When Donald Trump announced the withdrawal of the US from multiple United Nations human rights bodies, the reaction was predictably furious.
But almost nobody asked the more uncomfortable question: what kind of ‘truth’ has been flowing from these institutions into our courts? For years, concepts such as ‘coercive control’ have travelled from UN reports to domestic law with barely a pause for scientific scrutiny, transforming complex psychological dynamics into moral certainties and legal shortcuts. What is now being exposed is not the fragility of victims’ rights, but the fragility of a system that replaced forensic evidence with belief, and called it safeguarding.
There are phrases that begin as warnings and end as weapons. Coercive control was meant to name something real: the slow grinding down of a person through fear, isolation, surveillance and humiliation. Abuse without bruises. That insight mattered.
But in Britain’s courts today, coercive control has been transformed into something else entirely. It is no longer a description of behaviour. It is a mechanism of power – a way to secure injunctions, shut down contact with children, shape findings of fact and decide outcomes before any serious forensic analysis has taken place.
I have worked for many years in family and crossover criminal cases assessing risk, threat and family dynamics. What I have watched happen to coercive control should alarm anyone who still believes justice depends on evidence rather than ideology. The concept now operates without a forensic backbone.
In every other area of serious harm, the legal system insists on discipline. Violence, stalking, escalation and serious threat are assessed using structured methods precisely because intuition and narrative judgment were shown to be unreliable (Hart and Logan, 2011). That is why serious forensic work abandoned gut instinct and clinical opinion years ago. Risk assessment is not about believing the most frightening story; it is about understanding how harm occurs, what triggers it, and whether it is likely to happen again. It asks whether behaviour can change and what protects children.
Coercive control, as it is routinely deployed in family and civil courts, does none of this. There is no validated assessment framework, no reliability standard, no agreed threshold for proof and no pathway for reassessment or change. Instead, courts are invited to infer coercive control from narratives, screenshots and emotional impact statements. That is not forensic reasoning. It is story-based justice. And stories are easily engineered.
Because coercive control is so loosely defined, it inevitably expands. In practice, it is now alleged for behaviour that would once have been recognised as painful but ordinary features of separation: persistent communication, disagreement over parenting, refusal to concede legal points, continuing litigation, even wanting to see one’s children.
In high-conflict separations – particularly those involving parental alienation – this drift is not accidental. It is useful. Once coercive control is alleged, everything downstream changes. Emergency orders follow. Contact is restricted. Suspicion hardens. And denial itself becomes evidence, because ‘of course he would deny it’. That’s how an allegation becomes unfalsifiable.
We have been here before.
Non-molestation orders are essential when used properly. But anyone working in family law knows how easily the system slides into permissiveness, particularly at without-notice stage, when one party speaks and the other is excluded (Judicial College guidance). The vast majority of domestic abuse remedy orders are non-molestation orders, yet there is strikingly little transparency about how many later result in no findings, no further action, or silent expiry.
I have heard a barrister boast about how easy it now is to obtain non-molestation orders for women – especially mothers – with no discussion of truth-testing, proportionality or evidence. No analysis. No curiosity. Just speed. The Falsely Accused Network has described non-molestation orders as being ‘handed out like confetti’, and its helpline reports daily contact from people whose lives have been derailed by allegations that are never proved.
Courts and policymakers were warned years ago that protective measures designed for safety could be exploited when thresholds collapse. Instead of correcting course, the system doubled down and recreated the same vulnerability under a new, more powerful label: coercive control. Now the pattern is repeating again.
Since the non-fatal strangulation offence came into force in 2022, prosecutions have surged. Crown Prosecution Service figures show cases rising from around 1,400 in 2022–23 to well over 8,000 by 2024–25. Prosecutors correctly note that visible injury is not required because strangulation can be lethal without leaving marks.
That medical fact is not in dispute. What is in dispute is whether evidential discipline has kept pace. Defence solicitors have publicly acknowledged the growing number of cases where the only evidence is narrative – no injury, no witnesses, no medical findings beyond self-report. This does not mean victims are lying. It means the system is under strain, and belief is replacing proof. When law expands faster than assessment, false positives are not an accident – they are a design flaw.
Then there is the ideology that collides head-on with the data. For years the public has been told that domestic abuse, particularly coercive control, is essentially a male crime. This belief is aggressively promoted and brooks little argument. Yet figures from the Office for National Statistics tell a more complex story: in the year ending March 2025, about 1.5million men and 2.2million women experienced domestic abuse. Male victims are not rare or marginal; they are simply inconvenient to a narrative that demands a single direction of blame.
Conviction statistics are routinely invoked to defend that narrative. But conviction data reflects charging practices, credibility assumptions and institutional bias, not prevalence. When a system expects men to be perpetrators, it will find them. In family law, this removes the child from the centre of the case and replaces their welfare with adult ideological claims.
The stakes are now even higher. Coercive control is increasingly being promoted not just as an offence but as a benchmark concept for reshaping how serious violence – including homicide – is interpreted and sentenced under the Violence Against Women and Girls framework. Legal advocacy organisations and policy campaigns argue that women who kill abusive partners are systematically misjudged because coercive control is not given sufficient weight, and that it should be central to mitigation and culpability.
These arguments appear in reform initiatives such as the Centre for Women’s Justice’s Women Who Kill campaign, in public commentary by Women’s Aid, and in parliamentary and policy discussions flowing from the Domestic Abuse Act 2021, in which coercive control is repeatedly framed as a driver of the most serious harm. Taken together, this signals a dangerous shift: the elevation of an ill-defined, weakly operationalised construct into a decisive explanatory lens for the gravest criminal offences. This is not a theoretical concern. It is a clear and present danger.
If coercive control, a concept with no validated forensic assessment framework, no clear thresholds of proof and no safeguards against narrative inflation, is treated as a foundational explanatory or justificatory factor in homicide cases, then allegations alone may acquire extraordinary legal weight. Retrospective narratives can be assembled after a death, relying on selective communications and third-party testimony, without meaningful adversarial testing against the accused, who is no longer alive to respond.
English law already provides mechanisms for genuine self-defence and loss of control. What is being proposed is something else entirely: the dilution of evidential discipline in the most serious of crimes. This poses a particular and under-acknowledged risk to men, whose deaths may be legally reframed through allegations they can never contest. It imports into homicide law the same evidential weaknesses already visible in family courts.
Forensic science already provides tools to examine how people process fear, responsibility and power under stress. Attachment-informed assessments, for example, do not rely on who shouts loudest. They examine coherence, responsibility-taking and capacity for change. They distinguish genuine danger from narrative dominance. Above all they show who’s thinking coercively and needing to control.
This does not require technical language. It requires intellectual honesty. It requires one principle only: labels are not evidence. Somewhere along the way, coercive control stopped being a description of specific behaviours and became a magic spell – a legal incantation that can decide who loses their home, who loses their children, who is treated as dangerous, and who is believed.
This is the great irony of coercive control as it is now used. It claims sophistication while resurrecting the very impressionistic thinking forensic science spent decades dismantling (Hart and Logan, 2011).
No formulation.
No testing of alternatives.
No explanation of cause.
No pathway to prevention.
None of this denies real abuse. It demands standards. Forensic and attachment science are being quietly cancelled in Britain’s courts, replaced not by better evidence but by guesswork, narrative, and ideological certainty.
If coercive control is to sit at the centre of British law, it must finally be treated like what it claims to be: a serious allegation requiring serious proof. Without that, a concept designed to protect the vulnerable will continue to destroy families, and justice along with them. When stories replace standards, the law does not become compassionate. It becomes dangerous.
Melanie Gill is a UK-based attachment specialist, psychologist and forensic consultant, working as an expert witness in complex family proceedings for nearly two decades. Despite an ongoing feminist-inspired campaign to ‘cancel’ her from her family court work she continues to campaign for children and families and remains passionate about bringing psychological science and knowledge into policy and family law.
This piece was first published in TCW Defending Freedom, and is reproduced by kind permission.
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