Recent Prosecution of Woman for ‘Nagging’ Reveals Why Coercive Control Laws Are a Pandora’s Box

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Contact: Rebecca Stewart

Telephone: 513-479-3335

Recent Prosecution of Woman for ‘Nagging’ Reveals Why Coercive Control Laws Are a Pandora’s Box

WASHINGTON / December 20, 2021 – Last week a court acquitted a woman charged with “nagging” her husband. The 45-year-old Indonesian woman had been charged with domestic violence for allegedly causing her husband psychological harm by “nagging” him. The case reveals the many problems with so-called “coercive control” laws that are being considered in many places (1).

The vast majority of victims of nagging and other forms of psychological abuse are males, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. The CDC reports that each year, 17.3 million men, compared to 12.7 million women, are victims of coercive control (2).

Despite their intuitive appeal, coercive control laws have five major flaws:

Lack of Definitions: In March, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Violence Against Women Act reauthorization, H.R. 1620 (3). The bill broadened the meaning to domestic violence to include “a pattern of behavior involving the use of physical, sexual, verbal, psychological, economic, or technological abuse.” But the bill was not able to define the meaning of verbal or psychological abuse.
Disservice to Victims of Physical Violence: Law professor Leigh Goodmark has predicted that “prosecutions of women would skyrocket” under coercive control laws (4). This would dissipate the availability of criminal justice resources for victims of physical violence. Erin Pizzey, founder of the first abuse shelter in the world, has spoken out against coercive control laws: “I’m convinced that bringing other, lesser, wrongs under this same legal umbrella does a great disservice to the women who really suffer.” (5)
False Allegations: Claims of verbal or psychological abuse are so vague that accused persons have little or no viable defense against an unfounded allegation. Eight percent of Americans now report being falsely accused of abuse (6).
Dishonesty: As shown by the CDC numbers, females are the most common perpetrators of coercive control. But abuse activists often portray the issue in terms of unilateral male-on-female abuse. In Connecticut, for example, Senator Mae Flexner misleadingly claimed that her coercive control bill would be, “a lifeline to the more than a third of all Connecticut women who will experience some form of intimate partner violence or stalking in their lifetime.” (7)
Nothing is Domestic Violence: Supreme Court Justice Scalia once argued, “When [activist groups] impose their all-embracing definition on the rest of us, they not only distort the law, they impoverish the language. When everything is domestic violence, nothing is.” (8)

Commentator Wendy McElroy explains that broad definitions of abuse would encompass “lover’s quarrels (verbal abuse), threats of leaving the relationship (psychological), and imposing a budget (economic).” (9) This would potentially turn virtually every American into a perpetrator of domestic violence, a victim, or both.

Coercive control needs to be addressed as a mental health issue, not a criminal problem. Watering down existing definitions will only exacerbate the shortcomings of our nation’s broken domestic violence system and unfairly label millions of Americans as domestic abusers.

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