Male victim-survivor views on the criminalisation of coercive control in Australia
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Walklate, Sandra
Meyer, Silke
Reeves, Ellen
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Abstract
New criminal offences for coercive and controlling behaviours have been introduced over the last decade in several international jurisdictions, including in England and Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. Within this policy reform context, there has been significant debate in Australia as to whether the criminal law in each state should be reformed to include a stand-alone criminal offence which can ensure legal capture of the pattern of non-physical forms of abusive behaviours experienced within the context of a coercivel and controlling relationship. While research has drawn attention to the gendered nature of coercive control from a female victim-survivor perspective, little is known about men’s experiences of coercive control. Reporting on a self-selecting sample of 28 interviews with male identifying victim-survivors of coercive control, this article analyses their views on the criminalisation of coercive control, including what the risks, benefits, and impacts of a stand-alone criminal offence might be. The majority of those interviewed supported the introduction of a stand-alone offence in principle, however, this support was nuanced. Participants’ views pointed to the need for whole of system change.
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Current Issues in Criminal Justice
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© 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
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Criminology
Law in context
Legal systems
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Fitz-Gibbon, K; Walklate, S; Meyer, S; Reeves, E, Male victim-survivor views on the criminalisation of coercive control in Australia, Current Issues in Criminal Justice, 2025