On June 17, 2026, New York became the ninth state to enact a law addressing coerced debt. It took effect unobtrusively, initially attracting little attention beyond the consumer-finance trade press. The New York State Office for the Prevention of Domestic Violence quickly recognized what the law could mean to survivors of coercive control.1 Behind the dry language of Article 29-HHH of New York’s General Business Law is a salient idea: debt incurred through coercive can itself be a form of abuse.2 The law now offers a way out.

Coerced-debt statutes are, in substance, coercive control laws. But they sit in commercial codes rather than criminal ones, in consumer protection rather than domestic violence law. They do not appear on the existing trackers of coercive control legislation, including the Global Coercive Control Legislation Index (GCCLI).3 That itself is noteworthy. The civil-law architecture of survivor protection is being built in tandem with the criminal one.

How the Law Works

The statute defines coerced debt broadly: consumer debt incurred through duress, intimidation, threats, force, coercion, manipulation, undue influence, or the non-consensual use of a person’s identifying information. Furthermore, the law is restricted to specified relationships. These include intimate partners as well as family or household members; trafficking victims and those who traffic them; and certain relationships involving children, senior citizens, or people eligible for protective services and their caregivers.

The process begins with a notice. A person who believes a debt was coerced can notify the creditor and provide supporting documentation. Once the creditor receives that notice, it must stop collection and investigate. If it determines that the debt was coerced, collection ends, and the creditor must direct the credit reporting agencies to delete the relevant information. Coerced debt can also be raised as an affirmative defense to a collection action.

The law also provides several paths to court. A creditor that fails to follow the notice and investigation requirements can be sued for $1,000 in statutory damages, along with actual damages, costs, and attorney’s fees. A debtor can also ask the court to declare some or all of a debt coerced. And the person who caused the debt — the controlling person — can be held liable to the creditor or debtor for the amount of the debt, plus costs, and attorney’s fees. The Attorney General may bring enforcement actions as well, with civil penalties of up to $5,000 for each violation.

The Amendment Trail

The law that took effect on June 17 is not the law that New York originally enacted. When Governor Kathy Hochul signed the bill in December 2025, her Approval Memorandum acknowledged that the legislation contained “numerous technical errors, substantive issues, and structural defects.4 5 The original effective date was March 20, 2026.6 Two days before that date, Hochul signed Chapter 90 of the 2026 Session Laws — a chapter amendment that substantially narrowed the statute and delayed its effective date until June 17.

The changes to the law are significant and deserve close attention. Previously, coerced debt was defined broadly as a type of economic abuse.7 Now, the updated law narrows that definition, focusing instead on specific actions and the relationship types outlined earlier. Debts backed by real estate are no longer covered by the statute’s protections, except in one key situation: you can still bring a claim against the person responsible for creating the debt. For debts secured by personal property—like car loans—the law now excludes them from the notice and investigation requirements and from declaratory judgment actions. However, if a lender tries to collect a deficiency after repossession, the borrower can still use the affirmative defense.

In addition to these substantive changes, the amendment provided a number of additional procedural protections for creditors. A fifteen-day cure period now lets a creditor correct a notice or investigation violation before the debtor can sue. A bona fide error defense applies in declaratory judgment and enforcement actions. A debtor must request reconsideration before filing suit and may proceed only if the creditor affirms its decision or fails to respond within thirty-five days. The provision automatically awarding costs and attorney’s fees to a debtor who prevailed on an affirmative defense has been removed. The law applies only prospectively, to debts incurred on or after June 17, 2026.

This is the evolution of survivor-protective legislation under industry pressure, documented in real time. The December version was stronger. The June version is the version that survived the consumer-finance lobby’s six-month editing pass. Nevertheless, it is still a meaningful advance. It is also a record of where industry won and where it did not, and that record is noteworthy.

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The Nine-State Map

New York is the ninth state to enact a coerced debt statute, by Urban Resource Institute’s count.8 The other seven are California, Texas, Connecticut, Minnesota, Maine, Illinois, Vermont, and Nevada. Definitions differ. Evidentiary standards differ. Available remedies and the treatment of secured debt differ. What every one of these statutes shares is a recognition that consumer credit can be a weapon. More and more states are waking up to the reality that the perpetrator of an intimate- or familial violence can use a credit card application or a loan document the way another perpetrator uses a closed door.

These laws sit alongside, and are conceptually continuous with, the criminal coercive control statutes that the Global Coercive Control Legislation Index has tracked since 2020. The criminal statutes recognize a pattern of behavior. The civil statutes recognize one of the most damaging products of that pattern — a financial record that survives long after the relationship ends, lowering credit scores, blocking housing applications, costing jobs. The two architectures are doing related work. They go hand-in-hand.

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How a Law Like This Gets Made

The intellectual foundation for the New York statute was laid by Professor Angela Littwin of the University of Texas School of Law, who coined the term “coerced debt” in a 2012 article in the California Law Review.9 Littwin’s empirical work, much of it conducted with Professor Adrienne Adams of Michigan State University and funded by the National Science Foundation, established what survivors and advocates had long known and what the legal system had refused to see. In a sample of 1,823 women calling the National Domestic Violence Hotline, coerced debt was widespread.10 Traditional remedies — divorce, bankruptcy, identity theft defenses, fraud defenses — were insufficient. The legal options that did exist failed survivors not because they lost in court, but because there was often no law to bring a case under at all.

Building a law on top of that research took the people who do this work: domestic violence survivors, legal services attorneys, consumer protection lawyers, and policy advocates. In New York, Urban Resource Institute led the advocacy effort, with Lauren Schuster and Teal Inzunza public in their leadership. CAMBA Legal Services in Brooklyn — Divya Subramanyam and Naomi Young, among others — provided the legal-services perspective on how the statute would operate in practice. At the national level, the National Consumer Law Center, where Carla Sanchez-Adams now leads on this issue, has been organizing the multi-state movement. Sanchez-Adams’s earlier work at Texas Rio Grande Legal Services placed her directly inside the original Texas effort. Senator Cordell Cleare and Assemblymember Linda B. Rosenthal carried the bill in Albany.

This is how a law like this gets made. An academic names the harm. Empirical researchers document its prevalence. Legal services attorneys translate survivors’ experiences into statutory language. Advocacy organizations move the bill. Sponsoring legislators take the political risk. Industry pushes back. The bill is narrowed. The version that becomes law is not the version that was filed. The narrowing is consequential, as is the fact that the law passed at all.

What the Index records in New York is something larger: the civil parallel to coercive control law is now operating in the country’s financial capital. Nine states down. Forty-one to go. The map no longer looks quite so empty.

Too often legislative documents arrive long after the fact. After the inquest. After the funeral. After every reasonable opportunity to have prevented what it now claims to address. That is the shape of the statute Canada's Parliament passed on June 18, 2026, when the Protecting Victims Act — Bill C-16 — received Royal Assent.1 Most of its provisions come into force on July 18.

Three things are now part of Canadian federal criminal law that did not exist a week ago. Femicide is first-degree murder. Coercive control in an intimate relationship is a standalone criminal offense. And under the companion legislation that passed alongside it — Bill C-225, Bailey’s Law — an intimate partner homicide that occurred within a pattern of coercive or controlling behavior is treated, by operation of statute, as first-degree murder.2

Together, the three provisions write something into Canadian law that survivor advocates and the most consequential scholars in this field have been arguing for, in some cases for decades: the pattern is the premeditation.

What the Global Femicide Legislation Index Captures

The Global Femicide Legislation Index (GFLI) now lists 33 jurisdictions.3 The Index reads what the law has produced since Carol Orlock coined the word femicide in 1974, and since Diana Russell carried it to the 1976 International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women in Brussels.4 Canada’s entry, as of today’s update, no longer reads “Pending.” It reads “Enacted.”

The model — femicide codified as an aggravated form of first-degree murder rather than as a standalone offense — places Canada alongside France and Türkiye in the class of jurisdictions that have recognized femicide structurally without using the noun in the operative text. That is a method choice, and it is not a soft one. France writes sex and gender as aggravating circumstances into Article 132-77 of the Code Pénal.5 Türkiye writes the female victim into the aggravated homicide article in its 2022 amendments.6 Canada, now, writes the same architecture into the Criminal Code’s first-degree murder provisions.

The advantage of this model is that it does not depend on a prosecutor’s willingness to charge femicide as a separate count. The aggravation operates at sentencing, automatically, every time. The disadvantage — and it is worth saying — is that it gives statisticians less to work with. Femicide that is folded into first-degree murder is femicide that gets counted as murder.

This is what the Global Femicide Legislation Index captures. The naming matters. The not-naming matters. The legal effect is what is decisive.

What Bailey’s Law Actually Does

Bill C-225 — Bailey’s Law — is the more conceptually comprehensive of the two enactments. It is also the one most directly indebted to a tradition of scholarship that began with Susan Schechter introducing the idea of coercive control to Evan Stark, and that found its working vocabulary in Stark’s 2007 book Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life.7 8

What C-225 does is procedural and definitional in equal measure. When an intimate partner is killed and a pattern of coercive or controlling behavior preceded the killing, the law now treats the homicide as first-degree murder. Not as murder later upgraded by aggravating evidence at sentencing. As first-degree, by reason of the pattern.

This is what Stark’s framework predicts the law should do, if the law were honest about how lethal intimate partner violence escalates. Coercive control is not a series of discrete incidents that culminate in one final incident. It is a sustained regime — what Dr. Stark called “mini regime of patriarchy” — within which the eventual lethal act is continuous with everything that preceded it. The premeditation does not begin the day of the killing. It began when the pattern began.

What Canada has done — what only Canada has now done at the federal level in a G7 federation — is allow the criminal law to read the pattern as evidence of intent.

Bailey McCourt, and the Politics of Named-Victim Legislation

Bailey McCourt’s name is in the statute because the people who loved her made sure that it was.9 That is the through-line of every named-victim law of the past fifteen years — Clare’s Law, Sarah’s Law, Bailey’s Law. It is also the silent indictment of the system the law now claims to reform.

There is no shortage of women whose deaths could have produced a statute. According to the United Nations, a femicide occurs every 10 minutes. The named victim is the one whose family had the resources, the community, and the political access to make a case that the next death could be prevented. That this is the path through which law reform proceeds in common-law systems is a fact worth holding in mind. It is not a criticism of the law. It is a description of how the law arrives.

The G7 Federation Asymmetry

What Canada has now done sits comparatively in a particular place. England and Wales criminalized coercive control in 2015. Scotland and Ireland followed. France and Italy have moved toward femicide-specific recognition. New South Wales has its own offence. These are unitary jurisdictions or sub-national ones. Canada is a federation. The Criminal Code is federal. The Canadian Parliament has just done something no other G7 federation has been willing to do.

The United States is the conspicuous absence. There is no federal coercive control offence in the United States. There is no federal femicide classification. Puerto Rico — Ley Núm. 40, 2021 — remains the only U.S. jurisdiction to have enacted a femicide law, and it is the only North American entry on the GFLI that pre-dates this month’s update. Several state-level coercive control bills have advanced. None have produced the federal architecture Canada now has.

That asymmetry will be felt. It will shape how American advocacy groups frame the next round of federal intimate partner violence reform. It will give Canadian prosecutors a tool their American counterparts will not have. It will give comparative law scholars a federation model to study. And it will, in the way these things tend to, make the absence of a U.S. equivalent more visible than the absence of a Polish or a German one.

The Other Half of the Architecture: Ahluwalia v. Ahluwalia

What Parliament wrote into criminal law this month, the Supreme Court of Canada wrote into civil law five weeks earlier. On May 15, 2026, in a 6-3 decision in Ahluwalia v. Ahluwalia, the Court created an entirely new civil tort for intimate partner violence — one built explicitly around the pattern of coercive control rather than around any single act of physical violence.10 I covered the ruling in depth in my earlier post.

Writing for the majority, Justice Nicholas Kasirer held that existing torts — assault, battery, intentional infliction of emotional distress — “do not adequately remedy the specific wrong to dignity, autonomy and equality that intimate partner violence creates.” The new tort is satisfied on three elements: that the conduct happened during an intimate relationship or after it ended; that the defendant intentionally engaged in abusive conduct; and that the conduct, viewed in context, amounted to coercive control. The Court’s definition of coercive control runs through “egregious acts of physical and psychological violence, as well as tactics of isolation, manipulation, humiliation, surveillance, economic abuse, sexual coercion, and intimidation that can control and entrap intimate partners.”

Crucially, the plaintiff does not need to prove separate consequential harm. The harm is treated as inherent in the conduct. That is the survivor protection in the ruling. Coercive control survivors have spent decades being asked to forensically account for psychological injury after the fact. Ahluwalia removes that demand.

Set against C-16 and C-225, the picture is now this. The criminal route runs through Parliament: femicide as first-degree murder, coercive control as a standalone offence, intimate partner homicide preceded by a coercive-control pattern as first-degree murder. The civil route runs through the Supreme Court: a free-standing cause of action available to survivors independent of any criminal proceeding, with the burden on the balance of probabilities rather than beyond a reasonable doubt, and with the survivor herself driving the litigation.

That parallel architecture is the comparative story. No other G7 federation has both. Most jurisdictions tracked in the Global Coercive Control Legislation Index have pursued criminalization — Scotland in 2018, England and Wales in 2015, Ireland in 2018, NSW in 2024. A free-standing civil tort built specifically around coercive control has not, to my knowledge, been recognized elsewhere. Ahluwalia is the first.

For survivors who have watched the criminal justice system fail them, the significance is immediate. A criminal coercive control prosecution requires police willing to investigate non-physical abuse and a Crown willing to charge. A civil claim requires neither. The two routes do not replace one another. They function as complements. Canada is now closer to that complementary architecture than almost anywhere else.

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How a Law Like This Gets Made

Federal criminal laws are not born in a vacuum—they are built by decades of advocacy. This is true for C-16.

The institutional foundation was built by Dr. Myrna Dawson, who founded the Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability at the University of Guelph.11 For years, her team collected the data that the legal system was not collecting — every woman and girl killed in Canada, the relationship to the perpetrator, the circumstances of the killing, the prior history of coercive control. The Observatory’s annual reports built the evidentiary base that policymakers eventually drew on.

In November 2025, the Observatory launched the Too True Crime podcast. The project has produced nearly six hundred episodes since. Each one memorializes a Canadian woman or girl killed since 2020. The series did what statistics alone could not — it gave the data faces and names, and it carried the #CallItFemicide movement into a national conversation that Parliament eventually had to answer.

Bailey McCourt’s family carried that conversation into politics. Bailey’s Law (C-225) is the bill that carries her name; the people who loved her are the reason it exists. Behind them stand the women’s shelter movement, frontline anti-violence workers, the gender-based violence researchers who testified at committee, and the survivors whose accounts shaped the language of the bill.

On December 9, 2025, Justice Minister Sean Fraser tabled Bill C-16. The bill removed gender-motivated killings from the general homicide categories and elevated them to first-degree murder where coercive control or sexual violence was present. I wrote about that introduction at the time. Six months later, the bill is law.

The lesson of C-16 is the same lesson every successful intimate partner violence statute teaches. The law does not produce these reforms. The people — researchers, survivors, families, frontline workers, and the parliamentarians who finally listen — produce these reforms. The law eventually catches up.

What the Global Femicide Legislation Index Will Be Tracking

In February 2026, I launched the Global Femicide Legislation Index as a follow-up to the Global Coercive Control Legislation Index that I launched in 2020. It was the logical next step. Coercive control and femicide go hand in hand. The GFLI tracks legislative developments in both spheres because the two cannot honestly be tracked apart.

The first test of C-16 will be how it is charged. The second test will be how it is sentenced. The third test will be how Canadian courts read the coercive control provisions when the pattern was textual rather than physical — the post-separation context, the family court weaponization, the digital surveillance, the financial chokehold. These are the cases the law will struggle hardest to recognize. They are also the cases survivors most often describe.

Finally, I will track a crucial gap that leaves many domestic abuse victims vulnerable. As I wrote in my previous post Manslaughter by Coercive Control: The Femicides the Count Leaves Out, coercive control precedes 88% of domestic abuse-related suicides. Canada’s new legislation does not address this — a gap that leaves survivors vulnerable to these hidden femicides.

The Index records the law. The cases will measure its impact.

Content note: This article discusses and describes sensitive topics. If you are currently experiencing abuse or are in early recovery from coercive control, please read with care, or seek support from Samaritans.

For the second year running, the suicides outnumbered the killings.

In the year to March 2025, police in England and Wales recorded 347 domestic abuse-related deaths — the highest the national Domestic Homicide Project has counted, and an increase of 85 on the year before.1 Most of that increase was not homicide. It was suicide: women who endured coercive control and then died by their own hand. Across the project’s five-year dataset, suspected victim suicides now sit alongside domestic homicides as one of the two largest categories of death — and for two years in a row, the suicides have come out ahead.2

Read that again, because almost no one reports it.3 We count the women a man strangles or stabs. We are only just beginning to count the women he drives to the bridge, the overdose, the point of no return. They die by their own hand, and the system has long filed them under private tragedy rather than gender-based violence. The man who built the cage walks away, often never questioned.

These deaths are not a footnote to femicide. They are femicide — the part the count leaves out.

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Coercive Control and Femicide Go Hand in Hand

Here is the figure that should end the debate. In 88% of those suspected suicide cases, police already had a record of domestic abuse against the victim before she died.4

Eighty-eight percent. The warning was on file. The pattern of coercive control was known. And still the deaths came.

That single statistic dismantles the idea that these suicides are private, unforeseeable, nobody’s fault. They are the opposite of unforeseeable. They are the visible end of a documented process — and the points where someone could have intervened were there, recorded, in black and white.

Find out if coercive control legislation exists in your area by visiting the Global Coercive Control Legislation Index.

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What Drives a Woman to That Edge

These deaths are not, at root, about mental illness in the way we usually mean it. They are the end point of coercive control.

Coercive control works by closing every exit. It isolates a woman from the people who might help her, drains her finances so she cannot leave, monitors her movements, and rewrites her sense of reality until she no longer trusts her own judgment. In the most severe cases, the perpetrator’s goal is stated outright. In my own practice, I have heard survivors describe being told they were worthless, that their children would be better off without them, that they should go ahead and do it. Over time, the perpetrator’s voice becomes the voice in the victim’s own head. Eventually, for some women, the act follows.

This is not a woman choosing death. It is a woman who has had every other choice taken from her. The control is the cause. The suicide is the consequence. And the person who engineered the entrapment bears responsibility for where it led.

I have written in detail about these terminal patterns, and the campaign to make the law recognize them, on Narcissistic Abuse Rehab.

Read more: Manslaughter by Coercive Control.

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A Crime With No Name

Manslaughter by coercive control names a principle: that a perpetrator whose sustained controlling behavior drives a person to take her own life can bear criminal responsibility for that death, even though he did not physically cause it.

The trouble is that, in England and Wales, no such offense exists on the books. As of publication, there is no statute called “manslaughter by coercive control.” Prosecutors must instead route these cases through the ordinary common law of manslaughter, proving that the perpetrator’s unlawful conduct caused the death — an evidential bar so high that it has almost never been cleared. Only three men in the UK have ever been charged with manslaughter following a partner’s suicide. Until recently, only a handful of such prosecutions have ever succeeded in England and Wales: Nicholas Allen, in 2017, and Ryan Wellings in 2025.5 6

That is the gap families are fighting to close. After her 23-year-old daughter Chloe took her own life following a year of coercive control, Sharon Holland campaigned for a specific statutory offence — so that what happened to Chloe would have a name in law, and a consequence.7 The government declined, arguing existing law already covers it. In practice, existing law almost never does.

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Scotland Just Drew the Line

Then, on March 3, 2026, at the High Court in Glasgow, something happened that had never happened in Scotland before.

Lee Milne was convicted of culpable homicide — the Scots equivalent of manslaughter — for the death of his wife, Kimberly.8 She was 28. She died on July 27, 2023 after jumping from a bridge over the A90 in Dundee. Her husband had subjected her to eighteen months of abuse: he choked her, knocked her unconscious, controlled her money, cut her off from her family, locked her in their home. The prosecutor told the court he had deliberately and ruthlessly exploited her vulnerabilities, and that this made him culpable for her decision to end her own life. The jury agreed. He was sentenced to eight years, with a further three-year extension.9

The judge, Lady Drummond, said it plainly: domestic abuse is rarely about one incident, and it is not only about violent acts. It includes the subtler, equally harmful exertions of power and control that run through a relationship.10

It was the first prosecution of its kind in Scotland.11 It will not be the last.

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Why This Matters Beyond the Courtroom

A conviction does not bring Kimberly or Chloe back. No verdict ever will. But these cases establish the principle the law looked away from for so long: that you can kill someone without laying a hand on them in the final moment, and that the slow violence of coercive control can be just as lethal as the fast violence of a weapon.

That principle is what closes the gap. It tells investigators to look at an apparent suicide and ask what came before it — which is exactly the change now underway, as police begin checking for a history of coercive control at the scene of unexpected deaths. It tells perpetrators that destroying a woman by degrees is not a loophole. And it tells survivors, and the people who love them, that what is being done has a name and, increasingly, a consequence.

It also points to where the real work is — upstream, before the edge. In nearly nine of ten of these deaths, the abuse was already known. The chance to act came long before the tragedy.

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The Map of Who Sees It

This is why I track the law, country by country. Femicide — including the deaths that come at a woman’s own hand after a sustained campaign of coercive control — is only now being written into legislation, and the picture is uneven and changing fast.

The Global Femicide Legislation Index tracks where the law recognizes these killings for what they are. Coercive-control-driven death sits right at the frontier of that recognition: a few jurisdictions are beginning to prosecute it, most have not even named it. The gap between what is happening and what the law sees is exactly the gap this work exists to close.

See where your country stands in the Global Femicide Legislation Index.

The count is starting to catch up with the truth. The year the suicides outnumbered the killings — for the second time running — was the year it became impossible to keep calling these deaths anything other than what they are.

A thousand women a year.1 That is how many women are killed by intimate partners and family members in the EU and that number is not falling.

Despite a decade of reforms, despite the Istanbul Convention, despite countless awareness campaigns – there is no consistent downward trend. Femicide occurs at roughly the same rate. Sixty percent of female homicide victims are killed in their own homes, against 11 percent of men.2 In other words, the place that should be safest is, for many women, the most deadly address there is.

If you are wondering why this is not headline news, the reason runs deep. Patriarchal systems have minimized violence against women since the agricultural revolution.3 4 5 We are conditioned to turn a blind eye to family- and domestic violence. Those of us with eyes to see the truth are taught never to speak it aloud, lest the system turn on us. The media is conditioned to report that “women die” and “women are killed” — conveniently leaving out who did the killing.

Femicide is not some inevitable force of nature. It is built — taught, permitted, and excused by a culture thousands of years in the making. Killers are not born; they are made. That is the hard truth. But it is also the hopeful one, because what a culture builds, a culture can disassemble. That work belongs to everyone who wants to live in a society that is safe for all. It cannot – and should not – be done by women alone.

Femicide is One of the Most Predictable and Preventable Crimes There Is

Here is the part of the news that matters most, and almost no one is reporting it.

In the same breath that the European Parliament is pushing to recognize femicide across the bloc, its own experts have issued a warning. A Parliament briefing, published in May 2026, says the harsh-sentence approach is the wrong center of gravity.6 Experts urge avoiding an exclusive focus on tougher penalties. Instead they call for a comprehensive approach: prevention, victim protection, better data, public awareness.

In plainer words: you cannot punish your way out of femicide. By the time there is a body and a trial, prevention has already failed. A life sentence is what the state does after a woman is dead. It changes nothing for her, and the evidence says it does little for the next woman either.

This is the truth survivors already know in their bones: the law keeps arriving too late. Femicide is among the most predictable and preventable crimes there is.7 These are rarely random acts. They are the fatal culmination of a known continuum.8

Coercive Control: The Prelude to Femicide

Femicide is rarely a bolt from the blue. It is, far more often, the last act in a long story — surveillance, isolation, financial control, the slow tightening of a noose. Frequently the woman reported it. Frequently someone in authority called it a private matter and looked away.

That long story has a name: coercive control. Femicide is frequently its lethal finale. The same control, the same isolation, the killing is simply the end of the road the control was already traveling. Romania’s own government understood this when it wrote its new law. The minister described protecting women not only from physical violence but from bank-account closures, GPS tracking, and online stalking. That is a checklist of coercive and controlling behavior. Romania, at least, is legislating against the pattern, not only the corpse.

So when the European Parliament says prevention over punishment, here is what prevention actually means: recognizing the pattern upstream, while she is still alive. It means treating the surveillance and the isolation and the financial choke-hold as the early warning they are. We cannot prevent what we refuse to see. And for thousands of years, our culture refused to see it.

This is also where allies matter most. The men who recognize controlling behavior in a friend, a brother, a colleague — and who refuse to wave it off as “that’s just how he is” — are doing prevention work the law cannot reach. The pattern is most visible long before it is lethal, and it is often most visible to other men.

The Importance of Naming Femicide

None of these factors mean naming the crime is pointless. On the contrary, it is the precondition for everything else.

When the law will not name femicide, it cannot count it. When it cannot count it, it cannot see the pattern. And when it cannot see the pattern, it cannot intervene before the pattern turns lethal. The naming is not the finish line. It is the first step that makes prevention possible at all.

It must be said that word itself was not handed down by a government. The feminist scholar Diana Russell put it on the map at the International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women in 1976, because she understood that naming the crime was the first act of resistance against the culture that permitted it. These new European laws are not invention. They are institutions finally catching up to what women named for themselves half a century ago.

Where Europe Actually Stands

The picture on the ground is uneven. Four EU countries have now written a legal definition of femicide into their criminal codes: Cyprus and Malta in 2022, Croatia in 2024, and Italy in 2025. Belgium took a different route in 2023, with a prevention-and-data law that does not touch the penal code. Romania followed in April 2026, extending aggravated homicide to gender-motivated killings and building in exactly the prevention architecture the EU now says matters most. France, too, treats the gendered motive as an aggravating factor.

Italy is the cautionary tale inside this group. Its 2025 law made femicide an autonomous crime carrying life imprisonment — and the European Parliament’s experts pointed to it as an example of the punishment-first instinct that, on its own, does not save lives.9 Tough on paper. Deficient in practice.

Why I Built the Global Femicide Legislation Index

Femicide and coercive control go hand in hand. For this simple reason, I quietly launched the Global Femicide Legislation Index on February 1, 2026.

It was never a standalone idea. It grew out of the Global Coercive Control Legislation Index, which I built first back in 2020, because coercive control is the soil femicide grows in. The two indices are one project in two parts. The coercive control index maps where the law recognizes the pattern. The femicide index maps where the law recognizes its deadliest outcome. You cannot honestly track one without tracking the other, because they are not two crimes. They are one trajectory — and prevention lives in the gap between them.

Right now the femicide index tracks 33 jurisdictions across four regions. It answers one urgent question for the woman reading this in fear: does the law where I live recognize what is being done to me?

See where your country stands in the Global Femicide Legislation Index.

One Jurisdiction Americans Should Notice

While Europe debates, a US jurisdiction has already acted. Puerto Rico did it in 2021. Its Ley Núm. 40 wrote feminicidio and transfeminicidio into the Penal Code as first-degree murder — making Puerto Rico the first US jurisdiction to name the crime in law.

No US state has followed. You read that correctly. A territory of three million people recognized femicide before any of the fifty states managed to. If you live in the US mainland and assume your law already accounts for the gendered pattern behind these killings, it does not. The index shows you exactly where that gap sits.

The Work Ahead Belongs to Everyone

Femicide is a gendered crime. The data leaves no room to pretend otherwise, and pretending otherwise has never protected anyone. The harm runs in one direction overwhelmingly: women and girls, killed most often by the people closest to them. The UN locates the cause squarely — entitlement, rigid ideas about masculinity, the demand to control women's choices and punish women who refuse.10

Acknowledging the gendered direction of this violence is an exercise in accuracy, not a mass indictment. The culture that constructs a killer also shapes the men who refuse to become one — and many of those men are not bystanders to this problem. They are among the most powerful forces for ending it. Change on this scale has never come from women alone, and it will not come now. It takes everyone, women and men together, to dismantle the lies and the silences that allow this to continue.

What This Means for You

If you are living inside coercive control right now, the index is not an abstraction. It tells you whether your jurisdiction sees the pattern you are surviving — and a jurisdiction that sees the pattern is one that can act before it is too late. That is the whole point. Prevention is not a policy abstraction. It is the difference between a law that mourns you and a law that protects you.

Europe is finally saying the quiet part out loud: punishment after the fact was never going to be enough. The answer was always upstream, in the pattern, while she is still here. The index of who recognizes that is filling in, country by country.

The map already exists. I built it for this moment. Go and use it — and bring the people who want our world to be safe with you.

Explore the Global Femicide Legislation Index.

If you have ever been told that what happened in your marriage was “just a high-conflict relationship,” you should know what the Supreme Court of Canada did on May 15, 2026.

In a 6-3 decision in Ahluwalia v. Ahluwalia, the Court created an entirely new civil tort.1 Not assault. Not battery. Not intentional infliction of emotional distress. A new wrong, named for what it actually is. The systematic stripping of a partner’s dignity, autonomy, and equality inside an intimate relationship.

Justice Nicholas Kasirer, writing for the majority, called intimate partner violence “a pernicious social ill deserving of the full attention of the law.”2 That is the language of a court that has finally caught up. Survivors, frontline workers, and a generation of researchers — Susan Schechter, Evan Stark, Emma Katz, Joan Meier — have been saying this for decades.3 4

I want to walk you through why this matters. What it changes. And where it sits in the international picture I track in the Global Coercive Control Legislation Index.

The Case Behind the Ruling

Kuldeep Ahluwalia married Amrit Ahluwalia in India in 1999. They emigrated to Canada in the early 2000s. Over sixteen years of marriage, he abused her — physically, emotionally, financially. He isolated her from her family. He restricted her friendships. He controlled the money. There were three major physical assaults.

There was also the slower, quieter, daily architecture of domination. Survivors recognize it instantly. Courts have historically struggled to name it.

When the marriage ended, Kuldeep asked for damages. By then she was representing herself. In 2022, Justice Renu Mandhane of the Ontario Superior Court awarded her $150,000. The trial judge recognized a new tort she called “family violence.” The Ontario Court of Appeal struck that down in 2023. The appellate court ruled that existing torts were enough. Kuldeep appealed to the Supreme Court.

The Court took fifteen months to deliberate — among the longest spans in its history. Ultimately, it ruled almost entirely in her favor.

What the New Tort Actually Says

To bring a claim under the new tort, a plaintiff must show three things. First, that the wrongful conduct happened during an intimate relationship or after it ended. Second, that the defendant intentionally engaged in abusive conduct. Third, that the conduct, viewed in context, amounted to coercive control.

The Court’s definition of coercive control is the part I want survivors to read twice. Kasirer wrote that it includes “egregious acts of physical and psychological violence, as well as tactics of isolation, manipulation, humiliation, surveillance, economic abuse, sexual coercion, and intimidation that can control and entrap intimate partners.”

Read that list again. Notably, every item is something I hear in my consultations every week. Every item is something survivors have long been told was not “real” abuse. No bruise. No broken bone. No police report. The highest court in Canada has now said, formally, that this conduct is itself the wrong. It is not a footnote to physical violence. It is the harm.

Importantly, the Court held that a plaintiff does not need to prove separate consequential harm. Once the three elements are established, the harm is treated as inherent in the conduct. That matters enormously. Survivors of coercive control are often re-traumatized when courts demand a forensic accounting of psychological injury after the fact.

Why “Existing Torts” Were Not Enough

The dissenting justices — Jamal, Côté, and Rowe — argued that existing torts could already compensate Kuldeep. Assault covers the physical attacks. Intentional infliction of emotional distress covers psychological harm. Why create a new wrong?

Kasirer’s answer is, to me, the most important sentence in the ruling. Existing torts “do not adequately remedy the specific wrong to dignity, autonomy and equality that intimate partner violence creates.”

This is the recognition I have been waiting for. Coercive control is not a long string of separate assaults. It is a pattern — and the pattern is the injury.

Evan Stark called these relationships “mini regimes of patriarchy.” The harm is the regime itself, not just the individual acts that enforce it. Susan Schechter introduced the concept of coercive control to Stark in the 1980s. He credits her in Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life (Oxford University Press, 2007). It has taken nearly forty years for a Supreme Court to translate that idea into law.

The Canadian Court did not flinch from the gendered reality, either. Kasirer wrote that efforts to confront intimate partner violence “must begin by recognizing that women are overwhelmingly those most often harmed by their partners.” That is the framework holding. That is the framework I hold across every piece I write.

Where This Sits in the Global Picture

I built the Global Coercive Control Legislation Index in 2020 to track exactly this kind of progress — and exactly this kind of gap.

Most of the conversation about coercive control law has focused on criminalization. Scotland’s Domestic Abuse (Scotland) Act 2018. Section 76 of the Serious Crime Act 2015 in England and Wales. Ireland’s Domestic Violence Act 2018. New South Wales’ 2024 offense. Each of these makes coercive control a crime.

What Canada has just done is different, and in some ways more immediately useful to survivors. It is also, to my knowledge, a first. No other jurisdiction tracked in the Index has recognized a civil tort built specifically around coercive control. Criminal offenses exist in several countries. Family law definitions exist in more. But a free-standing civil cause of action, available to survivors independent of any criminal proceeding, is new.

I have updated every Canadian province card in the Index to reflect this. Each entry now carries the line: Date: May 15, 2026 (civil tort) and Ahluwalia v. Ahluwalia, 2026 SCC 16 (civil tort) · federal legislation pending. The civil route is live nationwide. The criminal route is still working its way through Parliament.

Canada’s federal criminal bill on coercive control was first introduced as Bill C-332 in 2023. The House of Commons passed it in June 2024. Then it stalled in the Senate and was folded into the broader Bill C-16. It has still not become law. Survivors waiting on Parliament have been waiting a long time. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has opened a parallel route. Civil, not criminal. Survivors can now sue. They can seek damages. They do not need a police investigation, a Crown prosecutor, or a criminal conviction to access this remedy.

For survivors who have watched the criminal justice system fail them — and they are many — this is significant. A criminal coercive control prosecution requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Furthermore, it requires police willing to investigate non-physical abuse and a Crown willing to charge. A civil claim requires proof on a balance of probabilities. And the survivor herself drives the litigation.

This does not replace criminalization. It complements it. The ideal legislative environment offers survivors both routes. Canada is now closer to that than almost anywhere else.

What the Ruling Does Not Do

I want to be careful here. The new tort is powerful, but it is not a universal solution.

To sue, you need access to a lawyer or the capacity to represent yourself. Kuldeep Ahluwalia represented herself for part of her case. That should not be the default expectation. Legal aid for civil family matters is patchy across Canadian provinces. Many survivors who would qualify under this tort cannot access it without funded representation.

The ruling also does not address the family court system’s mishandling of coercive control allegations. Joan Meier and Emma Katz have spent years documenting those patterns. Survivors who raise abuse are too often framed as “alienating” or “high-conflict.” Many lose custody to their abusers. A new civil tort in the abuse case does not automatically fix the parallel custody case happening in the same courthouse.

The dissent’s warning also deserves honest acknowledgment. Justice Jamal called intimate partner violence in Canada an epidemic. However, he also argued the courts should leave the creation of new causes of action to the legislature. His concerns were threefold: complexity in the lower courts, plaintiffs uncertain which tort to plead, and inconsistent application across jurisdictions. These are real concerns. The first few years of cases under the new tort will tell us how Canadian courts apply it.

But I will say this plainly. Survivors of coercive control have been telling the truth for decades. They were told they were exaggerating. They were told they were vindictive. They were told that what happened to them was not “real” abuse. A Supreme Court ruling that names this conduct, defines it, and provides a remedy is a profound act of validation. That is true regardless of how the lower courts implement it next.

What Survivors Should Take From This

If you are a Canadian survivor reading this, here is what the ruling means for you in practical terms.

First, the conduct you experienced has a name. That name now appears in the highest court’s official language. Isolation, surveillance, financial control, sexual coercion, humiliation, intimidation — these are not “relationship problems.” They are recognized forms of intimate partner violence.

Second, if your marriage or partnership involved coercive control, you may now have a civil remedy. It is independent of any criminal proceedings. Speak with a family lawyer or a gender-based violence lawyer about whether the new tort applies to your circumstances.

Third, if you are still in the relationship, please reach out to a domestic violence service before considering legal action. Leaving is the most dangerous time. Post-separation abuse, including litigation abuse, is well documented. Safety planning comes first.

If you are reading this from outside Canada, the principle still matters. Court systems watch each other. Australian, New Zealand, English, and American courts now have a Canadian precedent to consider. This ruling will travel.

What I Will Be Watching

I will be tracking three things over the next twelve to eighteen months in the Global Coercive Control Legislation Index.

The first is how Canadian provincial courts apply the new tort. I am particularly watching cases where coercive control appears alongside contested custody. The second is whether Canada’s federal Parliament finally passes the criminal coercive control offense in Bill C-16. Survivors deserve both civil and criminal routes. The third is whether other common law jurisdictions begin to recognize comparable civil torts of their own. Australia, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and parts of the United States are the obvious candidates.

For now, I will say what I rarely allow myself to say in this work. This is good news. Imperfect, incomplete, and qualified by the realities of legal access — but good news. Survivors fought for this. Kuldeep Ahluwalia fought for this. Sixteen years of marriage. Years of self-representation. A Supreme Court hearing that took fifteen months to decide. She did not have to do that. She chose to do it so that the women who came after her would have what she did not.

That is what changes the law. Not the judges, in the end. The women.

I am writing this in the wee hours of in the morning, because I couldn’t wait to share the good news.

HB26-1309 has passed the Colorado legislature.

The bill that would have been easy to kill — the one four local bishops organized against, the one that asked courts to look at coercive control before applying a best-interests analysis, the one that named reproductive coercion and technological abuse and economic control as domestic violence — passed.

It now goes to Governor Jared Polis for signature. If signed, it becomes law. The effective date is August 12, 2026.

Take a moment with that. Then keep reading, because the work is not finished.

What Just Happened

HB26-1309, titled “Abuse in Cases of Separation,” passed both chambers of the Colorado General Assembly before the session’s scheduled adjournment on May 13, 2026. It was sponsored by Representative Meg Froelich, Representative Tammy Story, and Senator Katie Wallace.

In practical terms, here is what Colorado family courts will be required to do once this law takes effect.

Before applying the best-interests-of-the-child standard — the framework that has governed custody decisions for decades — a court must first determine whether a party has committed domestic violence. If the court finds domestic violence by a preponderance of the evidence, a legal presumption activates: it is presumed not to be in the child’s best interests to award that parent custody.

The burden shifts. For the first time in Colorado, a parent found to have committed coercive control does not simply have that history weighed as one factor among many. They have to actively rebut a legal presumption against them.

That is a structural change. It is not incremental. It is the kind of shift that takes years of advocacy, research, and survivor testimony to produce — and Colorado produced it.

What This Means for Survivors

If you have been through family court as a survivor of coercive control, you already know the specific cruelty that this bill addresses. You know what it is to walk into a courtroom with years of documented pattern behavior — the monitoring, the isolation, the financial control, the threats — and watch it be treated as context rather than evidence. You know what it is to have a judge apply a best-interests analysis to a situation where the abuser’s interest in controlling you never stopped operating. It simply moved into a new venue.

HB26-1309 does not fix the family court system. It does not guarantee outcomes. Judges still have discretion. The presumption is rebuttable. Implementation will be uneven, and the training gap among judicial officers and court-appointed professionals is real and will take time to close.

But it changes the question the court is required to ask first. And changing the first question changes everything that follows.

After many years of direct work with survivors of coercive control — including the most severe and treatment-resistant presentations — I can tell you that the post-separation period is consistently the most dangerous. The courtroom becomes the new theater of control. Vexatious litigation, weaponized parenting time, financial attrition — these are not edge cases in the population I work with. They are the norm.

Legislation that requires courts to see the pattern before they weigh the factors is not a small thing. For the survivors who will walk into Colorado family courts after August 12, 2026, it may be the difference between being believed and not being believed in the room that determines their children’s lives.

What This Means for Children

Colorado’s own 2024 domestic violence fatality report documented eight children killed as collateral victims of domestic violence in a single year (See my previous post Colorado Is About to Vote on a Coercive Control Bill. Here's What's at Stake.) Every one of them was under the age of eight. Five were killed during active custody disputes.

Piqui Andressian was five years old when his father killed him during a custody dispute in California in 2017, despite his mother’s warnings to the court. Greyson Kessler was four years old when his father killed him during court-ordered visitation in Florida in 2021, while his mother’s domestic violence injunction sat unanswered.

These children died in the gap between what a protective parent knew and what the court was equipped to see. HB26-1309 is Colorado’s attempt to close that gap. It will not close it completely. But it narrows it in ways that matter.

What the Opposition Got Wrong

The Colorado Catholic Conference organized against this bill. Four bishops issued a joint letter urging the faithful to call their senators and vote no. Their arguments — that the coercive control definition was too broad, that the reproductive coercion provision threatened religious parental rights — were reported here in full when the bill was under consideration.

Those arguments did not prevail. And it is worth sitting with why.

The legislators who voted for this bill were not dismissing the bishops’ concerns. They were weighing them against something heavier: the documented reality that courts have been systematically failing to protect survivors and children from abuse perpetrators who present well. The bishops argued from the margin cases — the interpretive edges of a broad definition. The bill’s supporters argued from the center — the thousands of survivors in Colorado courts right now whose coercive control history is being treated as one factor among many in a framework that was not built to see it.

The margin cases are real and deserve careful judicial attention. But they are not a reason to leave the center unprotected.

A Note on Common Ground

, a subscriber to Coercive Control, responded to my original article with something worth holding space for. She wrote that this looked like two groups — women’s and children’s safety advocates, and the Catholic Church — who essentially share the same goals but have not listened to each other enough to find consensus.

She is right. And I want to honor that observation properly.

The bishops’ letter represented an institutional position. It does not represent the full reality of what Catholics — and Catholic women in particular — are doing for survivors of coercive control around the world.

I want to recognize the outstanding work of countless Catholic nuns who are often the only source of support for survivors in remote and under-resourced communities. They are frequently the only people documenting the lived reality of victim-survivors of coercive control. Their work is quiet, consistent, and profound.

Among them is Sister Regy Augustine, a Medical Mission Sister who is also a practicing attorney representing women in abuse cases and an advocate across four nongovernmental organizations. Speaking at the 69th session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, she said, “Patriarchal norms and attitudes continue to perpetuate gender inequality and normalize violence against women […] with devastating physical and mental health effects on women, contributing negatively to national and social health.”

That is not the voice of an institution opposing protective legislation. That is the voice of a woman inside a religious tradition, doing the same work coercive control legislation advocates do, in places most of us will never reach.

The Catholic Church is multifaceted. The bishops’ letter was one expression of institutional authority. Sister Regy Augustine and the women alongside her are another expression of the same tradition — and it is the expression that has been in the room with survivors, in courtrooms, in shelters, and at the United Nations, making the case that coercive control destroys lives and that the structures enabling it must change.

To learn more about the sisters’ impact, visit Global Sisters Report.

What Comes Next

The bill now awaits Governor Polis’s signature. There is no indication he will not sign it.

Once signed, the effective date is August 12, 2026. Between now and then, the work is implementation. Colorado courts, judicial officers, family law attorneys, and court-appointed mental health professionals will need to understand what coercive control actually looks like — not in its most obvious physical form, but in the pattern-based, non-incident form that this bill was designed to address.

That training gap is the next frontier. Legislation names the pattern. Implementation requires people who know how to see it.

I, for one, will be watching.

Why This Matters Beyond Colorado

HB26-1309 is now a legislative model. A state that passed a law requiring courts to assess coercive control before applying a best-interests analysis — with evidentiary standards, written judicial findings, and a presumption that shifts the burden onto the party found to have committed abuse. Other state legislatures will look at it.

The arguments used to oppose it will travel too. They already have — versions of the “definition too broad” and “parental rights at risk” arguments have been used against coercive control legislation in other jurisdictions. Advocates in other states now have a counter-record: Colorado weighed those arguments and passed the bill anyway.

The strategic objective behind my support of this bill has always been institutional velocity: ensuring Colorado’s passage establishes the precedent required to mobilize the next jurisdiction. And the one after that. The Global Coercive Control Legislation Index exists to track exactly this progress. I am excited to update the index and add HB26-1309 to Colorado’s existing laws HB21-1099 (2021) defining domestic abuse to include coercion and SB25-116 which adds coercive control as a factor in spousal support determinations.

After many years of working with survivors who walked into courtrooms that were not equipped to protect them, I allow myself this morning to feel something that does not come easily in this work.

Hope.

You would have to live it to believe what coercive control looks like from the inside. The monitoring. The isolation. The slow erosion of your sense of reality until you can’t trust your own perceptions. The way your world shrinks — your family, your friendships, your freedom to move through a day without accounting for yourself. The threats to ruin your reputation, take your children, or harm the people you love if you try to leave. The way your body knows before your mind does — your blood loud in your veins at the sound of their footsteps in the hallway, their car in the driveway.

And then you walk into the courtroom. The person who did all of that is calm, composed, and completely confident — because the institution is built for them, not for you.

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Colorado’s HB26-1309 is trying to fix that second part It’s a bill that would require family courts to determine whether coercive control occurred before applying the standard custody analysis — not bury it as one factor among many, but put it first. If a court finds domestic violence by a preponderance of the evidence, a legal presumption activates: it is presumed not to be in the child’s best interests to award that parent custody.

The Senate votes on Monday, May 11. The legislative session ends May 13.

The window is three days.

What This Bill Actually Does

HB26-1309’s definition of domestic violence includes coercive control, economic abuse, technological abuse, health-related abuse, stalking, sexual assault, and human trafficking. That list matters. Family courts have historically been built around an incident model — discrete acts of physical violence that can be documented, reported, and weighed. Coercive control doesn’t produce police reports. It produces anxiety, self-doubt, and a learned helplessness that looks, to an untrained judicial eye, like a difficult personality.

The bill also addresses something survivors of reproductive coercion will recognize immediately. It includes, within its definition of health-related abuse, controlling or preventing access to reproductive healthcare — including contraceptive use and control of pregnancy outcomes. Reproductive coercion is a documented dimension of coercive control. It belongs in this framework.

And the bill raises the bar for mental health professionals involved in these cases. Anyone working with a party found to have committed domestic violence must have specialized training in treating domestic violence survivors and must have completed a 52-week domestic violence abuser intervention program. That is a meaningful floor.

Who Is Opposing It and Why

On May 8, the Colorado Catholic Conference issued a joint letter from four bishops, urging the faithful to call their senators and vote no on HB26-1309 before passage.

Their first objection is about legislative drafting: they argue the bill’s coercive control definition is broad enough to apply to parents who don’t affirm a child’s gender identity, potentially triggering custody loss. This is a real tension in coercive control legislation generally. Definitions broad enough to capture the lived reality of survivors are also definitions that will be tested at the margins. The answer to that is precise drafting and judicial guidance — not defeating the underlying framework.

Their second objection concerns the reproductive coercion provision. They argue that a father who opposes his partner’s abortion decision could be classified as an abuser under the bill’s health-related abuse language. The bill’s actual language targets control and interference — blocking access, using intimidation, coercing outcomes through physical harm or threat. Disagreement is not coercion. Advocacy is not coercion. But the framing of this objection follows a pattern that anyone who has worked in this field will recognize: the reframing of coercive behavior as a rights issue.

That argument has slowed protective legislation in jurisdiction after jurisdiction. Meanwhile, according to UNODC and UN Women’s 2025 femicide report, a woman or girl is killed by an intimate partner or family member every ten minutes — 50,000 in 2024 alone, with no sign of real progress. Nevertheless, the same arguments will be used again wherever the next coercive control bill is introduced.

Why This Vote Matters Beyond Colorado

If HB26-1309 passes, it becomes a model. A state that formally made coercive control a legal predicate in family court — with evidentiary standards, written judicial findings, and a presumption that shifts the burden onto the party found to have committed abuse. Other legislatures will look at it.

If it fails, that failure is also a model. The arguments used to defeat it will travel. The coalition that defeated it will be available for the next fight.

My years of direct work with survivors of coercive control — including the most severe and treatment-resistant presentations — confirms what the research already shows: the post-separation period is the most dangerous The courtroom becomes the new arena for control when physical access is removed. Vexatious litigation, weaponized parenting time, financial attrition — these are not edge cases. They are the norm in the population this platform serves.

Legislation that requires courts to see that pattern — before anything else — is worth fighting for.

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Colorado Already Knows the Cost

Colorado already knows what is at stake when courts get this wrong.

The state’s own 2024 domestic violence fatality report — published by the Attorney General’s office — documented eight children killed as collateral victims of domestic violence last year. Every one of them was under the age of eight. Five were killed while their parents were in active custody disputes — at the exact moment the legal system was supposed to be protecting them.

Nationally, the Center for Judicial Excellence has tracked more than 900 children killed by a parent in the context of divorce, separation, or custody proceedings since 2008.

Other states have already written those deaths into law. Piqui’s Law in California is named for a five-year-old boy suffocated by his father during a custody dispute in 2017 — after his mother’s warnings to the court went unheeded. Greyson’s Law in Florida is named for a four-year-old boy shot by his father in 2021 during court-ordered visitation — while his mother’s domestic violence injunction sat unanswered.

These laws exist because children died in the gap between what a protective parent knew and what the court was willing to see. HB26-1309 is Colorado’s chance to close that gap. The question on May 11 is whether the Senate will take it.

What You Can Do

If you are in Colorado: Contact your state senator before Monday. Find your legislator at leg.colorado.gov/find-my-legislator. A call is faster than an email and just as effective. You don’t need a long message: I support HB26-1309. Please vote yes.

If you are not in Colorado: Share this post. The survivors in your life who are navigating family court need to know this fight is happening — and what the pattern of opposition looks like, so they can recognize it wherever they are.

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Final Thoughts

My hope is that by the time this session closes on May 13, Colorado will have a place in the Global Coercive Control Legislation Index I built six years ago. Not as a data point — as a turning point.

Because what HB26-1309 represents, at its core, is a court system finally required to see the pattern before the pattern ends in tragedy. Femicide, filicide, and familicide are among the most predictable crimes in the world.1 2 3 4

After all these years, I am still brought to tears by the preventable tragedies I have witnessed — cases where the absence of coercive control legislation was the difference between life and death.

We know the warning signs. We know the escalation trajectory. We know that coercive control is not a precursor to lethal violence — it is lethal violence in its early stages.

What survivors and the people who work alongside them have needed, for a very long time, is a legal framework that knows that too. Colorado has the chance to build one.

All eyes on Monday’s vote—I’m fully locked in.

The origin of the index is inseparable from a conversation I had on Twitter on October 3, 2020, with Professor Emeritus Barbara Gerbert of the University of California San Francisco. Professor Gerbert is a foundational figure in this field. At UCSF she developed the AVDR model — Ask, Validate, Document, Refer — a framework designed to support law enforcement, healthcare professionals, and others in identifying and responding to domestic violence. In 2009, Scotland’s newly formed Violence Reduction Unit adopted her model. In the decade that followed, violence rates in Scotland decreased dramatically. Twenty-five thousand Scottish police officers were trained in domestic violence and coercive control under the leadership of Superintendent Gordon McCreadie. The results are documented; the short film featuring the AVDR model in action, Harder - A Short Film About Domestic Abuse, was published by Medics Against Violence. It is less than five minutes long and worth every second of your time.

On October 3, 2020, I reached out to Professor Gerbert because she had posted about Hawaii’s newly enacted coercive control legislation — HB 2425, sponsored by Representative David Tarnas — and wanted the word to spread. I was writing about it and offered to share it across my platform. She wrote back with characteristic generosity, providing context, connecting the dots between her own research, Scotland’s implementation, and Hawaii’s legislation, and asking the question that has driven this work ever since: how do we get more states to pass and implement laws? Her work — at UCSF and beyond — is invaluable to this field.

That exchange crystallised something that remains one of the most instructive and frustrating facts in this entire area: the foundational research on coercive control was conducted primarily in the United States, by American scholars. Evan Stark’s landmark book Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life was published in 2007. Professor Gerbert’s AVDR model was developed at UCSF. And yet it was the United Kingdom — and Scotland in particular — that legislated first, informed in part by American research that American legislators had not yet acted upon. England and Wales criminalized coercive control in 2015 under Section 76 of the Serious Crime Act. Scotland passed its Domestic Abuse Act in 2018, widely regarded as the most comprehensive coercive control law in the world. The United States, where much of the intellectual architecture of this field was built, is still catching up state by state.

What the Index Is and How It Works — and What a Decade of Implementation Tells Us

The Global Coercive Control Legislation Index is a living reference document tracking the legal recognition of coercive control — in criminal law, civil protective order frameworks, and family court statutes — across jurisdictions worldwide. It covers the United Kingdom, Europe, Australia, Canada, and the United States. It draws on primary legislative sources, Council of Europe ratification data for the Istanbul Convention, and a cross-referenced approach that distinguishes between laws that have been enacted, laws that are in force, laws awaiting commencement, and proposals still moving through legislative chambers.

Methodology. For a jurisdiction to be included as having coercive control legislation, the index requires that the relevant statute either explicitly names coercive control or controlling and coercive behavior, or defines a sufficiently equivalent pattern-of-conduct framework — sustained behavior designed to limit a person’s autonomy, freedom, or access to support — in its operative provisions. A state statute that includes the word “coercion” only as an element of physical force does not qualify. A statute that defines coercive control as a pattern of behaviour interfering with free will and personal liberty, and applies that definition in the context of domestic abuse, does. Where a law addresses coercive control only in civil frameworks — protective orders, custody determinations — that distinction is noted and the applicable legal system specified. Where a law criminalizes coercive control as a standalone offense, that is specified separately, because the distinction carries significant implications for prosecution, evidence standards, and survivor access to remedy. Istanbul Convention ratifications are indexed under Article 33 — Psychological Violence — rather than as standalone coercive control legislation, because ratification creates an obligation to legislate but does not itself constitute domestic law. Entries are sourced to the primary statute or bill, not to secondary reporting. Status designations are precise: Enacted means passed into law; In Force means currently operative; Pending means introduced but not yet passed.

Tracking legislation is, however, only part of the picture — and England and Wales at the ten-year mark illustrate why. In 2025, a decade after Section 76 came into force, nearly 53,000 coercive control cases were recorded by police. Fewer than 10,000 ever reached the courts. The charge rate, given the volume of reports, is disproportionately low. Kate Brown, Chief Crown Prosecutor and national lead for domestic abuse at the CPS, explained the gap in a December 2025 interview with Sky News:

“Victims often don’t realize that what’s happening to them is criminal and is controlling. Very often these cases come to us when there has been a violent offence and the offender has been arrested for that violent offence. Then with very careful questioning the police discover that there is a whole history which shows manipulation, shows isolation, shows behaviours that are causing psychological harm.”

Nahar Choudhury, Chief Executive of Solace Women’s Aid, identified the human cost of that gap:

“One of the main issues is that people stop and remove themselves from the process before it gets to the charging point because it is so challenging and so difficult.”

These figures are not an argument against coercive control law. They are an argument for what must accompany it: mandatory professional training, survivor-centred prosecution processes, and the kind of sustained institutional commitment that Scotland built before its 2018 Act came into force rather than after. The index tracks what has been legislated. The ten-year data from England and Wales tracks what legislation alone, without that infrastructure, produces. Both sets of information contain important lessons.

What Has Changed Since 2020

Today, as I updated the Global Coercive Control Legislation Index – six years after launching it on October 20, 2020 – it was clear that substantial changes have taken place — and still not nearly enough.

When I began tracking, the United States had no state with a coercive control law in any meaningful sense. That has changed. California enacted legislation in 2021. Connecticut followed with Jennifer’s Law that same year. Washington State, Colorado, New Jersey, Hawaii — which remains the only US state to have criminalized coercive control as a standalone offence — Vermont, Massachusetts, Maine, Kentucky, and Louisiana. A USA Today report published on April 24, 2026 confirmed the current tally. Bills are active in New York, South Carolina, West Virginia, and Maryland.

Australia has moved state by state: New South Wales introduced a standalone criminal offence that commenced in July 2024; Queensland’s followed in May 2025. Canada’s Bill C-332, which would create a federal criminal offence applicable across all provinces, passed the House of Commons unanimously in June 2024 and is currently before the Senate.

Each of these entries represents years of advocacy, survivor testimony, legislative effort, and — too often — preventable deaths that made the abstraction concrete enough to generate political will.

Why This Is Everyone’s Problem

There is a persistent and damaging misconception about coercive control: that it is a private matter between two people in a relationship, that its consequences are contained within four walls, that it is not a public safety issue.

The research says otherwise, and has said so for some time.

Research has established a significant correlation between domestic violence history and mass shooting perpetration. A 2021 peer-reviewed study by Geller, Booty, and Crifasi, published in Injury Epidemiology, found that 59% of all fatal mass shootings in the United States between 2014 and 2019 were domestic violence related, and that in 68% of cases, the shooter either killed at least one intimate partner or family member, or had a documented history of domestic violence. Everytown for Gun Safety’s research has found that nearly two in three children and teenagers killed in mass shootings with four or more victims died in incidents connected to domestic violence. These are correlational findings, and the causal mechanisms between domestic violence, coercive control, and mass violence require further dedicated research. What the data does establish clearly is that the two phenomena are not separate — they share perpetrators, share warning signs, and share potential points of intervention. The question of whether earlier legal recognition of coercive control behavior would reduce the incidence of mass casualty domestic violence events is one that researchers and policymakers should be urgently pursuing. The Global Coercive Control Legislation Index is one data instrument in that larger investigation.

These are not private tragedies. They are public health emergencies wearing the disguise of private ones.

The Problem of Weaponization — and Institutional DARVO

Any honest defense of coercive control legislation has to grapple with a documented risk: that these laws can be, and have been, turned against the people they were designed to protect.

Dr. Jennifer J. Freyd, PhD, Professor Emerit of Psychology at the University of Oregon, Stanford PhD, first observed DARVO — Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender — in perpetrator responses to accountability. Today, it is a manipulation strategy well documented in the clinical literature on coercive control. Perpetrators who are skilled at controlling the narrative will, when confronted with accountability, reposition themselves as the victim and their target as the aggressor. This is not a failure of intelligence on the part of those deceived by it. It is a deliberate and practiced tactic, and it is effective precisely because coercive control, by design, leaves the survivor’s credibility degraded and their account of events already in doubt.

What is less often acknowledged is that DARVO does not only happen between individuals. It happens at the institutional level — in police interactions, in family court proceedings, in child protective services assessments — wherever a trained professional encounters a survivor whose reactive behavior looks, in isolation, like aggression. A survivor who monitored a partner’s whereabouts for safety, restricted access to finances to prevent the depletion of shared funds, or recorded threatening calls to document abuse can find these protective measures reframed as controlling behavior if the person evaluating them does not understand coercive control dynamics.

Joan Meier, founding director of the National Family Violence Law Center at George Washington University, has written and testified extensively on this problem. Kristine Lizdas at the Battered Women’s Justice Project has documented cases where coercive control statutes, imprecisely drafted or applied by untrained adjudicators, were used by perpetrators to file counter-claims against survivors.

The case of Francine Hughes illustrates what insufficient legal frameworks cost survivors, long before this was a legislative debate. In 1977, after thirteen years of severe and sustained abuse — years in which she sought help from police, courts, and social services and was repeatedly turned away — Hughes set fire to the bed in which her abuser was sleeping and surrendered herself to police. She was charged with first-degree murder. Her defense team argued that she had acted in a state of temporary insanity produced by years of coercive control and terror. She was acquitted. Her case helped shift public understanding of why survivors do not simply leave — and why, when they defend themselves, the institutional response so frequently treats them as the perpetrator.

Institutional DARVO does not require a trial to cause harm. It can occur in the first moments of a police response. When law enforcement encounters a survivor whose reactive behavior — raised voice, defensive physical response, visible distress — is mistaken for perpetrator aggression in the absence of training in coercive control dynamics, the system compounds the abuse rather than interrupting it. This is not a reason to abandon coercive control legislation. It is a precise and urgent argument for mandatory professional training as a non-negotiable condition of implementation, and for ongoing legislative review to ensure that the frameworks being built are as difficult as possible to misuse.

Scotland’s 2018 Act was preceded by extensive consultation and accompanied by dedicated training funded before the law came into force. England and Wales enacted their legislation without equivalent preparation, and the decade since has been marked by persistent implementation gaps. The lesson is clear: law without training is insufficient.

The People Who Are Not the Primary Target

One of the things that has struck me most forcefully in six years of tracking this legislation is who ends up in the casualty count. The reality is that perpetrators of coercive control do not move neatly from relationship abuse to intimate partner homicide. They often harm the people around the primary target — children, family members, suspected romantic rivals, first responders, and pets — before, alongside, or instead of the named victim.

On April 19, 2026, a man shot and killed eight children in Shreveport, Louisiana, in a mass shooting that authorities described as an entirely domestic incident. Seven of the eight were his own children. The violence began at the home of his wife Shaneiqua Pugh, who was shot first. The gunman also shot Christina Snow, the mother of three of his children. According to reports, the perpetrator had previously threatened to kill Shaneiqua, their children, and himself if she ever left him. At the time of the shooting, Shaneiqua and her husband were scheduled to appear in court the following morning to finalize their divorce.

The threat had been made. The system did not intervene before it was carried out. The incident is the deadliest mass shooting in Louisiana history and the deadliest in the United States since January 2024. More than 30% of murders in Shreveport, according to local officials, are domestic in nature. The month before Shaneiqua’s husband killed her, his ex, and the children, the Shreveport City Council had voted to withdraw from a partnership to operate a domestic violence resource centre.

Adrian Montano Medina was twenty years old when he was shot and killed in a parking lot in Howard Lake, Minnesota, in March 2023. He was killed by a coworker whose wife had told him that morning she wanted to end their marriage. The man went home, retrieved an AR-15 rifle, returned to the workplace, and shot Adrian three times in the head. Adrian was not in the relationship. He was in the blast radius of one.

Deputy Sheriff Joshua Owen was shot and killed on April 15, 2023 — his 44th birthday — while responding with colleagues to a domestic assault call in Cyrus, Minnesota. When the officers informed the man at the address that he was under arrest for domestic assault, he drew a firearm and opened fire. Deputy Owen died at hospital. He left behind a wife and a son. He had served for nearly twelve years. Two other officers were wounded in the same incident. Domestic violence calls are among the most dangerous that law enforcement responds to. The violence of coercive control does not stay contained to the room in which it began.

Coercive control occurs in same-sex relationships at rates comparable to those in heterosexual relationships — research from the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs consistently finds that 25 to 33 percent of LGBTQ people experience partner abuse in their lifetime. Where relationships are not legally recognized, or where reporting carries additional risks — of outing, of disbelief, of encountering homophobia within the systems meant to provide protection — abuse is harder to document and deaths are harder to classify accurately. The legislation this index tracks includes all intimate partner relationships regardless of gender. The legal frameworks emerging at their best do too.

The Prevention Argument

Every legislative entry in the Global Coercive Control Legislation Index represents a prevention instrument — an acknowledgment, backed by law, that the pattern of behavior preceding physical violence is itself the violence, and that it can be named, documented, and interrupted before someone dies.

Coercive control has been identified in the research as the single most consistent precursor to intimate partner homicide. It appears in the background of familicide. It is the scaffolding on which mass violence is frequently constructed, particularly when a perpetrator — facing the loss of control over a primary target through separation, divorce, or custody proceedings — decides to extend the harm outward.

The countries and states in this index that have enacted coercive control legislation have not solved the problem. Prosecution is difficult; evidence is hard to compile; judicial training remains inconsistent; and many of these laws are young enough that their full effects have not yet been studied. England and Wales criminalized this behavior in 2015 and a decade later is still grappling with training gaps and charge rates that do not reflect the scale of reporting.

But the legal recognition is of great consequence. It names what is happening. It gives survivors a framework. It gives law enforcement a basis for intervention before the call becomes the kind of call that killed Joshua Owen. It gives family courts a language for what they are seeing when a coercively controlling parent uses custody proceedings as an instrument of continued abuse. It gives coroners and investigators a lens through which to see the pattern in incidents that would otherwise be recorded as isolated.

The Global Coercive Control Index exists because that naming needs to be tracked, compared, and documented — so that advocates know where to push, legislators know where the gaps are, academics and policymakers know what has been tried and what has not, and survivors in jurisdictions where no law yet exists can see that the direction of travel, however slowly, is toward them.

How to Use This Index and How to Cite It

The Global Coercive Control Legislation Index is maintained at narcissisticabuserehab.com. It is updated as legislation moves. Each entry links to the primary source. The index is freely accessible and free to cite.

Citation format: Wakefield, Manya. (2020). The Global Coercive Control Legislation Index. Narcissistic Abuse Rehab. Updated April 2026. Retrieved from https://www.narcissisticabuserehab.com/coercive-control-legislation-index/

The index has been cited in peer-reviewed legal and academic publications, including the Southern Illinois University Law Journal and scholarship from the University of Agder. If you use it in your research or advocacy work, I ask only that you cite it accurately. Corrections, additions, and verifications from people working in specific jurisdictions are always welcome.

A Note to My Readers

If you have been here since the beginning, thank you. I hope to serve an audience for rigorous, uncompromising writing on coercive control, domestic violence legislation, and the systems that fail survivors. You came looking for that. I intend to provide it.

What I publish here will not be casual content. It will be researched, sourced, and written to a standard that holds up — the kind of writing that advocates can cite, that survivors can hand to a lawyer or a judge, and that legislators can read without finding an easy objection. That takes time, and it takes resources.

If this post has been useful to you — if the index has ever answered a question you had, if the work here has given you language for something you were struggling to name — I would be grateful if you would consider becoming a paid subscriber or a founding member.

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Paid subscribers make it possible for me to continue maintaining the index, tracking legislative developments across multiple jurisdictions, and writing the long-form pieces this subject demands. Founding members make a deeper commitment to this work at a critical moment — when coercive control is finally entering the public conversation in a way it never has before, and when the quality of that conversation matters enormously.

If paid subscription is not possible for you right now, sharing this post costs nothing and reaches people who need it. Every survivor who finds the index through a shared link is a reason this exists.

This work is not finished. It will not be finished until the map is full — until the question of where coercive control is recognised in law has a different answer than the one I found when I first went looking, in the weeks that followed my conversation with Professor Barbara Gerbert in October 2020.

The legislation is moving. The conversation is widening. I would like to keep building this with you.