The Coercive Control Con Job

Practicing situational awareness is not being paranoid, it's about avoiding potential problems. Photographee.eu/Shutterstock

Commentary

Talk about a meltdown. The explosive reaction from Liberal troops seeking votes for New South Wales (NSW) Attorney General Mark Speakman at the voting centre in his local electorate was not unexpected.

The cause of their wrath was a group of women, from Mothers of Sons, who were entertaining queueing voters with their spoof video featuring a smiling housewife showing off her bottle of “new coercive control.”

“Partner won’t pay for a new kitchen? That’s coercive control.” “Keeps asking for sex? That’s coercive control.” “Get that male sent to jail with new coercive control!”

Uniformed council officers were quickly on the scene, demanding the removal of a large banner that gave Speakman credit for pushing through draconian new laws designed to target men.

The mothers were bullied into removing the banner but kept going, handing out flyers to a remarkably receptive audience, alerting people to the truth about what they call the “coercive control con job” spelt out in detail on their website.

The con job starts with the fact that coercive control was simply made up—not so long ago—by a feminist academic, Evan Stark.

In 2007, he invented a brand-new form of domestic “violence” he called “coercive control”, which he claimed men used to control their relationships after society moved on from the widespread “wife torture” of the past due to women’s liberation eroding men’s sex-based patriarchal privilege.

Even though both men and women use controlling behaviours, Stark declared that people should “take on faith” that “the pattern of intimidation, isolation, and control ... is unique to men’s abuse of women.”

Failure of New Laws

Evan Stark became the pinup boy for the feminist movement, travelling word-wide to promote his new theory. He promoted this as a new criminal offence, which makes these laws a far more effective weapon against men than the old protection orders used for domestic violence.

On the basis of the flimsiest evidence describing behaviours that can’t even be properly defined, men would be sent to prison.

Police Officers stand in Parliament Square in London, England, on Feb. 15, 2015. Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Within a decade, Stark’s ideas were incorporated into new laws criminalizing coercive control across the UK, and he was playing a key role in pushing for similar laws in Canada, New Zealand, and here in Australia, in Queensland and NSW.

Interestingly, the laws were a dismal failure when first introduced.

In Tasmania, they had laws criminalizing this type of emotional abuse introduced in 2004 (pdf), apparently a world-first, and they sank without a trace. There wasn’t a single prosecution in the first three years after enactment!

It turned out everyone had great difficulty proving a man guilty when no one was really sure what he was supposed to have done wrong. It was only when local lawmakers introduced training programs to teach the police to target men more efficiently that the number of convictions started to go up.

Similar laws were introduced in England in 2015, making coercive control punishable by up to five years in jail.

By 2020, these laws resulted in 24,000 “incidents” but only 300 convictions. That meant an incredible waste of police time for almost no result.

Even though the laws were supposed to be gender-neutral, 97 percent of those convicted were male.

Here too, the new weaponry only became effective when police were trained exactly how to target men.

In England, there was a 40 percent increase in arrests (pdf) after police and staff were taught to identify coercive control behaviour—although after eight months, the effect wore off and the brainwashing had to be repeated.

A Rate of 99 Percent

Our powerful Australian feminists had a new trick up their sleeves to push through coercive control legislation in Queensland and NSW. They exploited public concern about a tragic family homicide to claim this would not have happened if coercive control laws had been in place.

This was a total invention. Even Stark didn’t endorse such claims.

The alleged link to homicide wasn’t promoted when coercive control was first introduced in other jurisdictions, and there’s no evidence from these places that coercive control laws had any impact on the safety of women.

But feminist bureaucrats quickly rectified that problem. Speakman came out with a sensational claim from the 2017-19 report of the NSW Domestic Violence Review Team that 99 percent of domestic homicides were linked to coercive control.

No convincing evidence was provided to support that claim, let alone any details about how their “research” was conducted.

The truth about this absurd claim was exposed in an excellent speech to the NSW Parliament by One Nation’s Mark Latham. He pointed out that this review team had produced a string of reports since it was established in 2010, demonstrating that socio-economic factors are key to explaining domestic homicide: poverty; mental health issues; Aboriginality; cultural factors; drug and alcohol abuse; and past criminal records.

NSW One Nation MP Mark Latham speaks to media during a press conference outside Canterbury Bankstown Council Chambers in Sydney, Australia, on Jan. 20, 2023. Dan Himbrechts/AAP Image

But with the appointment of a new female review team head, suddenly all that socio-economic data disappeared, to be replaced by what Latham called “politically-laden advocacy.”

The review team were told to look for examples of “coercive control,” which, unsurprisingly, they found 99 percent of the time.

Naturally, when coercive control became part of the criminal law of NSW, the government congratulated itself for having passed this “life-saving” law reform.

Oops, Accidently Charged Women

Now for the latest twist in this incredible saga.

The ABC recently ran a story from Tasmania about family violence orders backfiring on women, warning of a “growing misidentification crisis” where police have “mistaken the victim for the perpetrator” and charged women with criminal offences.

The article claimed police failed to analyse “complex patterns of coercive control”—which means they got confused about who was actually in need of protection.

So, despite strenuous efforts to indoctrinate the police to target only men, some brave officers had the guts to examine the evidence and determine where the blame truly lay.

That’s the feminists’ weak spot.

Everyone knows many women are masters at emotional control, as abundant academic research collated by Mothers of Sons shows.

Even the Australian Bureau of Statistics concedes that men experience emotional abuse at the same rates as women.

The truth will out. The fascinating recent development in NSW was that after Speakman pushed his laws through parliament, he then hit the pause button after women’s groups warned of possible “misidentification problems” unless police and the judiciary are properly indoctrinated.

And that’s precisely what’s happening now in Queensland and NSW—they are rolling out endless programs and procedures to “educate” police and judicial officers.

Clearly, there is considerable nervousness that their scheme will turn around to bite them if male victims start coming forward and women end up being charged.