Section 76 of the Serious Crime Act 2015 created, in England and Wales, the offense of controlling or coercive behavior in an intimate or family relationship. Scotland's Domestic Abuse Act 2018 goes further; Ireland, several Australian states and others have followed.
What is legally novel about it is what it makes the offense.
Criminal law had historically addressed domestic abuse through assault, which requires an incident: an event, an injury, a date. That framing systematically failed to capture the thing survivors described as most damaging, because the incident was frequently the least of it.
Evan Stark's argument, which the statute encodes, is that the harm lies in a pattern of domination — monitoring, isolation, financial control, regulation of daily life, degradation — and that this is better understood as a liberty crime than as a series of assaults. Some of the most controlling relationships involve little or no violence.
Section 76 accordingly requires a repeated or continuous course of conduct, between people who are personally connected, which the perpetrator knows or ought to know will have a serious effect — meaning either fear of violence on at least two occasions, or serious alarm or distress with a substantial adverse effect on day-to-day activities.
The evidential consequence is the practical content of this chapter, and it is why it sits next to chapter 330.
Prosecuting a pattern requires evidence of a pattern. Injury photographs establish an incident; they do not establish control. What establishes control is the accumulated record: messages showing monitoring and rules, financial records showing restriction, evidence of movements being controlled, communications with friends and family showing the isolation, and — most valuable — contemporaneous notes made at the time.
Evaluations of the offense's early years found prosecution difficulty concentrated precisely where the pattern had not been documented contemporaneously, and the Home Office's statutory guidance sets out what evidence is relevant.
The instruction that follows is uncomfortable to give and is the honest one: if you are in this situation, the record you keep now is the thing that will determine what is possible later. Dated, factual, external, held by someone else, made before any discussion of the events with the other party.
The counter-response, alongside reporting, is the protective orders available in most jurisdictions — non-molestation and occupation orders in England and Wales, restraining and protection orders elsewhere — which do not require a criminal conviction and operate on a different standard.
This counters Law 12.
Counters Law 12 — Isolate Them and Become Their Reality