Coercive Control: Part 2

In this short film we hear again from Fiona McMullen Operations Manager for ASSIST who talks in detail about the wide range of tactics used by perpetrators of Coercive Control.

She makes the point that some of these tactics are hidden in plain sight. It is important to understand these tactics so that we can look out for them if we have concerns that someone, female or male, may be experiencing IPVA.

We’ll see later in Section 3 that although many more women than men experience Coercive Control, and it is a gendered crime, it is also the most frequent form of abuse experienced by men who are abused whether by female or male partners.

Social Experiment

This link will take you to a social experiment conducted by the BBC where a group of young people were asked to explore the story of a young couple and to comment on any elements of coercive control that they could see and how those developed. This film shows that while any single element of the pattern of coercive control viewed as a stand alone event or incident may seem not to be abuse, when taken together they form a pattern that can become the criminal offence of coercive control. The film outlines how difficult it can be to prove because concrete evidence is often lacking for a crime that happens in private. It also shows how people looking at a relationship from the outside can hold different perceptions of what is happening inside someone else’s relationship.

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