Among all the lurid details and allegations that have surfaced in Sean “Diddy” Combs’s trial on federal charges, including sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy, one potential aspect of the music mogul’s relationships has flown under the radar.

What we haven’t heard on the witness stand is a concept crucial to understanding intimate partner violence and how individual incidents can form a pattern of abuse over time. That pattern, described by sociologists as “coercive control,” may have played a major role in Diddy’s relationships — but it won’t play a major role in the trial.

Generally speaking, “coercive control” is a pattern of controlling behavior, manipulation, and emotional abuse over time. It is criminalized in the UK, and seven states have passed laws that say coercive control is a form of domestic violence, though how they’re applied varies by state. US courts have been slow to adopt the concept, and Judge Arun Subramanian, overseeing Combs’s trial in New York City’s federal district court, blocked the prosecution’s expert on domestic violence, or intimate partner violence (IPV), from testifying specifically about coercive control.

That leaves the prosecution and all witnesses walking a very interesting line in their presentation of the evidence against Combs, who has pleaded not guilty. While “coercive control” isn’t a widely recognized legal concept in the US, “coercion” as an individual act is. Typically described in the US legal code as being compelled, forced, or threatened to act in a specific way, it’s a crucial pillar of several of the legal charges being brought against Combs.

Additionally, if the jury can’t hear testimony about the impact of long-term abuse and toxic environments on survivors over time, will they be able to understand why so many of the people testifying against Combs now spent years, even decades, working for him and/or entertaining positive relationships with him?

The case serves as a reminder that, despite having been known to IPV prevention researchers for decades, “coercive control” is still a little-known term to the public. While it’s an important concept for expanding how we think about intimate partner abuse beyond acts of physical violence, some experts say its highly murky legal status is warranted.

That ambiguity, however, makes it hard to talk about ways an alleged abuser might exert control over survivors that aren’t always obvious. Many of those methods have surfaced in the Combs trial. That gives us a major opportunity to understand what coercive control is — and the ways in which it’s being tried and tested in court.

What even is “coercive control”?

The term “coercive control,” reportedly first coined and promoted by the late social worker Susan Schechter, has existed in the fields of domestic violence prevention and feminist circles since the ’80s. “There is no single word to describe the full range of controlling behavior,” Schechter and her co-author Ann Jones wrote in their 1993 book When Love Goes Wrong in a section indexed as “coercive control.”

They write that many controlling abusers “never use force” and note controlling behaviors, such as “deliberately throwing a partner into mental confusion and anxiety, and tearing a partner down emotionally.”

If you or anyone you know is struggling with intimate partner violence (IPV), there are people who want to help.

Contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 800-799-7233 (or text BEGIN to 88788).

Since the late 20th century, the phrase “battered woman........

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