. And it rarely happens through completing checklists of abusive behaviours. Often it depends on where she is in the coercive abuser’s cycle of rotation between cruelty and kindness, or how the specific behaviour was framed inside their relationship.
What is needed is something that maps the patterns across time, not just the behaviours or incidents in isolation.
What the framework offers
The evidence-informed Relationship Clarity Mapping (RCM) framework has been developed specifically to support victim-survivors to do just that. It provides her with a seven-step mechanism that describes the patterns of behaviour that run underneath what law identifies. A trigger occurs in the relationship: a boundary signal, an independence move, an accountability request, a separation cue. The trigger activates a specific regulatory driver in the partner using control. The driver licences his sense of entitlement to compliance, or to validation, or to continued access to the relationship regardless of her wants or needs. From there her partner selects a domain in which to enact control through specific behaviours. The behaviour produces a yield: she complies, withdraws, apologises, performs, accommodates. Over time, the harm accumulates and the cycle reinforces itself.
This is the same conduct the legislation describes, viewed from a very different angle. From within the victim-survivor experience. The legal description faces outward, toward the perpetrator. Both are accurate. Neither are redundant. However, providing the woman living inside coercion with the tools to map her experience has the potential to interrupt the psychological mechanisms that blur her capacity to connect the harm she is experiencing; the anxiety, stress, fatigue; to the patterns of coercive control. To the legislative course of conduct. Importantly, it has the potential to support women to map the specific patterns of her own relationship experience before the escalations that draw the involvement of police and courts. And most importantly, it has the potential to mitigate longer term accrual of significant harm to victim-survivors.
A woman doesn’t need to wait for a prosecution to begin tracking the pattern. She doesn’t need a forensic level of certainty before she can name what’s happening to her. She needs a structure that is precise enough to make the moment-to-moment behaviour visible to her, in real time, while she’s still inside it.
That’s what the law can’t give her, but it’s what the Relationship Clarity Mapping framework was built to give.
Where this leaves us
This legislative wave is welcome, necessary and long overdue. Every Australian jurisdiction now has either a coercive control offence or one in development. The public conversation has shifted. The threshold for what the system recognises as serious harm has been recalibrated to include conduct that ten years ago would have likely produced a shrug.
But the law arrives at the end of a long process that begins, for every individual woman, with a private question: is this what’s happening to me? Until that question can be answered with reasonable confidence from inside the relationship, the legislative reforms will protect women only after the fact. The recognition has to come first. It has to come from the woman herself, with tools designed for the conditions she is living under, not the conditions of a courtroom.
That’s the work that remains. And that’s the work the law alone is never going to be able to do.