What Is Domestic Violence?

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Coercive control describes patterns of psychological abuse that occur without physical violence.

Hawaii is the only U.S. state to criminalize coercive control outright; others rely on civil courts.

A major meta-analysis links coercive control to PTSD and depression, even without physical harm.

Police reports rarely capture coercive control, though it may predict violence better than history.

For decades, the legal system treated intimate partner abuse mainly as a series of discrete physical events: a slap, a shove, a broken bone. Although some laws addressing domestic violence have covered certain forms of nonphysical misconduct, including threats, stalking, and harassment, legal protections have historically focused more heavily on identifiable incidents than on sustained patterns of psychological control. Psychological research describes something different: a sustained pattern of control that can cause serious harm without ever leaving a visible injury. The law is only beginning to catch up.

Coercive control refers to an ongoing pattern of behavior in which one partner isolates, monitors, intimidates, or manipulates the other in order to restrict their independence. It can include controlling access to money, tracking a partner's phone or location, dictating what they wear or eat, or threatening to damage their relationships with family and friends.

Although some of these........

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