The Dirty Words in Family Law

Finally back to good health (it took long enough!)!  Unfortunately, today's theme is domestic violence, and coercive control.  Three different situations.  In one,  the husband followed the wife to a shopping center parking lot and engaged in a fist fight with the man with whom she was talking.  In another, the husband withheld financial support, so that the wife's car is in danger of being repossessed and the house is in danger of foreclosure, while buying the children new electronics and pets; and took out credit cards in the wife's name and charged tens of thousand of dollars without her knowledge.  In the third,  the husband and wife were each rushing to grab a piece of financial "evidence", and the husband knocked the wife into the wall.  In which case was domestic violence present?  All of them.  In which of these cases was coercive control arguably present?  All of them.  In which case was the behavior actually coercive?  Only the second.  In the first and the third cases, it turns out the violence was episodic, an isolated incident which was born of the high emotionality of the impending separation of the parties.  The acts were violent, yes, and required the cooling off period and protections that the domestic violence and peace order statutes provide in order to ensure everyone's physical safety, but they were not for the purpose of intimidating or influencing the other to act as the violent partner required.  The purpose of the actions described in the second example were to browbeat, intimidate and financially blackmail the other spouse into towing the party line by punishing her when she deviated.  Its purpose was to control her actions and reactions.  It's been very effective, and has isolated the wife physically, financially and emotionally.
Any act by an intimate partner that controls the action of the other partner can be coercive.  Whether it is, in fact, coercive, depends on the relationship between the parties and the reasonable reaction of the recipient of the behavior under the circumstances.  Violence is sometimes coercive and sometimes it's simply dangerous.  The difficulty is that we all know what physical violence looks like.  In fact, most of you would probably have guessed that examples one and four were domestic violence.  How many of you would have guessed number two?  Yet, of all of the above examples, number two is the most frightening because the violence is invisible to the public at large.  No one would believe this woman is abused, and the husband explains away her fears and accusations with plausible but untrue stories.  She looks crazy.  She's financially dependent upon him, yet he withholds her basic needs, but presents to the world as a generous father.  There are no bruises, yet her behavior is controlled as certainly as if he had twisted her arm behind her.  It's not just women subjected to this kind of control - men can be as well, and I've seen it.

How did all this come up?  Well, we were planning the final project for our law school class and had a discussion over what fact pattern we could use that would raise the issue of domestic violence/coercive control without being enough to foreclose the collaborative process. Our discussion drove home the fact  that the type of violence and the length of time since any violence is not enough to determine whether coercive control is a factor in a relationship.  Neither is the absence of physical violence dispositive on the issue of coercive control.  Rather, it is all the facts and circumstances in the relationship and the effect on the partners that determines whether coercive control exists and the hold it has on the partners.  The wrong conclusion can spell disaster for our client - physically, emotionally and financially.  It's not an easy determination, but one we make every day - here in the Trenches.