“He Knew the System”: Coercive Control, Legal Systems Abuse and Survivor Help-Seeking in County Durham

Abstract

This article examines how domestic violence victim-survivors in County Durham, the north-east of England, experience help-seeking across criminal justice systems (CJSs) and women’s organisations. County Durham, an area recording the highest rate of repeat domestic violence incidents in England and Wales yet among the lowest rates of protective order applications, makes the gap between national reform and victim-survivors’ experiences visible. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with thirteen women who experienced domestic violence and engaged with both statutory and community-based responses, the article employs a survivor-centred analytical framework informed by scholarship on coercive control and legal systems abuse. The analysis reveals four interconnected themes: (i) coercive control as a cumulative pattern of harm (ii) the continuation and escalation of abuse post-separation across emotional, digital, administrative, and legal systems; (iii) the reproduction of powerlessness and loss of agency through evidentiary demands, procedural disempowerment, and institutional disbelief within the CJS; and (iv) the contrasting role of women’s organisations, which restore agency. Building on these findings, the article argues that the CJS do not merely fail domestic abuse survivors; they may reproduce the conditions coercive control depends on. In this context, women’s organisations function not as supplementary services but as essential sites of interruption that restore agency.

1. Introduction

When Bella left her relationship after years of escalating coercive control, she submitted a council tax form to her local authority. The council sent a copy of her new address to her former partner. He arrived at her door with a knife. When she reported the stalking to police, they asked her to provide evidence of him while stalking her, if possible, and to take a photograph of him. When she finally received a protective order through the courts, he responded with four vexatious civil claims alleging she had damaged his property and repositioned himself as victim and her as defendant. It was only through a local women’s organisation that she found a space where her narrative was believed.

Bella’s experience is not exceptional. She is one of thirteen women interviewed in County Durham, the north-east of England, an area in which, in 2020/21, more than 18,000 incidents were reported, and projections indicated a 16.8% rise by 2024/25. Durham Constabulary recorded the highest rate of repeat DVA-related incidents in England and Wales, at 16.8 per 1000 population, which is above the national average of 2.1. Despite this high number of cases, Durham applied for significantly fewer Domestic Violence Protection Orders and rarely used Stalking Protection Orders. Additionally, delays of up to 64 days in the Domestic Violence Disclosure Scheme highlight critical gaps in victim protection and response strategies (Durham PEEL Assessment 2023–2025), gaps that are not unique to Durham but reflect a tension between national reform and the lived reality of survivors navigating the criminal justice system.

Over the past three decades, the criminal justice system’s responses to domestic violence1 have expanded considerably across England and Wales, including the criminalisation of coercive and controlling behaviour under the Serious Crime Act 2015 and the statutory definition of domestic abuse under the Domestic Abuse Act 2021, alongside measures such as Domestic Violence Protection Orders, specialist courts, and Independent Domestic Violence Advisors (McPhee et al. 2022). Yet, despite this growing legal framework, domestic violence persists and the capacity of criminal justice systems to prevent future violence and provide effective remedies for existing cases remains a major concern for feminist activists and researchers (Burman and Brooks-Hay 2018), and is widely considered “a contentious issue” (Reeves and Meyer 2021). Given these concerns, criminal justice responses to domestic violence have been extensively critiqued for attrition, institutional disbelief, and secondary victimisation (McPhee et al. 2022; Burman and Brooks-Hay 2020; Myhill and Johnson 2016), yet less attention has been paid to the extent to which criminal justice institutions inadvertently reproduce the conditions coercive control depends on and enables legal system abuse. Furthermore, existing scholarship on legal system abuse has documented this exploitation primarily in the family law and custody context (Douglas 2018; Miller and Smolter 2011; Elizabeth 2017; McCormack 2025; Spearman et al. 2024). Less attention has been paid to how these dynamics operate within criminal justice settings specifically. Additionally, a growing body of work has examined community-based and survivor-centred approaches to domestic violence (Kim 2021). Yet there remains limited empirical attention to how community-based support is experienced by survivors themselves, particularly in the context of post-separation help-seeking, and how these experiences compare with and relate to their encounters with statutory systems.

Against this background, this article asks: how do domestic violence victim-survivors in County Durham experience help-seeking across criminal justice institutions and women’s organisations? Drawing on semi-structured interviews with thirteen women who experienced domestic abuse and engaged with both statutory and community-based responses, it pursues three aims: first, to examine how coercive control operates not only within abusive relationships but across survivors’ subsequent encounters with legal and administrative systems; second, to analyse how criminal justice processes shape survivors’ agency, safety, and access to justice; and third, to understand the role of women’s organisations. In doing so, it employs a survivor-centred analytical framework, informed by scholarship on coercive control and legal systems abuse, that understands help-seeking as a set of interconnected encounters across institutional and community settings.

The analysis proceeds as follows. Part II develops the theoretical framework while Part III outlines the methodological and ethical framework of the study. Part IV presents the findings through four integrated themes: (1) coercive control as a cumulative pattern of harm; (2) the continuation and escalation of abuse post-separation across emotional, digital, administrative, and legal systems; (3) survivor engagement with criminal justice processes, focusing on procedure, evidence, and loss of agency; and (4) the role of women’s organisations in restoring agency. Part V concludes by arguing that coercive control does not end with separation but is frequently displaced into legal, administrative, and criminal justice processes, where procedural practices and evidentiary demands risk reproducing survivors’ loss of control; in this context, women’s organisations function not as supplementary services but as essential sites of interruption that restore agency, safety, and collective forms of justice.

2. Theoretical Framework: Coercive Control and Legal Abuse

Coercive control is “designed to punish, hurt, or control a victim; its effects are cumulative rather than incident-specific” (Stark 2024, p. 256) and it is “in essence the invidious assertion of male power, not necessarily by force and/or physical violence, but by strategies of psychological, emotional, and financial abuse” (Barlow and Walklate 2022, p. 1). While the concept has been the subject of debate, coercive control has increasingly been incorporated into criminal law (Walklate et al. 2018). Yet, a key concern surrounding the criminalisation of coercive control remains that the law will be used as an instrument by perpetrators who will seek to have the victim-survivor criminalised under the offence (Tolmie 2018; Bailey 2010; Walklate et al. 2018; Barlow et al. 2019). In addition, victim-survivors often face significant challenges in proving the coercive violence which they experience as patterns of behaviours “rather than isolated incidents of abuse” (Douglas 2018, p. 769). This difficulty is exacerbated by the risk of perpetrators’ potential use of legal processes as a further tactic of control, particularly in the post-separation context. In this way, the legal system itself can become a site through which coercive control is extended.

Miller and Smolter (2011, p. 637) were among the first to name this continuation of abuse through legal procedures, coining the term “paper abuse” to describe acts that perpetrators routinely deploy against former partners to continue victimisation, including “acts that are routinely used by batterers against their former partners to continue victimization and includes a range of behaviors such as filing frivolous lawsuits, making false reports of child abuse, and taking other legal actions as a means of exerting power, forcing contact, and financially burdening their ex-partners.” As they observe, “it is naïve to think that abuse ends once a violent relationship is over” (ibid, p. 637). Drawing on interviews with sixty-five women, Douglas (2018) also documents how the courts can provide perpetrators with a mechanism through which to continue and even extend controlling behaviour, a tactic she terms “legal systems abuse”. Reeves et al. (2025, p. 772) extend this analysis by arguing that the law “continues to disbelieve women and validate abusers” because perpetrators of coercive control are already “skilled in manipulation,” they may be readily believed when they make false claims to legal and policing actors, while “by their gender alone women victim-survivors face a credibility deficit”.

A substantial body of family law and criminology literature has documented legal abuse and post-separation coercive control empirically, focusing on “custody stalking,” the use of child custody proceedings as a retaliatory mechanism of post-separation coercive control (Elizabeth 2017); the deployment of repeated litigation and false parental alienation claims (McCormack 2025); the systematic failure of family courts to recognise coercive control and understanding the “best interests of the child” as maintaining the parent–child relationship even with the abusive parent, which often results in failing to understand the nature of coercive control, questioning the credibility of mothers by labelling them as “unfriendly” or “alienating” (Jeffries 2016), and hindering their help-seeking experiences (Spearman et al. 2024) (See also Watson and Ancis 2013; E. Gutowski and Goodman 2020; E. R. Gutowski and Goodman 2023; Toews and Bermea 2017; Zeoli et al. 2013). Across these bodies of work, post-separation coercive control and legal abuse are examined almost exclusively through the lens of motherhood and family law. This framing persists in the most recent systematic literature: Spearman et al.’s (2024) comprehensive review of forty-eight studies on post-separation abuse identifies legal abuse, economic abuse, psychological abuse, mesosystem abuse, and the instrumentalisation of children as the core tactical repertoire of post-separation coercive control, yet the review’s organising frame is explicitly the family court context, and its policy recommendations are directed almost entirely at family court professionals. This article, therefore, engages with the legal systems abuse literature but extends it in two directions. First, it moves beyond the family law context to examine victim-survivor engagement with criminal justice institutions. This shift matters because criminal justice systems position women primarily as victim-survivors and witnesses rather than as parents. As a result, the evidential demands and power asymmetries women encounter are organised around distinct institutional logics. Relatedly, the existing literature has tended to frame women’s experiences through their identity as mothers, with custody disputes, parental alienation claims, and children’s welfare proceedings serving as the primary lens through which legal system abuse has been documented and theorised. This article departs from that framing by centring women’s own experiences of institutional harm, independent of their maternal role Second, it interrogates not only perpetrators’ active exploitation of legal processes but the extent to which criminal justice institutions themselves, through their evidentiary demands and patterns of institutional disbelief, reproduce the conditions on which coercive control depends, conditions experienced by women as victim-survivors in their own right, not as parties to a dispute about children.

3. Method

3.1. Research Design and Ethics

This article employs semi-structured interviews with thirteen women who experienced domestic violence and engaged with the criminal justice system and community-based support services. It focuses on women due to the disproportionate impact of domestic violence on women and the gendered nature of coercive control. Ethical considerations were central to the design of the study. The data collection was guided by a trauma-informed approach, which acknowledges that discussing experiences of interpersonal violence in a research context may be re-traumatising, and that the research process must be designed to ensure their safety (Alessi and Kahn 2023). Therefore, through Durham University’s Knowledge Broker, connections were established with Durham Community Action, which facilitated introductions to representatives from women’s organisations. These organisations, including Just for Women, Aspire Learning Support and Wellbeing, and Harbour, acted as gatekeepers, identifying and introducing women who could potentially consider taking part. This gatekeeping process ensured that recruitment centred their safety, emotional wellbeing, and access to ongoing support.

Prior to conducting formal interviews, I undertook a period of community familiarisation that extended beyond the gatekeeping arrangements. I held separate meetings with representatives from the participating organisations to discuss the circumstances and support needs of women who might take part,2 and I attended their weekly group sessions, spaces in which women gather to discuss their experiences, access peer support, and build connections with one another. Attending these sessions allowed me to introduce the research and its aims informally, to answer questions in a low-pressure setting, and to meet women who might take part before the formal interview took place. This process reflects two interconnected principles from Alessi and Kahn’s (2023, p. 11) trauma-informed research framework. The first is their argument that “it is incumbent upon qualitative researchers to investigate the trauma histories of research participants by having frank discussions with community partners.” The second is their guidance on attending to relationships with community partners and participants: “researchers attend to relationships by showing respect and understanding, which then enables community partners and participants to develop trust” (ibid, p. 18).

Interviews were conducted within the premises of the women’s support organisations. This was a deliberate methodological and ethical decision to ensure that interviews took place in familiar, safe environments where emotional support could be accessed immediately if required. Alessi and Kahn (2023, p. 18) identify the physical research environment as fundamental to trauma-informed practice, arguing that researchers must “conduct research activities in a welcoming physical environment where participants can feel relaxed enough to share their stories without fear of losing their dignity or being endangered.” Consistent with this approach, women in the study were informed prior to the interviews that support would be available during and after the interview process. In some cases, follow-up check-ins were conducted by organisational gatekeepers after the interviews to assess their wellbeing. In one instance, one woman requested that a friend from the support group be present during the interview to provide emotional support, and this request was accommodated. Dickson-Swift et al. (2007, p. 328) argue that researchers undertaking qualitative research on sensitive topics “need to be able to make an assessment of the impact of the research on both the participants and themselves”. My decision to conduct interviews within the organisations’ own premises, and to ensure that follow-up support was available after each interview, was a direct response to this imperative: by situating the interviews in spaces where professional support was immediately at hand, and by arranging post-interview check-ins, I sought to mitigate the potential impact of the research encounter on those who took part.

The inclusion criteria were individuals over the age of 18 who had experienced DV and engaged with support services, with exclusion criteria including individuals under 18, those currently experiencing high-risk abuse, and those unable to provide informed consent. As part of the recruitment process, each woman was assigned a unique identifier or pseudonym to maintain anonymity, and all identifying details, such as locations and specific events, were redacted or altered to prevent recognition.

The data is analysed via thematic analysis, which “is a method for identifying, analysing, and reporting patterns (themes) within data” (Braun and Clarke 2006, p. 79). The process began with a detailed review of the data to ensure familiarity, followed by manual coding. These initial codes were then categorised into meaningful groups and organised into potential themes for further interpretation.

3.2. Demographics of Participants

The demographic information presented here reflects what the women interviewed chose to share in response to an intentionally open introductory question: “Can you tell me a little about yourself?” This approach was designed to give them control over how they began the interview, allowing them to start with details that felt most comfortable, whether personal background or their experiences of abuse. As a result, demographic data emerged unevenly across interviews. From the information provided, most of them were women living in County Durham or surrounding areas, with ages (where stated) ranging from mid-30s to late-50s. Parenthood was common, with the majority mentioning children, and some also referring to grandchildren. Several described themselves as single or currently single, while others referenced past marriages or long-term relationships. Employment and education details were shared by a few, including roles in the legal sector, teaching qualifications, and previous careers, alongside volunteering with women’s organisations. One of them identified as having an immigration background. Overall, they represent varied life stages and family circumstances.

3.3. Reflexivity and the Research Encounter

Many women I interviewed found it challenging to articulate their experiences in a linear or coherent manner. Interviews were characterised by unfinished sentences, shifts between different events, and moments of apparent confusion. In these instances, they were apologetic for being upset and expressed concern about whether their responses were “helpful” to the research. In these instances, I reassured them that their presence and willingness to share was itself invaluable to the research. I routinely offered pauses or breaks, reminded them that participation was voluntary and that they could skip any question, stop the audio-recording, or withdraw at any point. Dickson-Swift et al. (2007) identify such attentiveness as part of the substantial ‘emotion work’ intrinsic to qualitative research on sensitive topics, where researchers must manage not only the practical dimensions of the interview but also the emotional labour of accompanying participants through distressing narratives.

Warin (2011, p. 809) describes reflexivity as “an inter-dependent awareness of how I as a researcher am influencing my research participants’ perceptions and a simultaneous and interdependent awareness of how they are influencing me”. Such influence became clear when an interaction with Brenda brought the question of positionality to the forefront when she directly challenged my position as a researcher and expressed hesitation to share her experiences of domestic violence. She asked whether I had personal experience of domestic violence and how I could understand her experiences without having lived through similar circumstances. I responded by avoiding a direct affirmation or denial of personal experience, instead acknowledging that experiences of domestic violence are deeply personal and varied. I emphasised that even when two individuals have experienced violence, their experiences are never identical, and that the aim of the research was to understand a diversity of victim-survivor narratives. I further reassured her that while my understanding would always be partial and situated, I was committed to engaging with her experience with care and respect. This exchange developed into a brief discussion about positionality and power within the research relationship prior to beginning the interview. Only after she was satisfied with my response did we proceed with audio recording and the interview itself. Guillemin and Gillam (2004) describe such moments as “ethically important moments,” the micro-ethical situations that arise unpredictably in the practice of research and demand practical ethical judgement beyond the parameters of formal ethical approval.

3.4. Limitations

This study does not claim statistical representativeness; rather, it was designed to produce knowledge grounded in victim-survivor experience and therefore draws on a qualitative sample of thirteen women. The analytical value of the findings lies in the depth of understanding they generate of victim-survivors’ subjective worldviews and lived experiences (for feminist epistemology and situated knowledge, see Doucet 2018). Further, all participants were recruited through women’s organisations, meaning the sample comprises women who actively sought community-based support. However, recruitment through such organisations was an ethical and epistemological necessity to ensure participant safety and to access women willing and able to share their experiences. The study is also geographically specific to County Durham. While Durham’s distinctive profile, recording the highest rate of repeat domestic violence incidents in England and Wales alongside unusually low rates of protective order applications, makes it a particularly revealing site for examining the gap between national reform and local institutional practice, the findings may not be representative of other regions.

4. “It Is All Out of My Hands”: Coercive Control, Criminal Justice, and the Restoration of Agency

4.1. Coercive Control as a Structural Pattern

“He would just drop the number one in the conversation, and I would know that one was starting […] if he got to 10 […] it would mean that I was going to get assaulted that night.”

Olivia–participant.

Across interviews, coercive control was described as operating through mutually reinforcing tactics including physical, sexual, emotional, and financial that accumulated over time into a pattern of harm rather than presenting as isolated incidents. Several narratives included assault during sleep that was not always immediately recognised as abuse, particularly within intimate relationships. In Rachel’s words, “I did not know this was happening…I just thought because we were in a relationship, [he was] allowed to do this…absolutely no, [he is] not.” Similarly, in Anna’s case, the recognition of rape emerged retrospectively and through police intervention: “The police came, they got me home, back to my flat, took a statement on video. And then saw that there was sexual abuse as well.” Such retrospective recognition highlights how the tactics of coercive control are embedded in gender norms, which makes it difficult to recognise where victim-survivors are not confronted with something obviously harmful (like torture or kidnapping) but are navigating a blurred line between what feels like normal relationship expectations and where risk actually begins (Stark 2024).

Physical violence was also widely reported: except for one woman, all considered their experience physically violent. For some, the forms of violence shifted across the lifespan of the relationship. While Angela described the first five years of her 23-year relationship as “much more physical,” and later periods involved different mechanisms of control, for Mary, “initially it was verbal. But then [it] became physical.” Indeed, such a shift was common among interviews, as Rachel also drew attention to; her experience began with deception about his identity, whereabouts, and marital status, and ended with a physical assault that left her with a permanently deformed hand.

While physical violence was a common theme among many narratives, the testimonies gathered consistently pointed to how perpetrators seek to dominate their partners by restricting liberty and autonomy through tactics such as isolation, intimidation, surveillance, economic restriction, and the micromanagement of daily life (Stark 2024). Rather than functioning as isolated restrictions, these tactics systematically reorganised women’s social worlds and narrowed their networks. Those interviewed described being prevented from seeing friends or family and discouraged from forming new social connections. In some cases, this surveillance extended into workplaces and public spaces. Bella, who experienced twenty years of coercive control, captured this narrowing vividly: “The only way I describe it is that my world was placed in this massive box to begin with. And the box got smaller because [there was no] contact with family, no contact with friends.” Certain activities, such as gardening and raising chickens and dogs, were permitted, but these permissions did not indicate freedom. They were conditional, and, as Bella put it, “there was a price for it.”

Anna recounted never knowing what she had done wrong: “I was saying sorry about 20 times a day, possibly more […] the rules […] would change and I wouldn’t know that he changed them.” The instability reflects a well-documented mechanism of coercive control: by shifting responsibility and producing uncertainty, perpetrators destabilise women’s moral certainty and position them as perpetually at fault (Towns and Adams 2016), which compels them to organise their everyday lives around anticipation and the continual assessment of risk (Cavanagh 2003). As Stark observes, “the injection of high levels of fear into the ordinary round of daily life and the difficulty in fixing its source are among the most remarkable features of coercive control” (Stark 2024, p. 263). Similarly, in other cases, coercive control operated through subtle cues that appeared ordinary to others. Olivia, whose partner worked as an accountant, described a coded system of intimidation she called the “counting method.” During social gatherings, he would casually drop numbers into conversation, starting at one and escalating toward ten. To outsiders, this appeared normal, but for Olivia it was a warning: “So if we were out a drink with friends, he would just drop the number one in the conversation and I would know that one was starting […] if he got to 10 […] it would mean that I was going to get assaulted that night.” Olivia’s experience is a striking illustration of how “everything about the experience of coercive control reflects its personal and individualized nature, from its proximate motives and relationship- specific organization through the tactics deployed” (Stark 2024, p. 257). Most importantly, it is a demonstration of why criminal justice systems struggle to recognise coercive control, as the “ordinariness” of this “conversation” rendered the coercive control that Olivia was experiencing socially and legally invisible.

Beyond regulating everyday life, coercive control resulted in long-term consequences that reshaped their sense of self, psychological wellbeing, including the development of PTSD, and extended to their children. Several of them described children being present during violence, including sexual violence, or experiencing neglect and bullying. They frequently distinguished physical from emotional harm. As Olivia put it, “physical scars heal, but it is the emotional and the mental side that lives with you forever. You never shift them.” Similarly, Jennifer’s childhood friends noticed she had changed before she recognised it herself. Even during the interview, she expressed shock at not having realised it earlier: “I did not notice it at all […] it is weird how somebody can kind of control you! Change you! When I look back at my photographs now, I just feel like I have lost myself completely.” Jennifer’s shock at not having recognised the control earlier reflects a pattern of retrospective self-blame. As Renehan et al. (2025) demonstrate that victim-survivors routinely internalise responsibility for failing to recognise warning signs of abuse, blaming themselves for not acting earlier even when the conditions of coercive control itself systematically obscured those signs. Indeed, describing their experiences as having a “dungeon effect that still affects [them] to this day” (Olivia), those who took part in the study also reflected on coping mechanisms developed within these constrained environments: As Bella put it, “I found a lot of comfort in food. The day-to-day pain numbed. […] my boys, my animals and food basically got me through many, many years.”

4.2. Post-Separation Abuse

Women in the study indicated that one form of post-separation abuse took the form of the displacement of violence into emotional manipulation to draw them back into the relationship, alongside surveillance and the exploitation of administrative and legal processes to maintain control. Anna’s experience captures how apologies functioned as a post-separation tactic: “He would find some way of getting in touch […] I would get all the apologies […] I would just go back.” Indeed, men’s apologies after abuse can operate as a tactic of control because they shape how women respond to violence and redirect attention away from the harm toward the figure of the “distressed” man. These apologies draw on gendered expectations that women should manage emotions and provide care (Cavanagh 2003). In parallel to this, in some cases, women returned to the relationship because they felt responsible for supporting their partners through personal difficulties. Bella, for example, left when her son was bullied but returned during a medical crisis as her ex-husband needed care and recovery.

Post-separation abuse also involved continued physical presence, harassment, and indirect intimidation. Two years after separation, Jennifer was still being controlled, as harassment continued through her former partner and his family. As she explained, her father-in-law moved nearby and continued to harass her while her husband was in prison. Beyond physical proximity, abuse also extended to digital stalking through social media and other online platforms. Bella’s former partner monitored her medical appointments, sending emails that demonstrated detailed knowledge of her schedule. As Stark (2024, p. 257) observes, “only in coercive control do perpetrators hone their tactics to their special knowledge of everything from a victim’s earnings and phone conversations to her medical problems, personal fears, sexual desires, and illicit activities.” “Most crucially, in Bella’s case, where the council’s disclosure of her address had already brought her former partner to her door with a knife, administrative and institutional processes became additional sites of risk production. Police responses placed her in further danger by requiring her to gather evidence while he was stalking her: “They expected me to go outside and take a photo […] stand in front […] I needed [a] photo to show the registration and his face […] I cannot believe that you are asking me to do this.” Bella’s experience illustrates how, when coercive control is not recognised as central to domestic violence, risk may be inadequately assessed, and institutional processes can function as an extension of abuse (Douglas 2018, p. 94). Furthermore, failing to recognise victim-survivors’ own risk assessments, despite their being best placed to identify “strong indicators of potential future victimisation” based on lived experience, means police may misjudge high-risk situations as low risk, thereby undermining survivors’ trust in the process (Birdsall et al. 2017).

Beyond physical, emotional, and digital abuse, post-separation harm may also take the form of legal abuse, particularly where perpetrators’ physical access to survivors is reduced (Douglas 2018). In Bella’s case, litigation itself was exploited as a post-separation tactic:

He put in fictitious claims, four of them, saying that I damaged his property, I had taken a hammer to the walls, I had broken in and stolen money from him […] I realised that this was vexatious litigation […] I spent months and months tied up with small claims trying to defend myself […] and the police said, ‘Nothing. We cannot do anything about it.

Her experience reflects a form of legal systems abuse in which perpetrators exploit legal procedures to reposition themselves as victims of harm. By initiating vexatious civil claims, Bella’s former partner compelled her to engage repeatedly with the legal system and repositioned himself as a claimant and her as a defendant. This legal abuse, as identified by Miller and Smolter (2011, p. 638), constitutes a form of “procedural stalking,” in which perpetrators choose to stalk not through criminal acts but by exploiting legal processes. This results in multiple hearings and prolonged procedures and creates opportunities for “histories of abuse [to] be ignored, forgotten, or distorted by the abuser.” It also illustrates how survivors’ credibility is often discounted in legal systems, where “by their gender alone women victim-survivors face a credibility deficit” (Douglas 2018). Bella’s story, like those of the other women interviewed, makes clear that separation did not mark an end to abuse but a period of heightened risk, in which control migrated into new arenas, from the domestic space into the administrative, the digital, and finally the legal space.

4.3. Navigating the Criminal Justice System

“I did not have control in the relationship. I was completely controlled then. And then through this investigation and everything I have had no control over that either. It is all out of my hands.”

Anna–participant.

4.3.1. Loss of Control in the Justice Process

Anna’s words reflect Burman and Brooks-Hay’s (2020, p. 135) observations that adversarial legal processes frequently place victim-survivors “in the midst, but not in control of, what can be a protracted and bewildering process, whilst managing the demands of their everyday life and a range of other issues resulting from the abuse”. For many, this meant choosing not to pursue their cases beyond the initial police interaction. A consistent barrier was fear of insufficient evidence and concerns about perpetrators’ ability to manipulate the system. For example, while talking about the “counting method,” Olivia made this clear:

But then when you say that to the police […] There was nothing they could do with that information because he would just say, but I was only having a conversation. Whereas I knew what each number meant. I knew what two meant. I knew what three meant. I knew what four meant. I knew five meant that: he would not let me sleep that night because it is halfway to ten. But it is my word against his. And unless you have got that in text messages, what all the numbers meant? You do not have any evidence. And I think that is a bit sort of heartbroken about domestic abuse and trying to get justice for it.

Olivia’s concern about it being “my word against his” recurred across interviews with striking consistency. Jennifer believed her investigation was dropped for exactly that reason, and Sophie anticipated the same outcome before deciding not to pursue legal action. Across these narratives, perpetrators were also frequently characterised as “clever,” “knowing the system,” “charming,” and “educated in manipulation”.

While many chose not to pursue their cases, those who continued with proceedings reported mixed experiences. Initial police responses were sometimes affirming; Anna recalled being told “We believe you,” but this was rarely sustained. What followed, in her case, was frequently characterised by long periods of uncertainty, minimal updates, and a process that felt more interrogative than supportive: “I felt like I was being interrogated. And it was exhausting.” Anna’s exhaustion can be seen as system burnout in which repeated institutional failures lead to secondary victimisation and the erosion of institutional trust (Fleury-Steiner et al. 2026). This variability also shaped how participants understood positive outcomes: these were framed not as institutional standards but as exceptions. As Emily reflected, “I was incredibly lucky […] it was just like I had luck all the way through […] it was like [a] lottery”.

A recurring experience was the feeling of loss of control and inability to find closure, as Anna indicated: “I have not been able to, like get full closure. Because I am still waiting for that. So, I am still carrying it all around.” Carrying the trauma is not unique to Anna as “the repeated forced contact through on-going legal abuse interferes with survivors’ ability to heal from trauma” (Spearman et al. 2024, p. 155). Feelings of lost control and lack of closure were reinforced by the minimisation of their experiences by police officers, such as being told “what do you expect if you have just left him?” (Bella), “he just touched your chest” (Olivia), or having their situation trivialised through comparisons to routine matters, as one police officer compared the duration of Anna’s case to the time it took to sort out his own mortgage.

The gendered assumptions shaping individual officers’ interactions were particularly evident where concern was redirected toward perpetrators’ experiences. Jenny recalled being told: “Please do not stop him from seeing his son, because I have got a little boy myself and I would hate to think that I could not see him.” When the officer redirected the interaction toward his own paternal feelings, he prioritised paternal contact over the safety and needs of the victim-survivor. This cannot be understood solely as an instance of individual bias but may instead indicate broader institutional norms and cultural assumptions embedded within institutions (McCormack 2025). The consequence, as (Spearman et al. 2024, p 152) observe, is that court and legal professionals “who are not aware of the patterns of the perpetrator’s tactics may unwittingly be used to further harm or abuse survivors”.

4.3.2. Burden of Evidence and Withdrawal

Women in the study repeatedly highlighted the difficulty of meeting the evidentiary standards like Olivia describing the system as “black and white” and indicating that “It is almost hard to prove the case.” This resonates directly with McCormack’s (2025, p. 10) argument in relation to fathers using the legal system as a manipulation technique that “when courts, constrained by evidentiary thresholds that prioritise overt harm, may fail to recognise the subtle forms of coercion and manipulation.” While McCormack’s observation relates specifically to children and custody proceedings, it speaks directly to Olivia’s concerns that a black-and-white approach recognises only discrete acts and leaves little room for understanding the power relations that shape experiences of coercive control. Indeed, as Douglas (2018, p. 96) argues, understanding domestic violence through a coercive control lens would require closer scrutiny of such power dynamics.

This evidential burden and prolonged nature of the criminal justice process significantly shape survivors’ decisions to withdraw support for their cases, as Anna’s withdrawal makes clear: “I said: I am not retracting my statement. It definitely happened, but I am going to withdraw my support for the case because I do not want anything more to do with it. I said this has gone on too long […it] is constantly there: in the back of my head […] It is always there right in the back and anything can trigger it.” Anna’s perspective reflects that withdrawal does not indicate reluctance to access justice, rather frustration, confusion, and the emotional toll of lengthy legal proceedings (McPhee et al. 2022).

Olivia’s withdrawal emerged through a different but related dynamic. Rather than procedural exhaustion alone, her disengagement followed simultaneous pressure to proceed and the minimisation of harm. After disclosing non-consensual touching, she encountered conflicting responses from the same officer. Despite repeatedly stating that she did not wish to pursue the case, she was told that “we have to pursue this,” a decision taken, in her words, “above [her] head” that generated “massive fear.” At the same time, the assault was trivialised through comments such as “just touching your breasts, how can that be sexual assault?”, which she experienced as being “minimised […] almost, like, laughed off.” She subsequently withdrew her cooperation: “I am not pursuing it…you just made me feel so stupid and uncomfortable.” She then lodged a complaint, which resulted in the officer being removed from her case. Olivia’s experience can be understood in light of concerns raised by Birdsall et al. (2017) regarding the lack of uniformity in police approaches to intimate partner violence (IPV) and the consequences this has for victim-survivor engagement. As they observe, “there is still no uniformity over the approach to take when dealing with victims of IPV, with some officers favouring ‘victim choice’, some using ‘pro-prosecution’, and others who use a ‘victim empowerment’ approach.” Where officers prioritise investigation over victim-survivors welfare and treat survivors primarily as sources of evidence, disengagement may follow, particularly when responses are perceived to “trivialis[e] the violence they have suffered” (ibid, pp. 77–79).

More broadly, the system was consistently described as treating abuse as an isolated incident rather than an experience that “affects everything in [their] being” (Anna). Occasionally, they expressed anger at the lack of protective measures following court proceedings and early release decisions: “Surely police ought to be notified if the perpetrator is being let out […] There should have been safety measures put in.” These concerns regarding their safety underscore survivors’ perceptions that institutional responses did not adequately anticipate or mitigate post-separation risk. However, unlike one-off incidents, disclosure in domestic abuse cases frequently increases risk rather than reducing it, particularly at the point of separation. Women seek help within highly unsafe and rapidly changing contexts; therefore, it “is vital that the response provided by criminal justice agencies is sensitive to the dynamics within which women operate when attempting to seek protection” (Wydall and Zerk 2021, p. 615).

4.3.3. What Do Victim-Survivors Expect from the Criminal Justice System?

The victim-survivors described reporting as serving multiple and sometimes competing purposes. For many, self-protection was the immediate need to secure safety measures even when confidence in the system was low. Olivia’s words captured this tension: “You go through all that stress and you’ve still got nothing for it […] but you do it because you hope it will stop him.” Yet these expectations extended well beyond personal safety. Many framed their decision to report as a moral responsibility to protect other women, like Anna highlighting: “It is merely the thought that he is out on bail. He could be doing this to other women […] I cannot possibly be the first woman that he has treated this way.” Jennifer echoed this concern: “He has done it to several other people […] something needs to be done.” Reporting was thus frequently motivated by a desire to prevent future harm, not only to themselves but to other potential women. This collective orientation to justice was particularly evident in Olivia’s voice, which explicitly referenced Clare’s Law. For Olivia, prosecution was about visibility for other women: “Why is only convictions put on Clare’s Law? […] I think you should know everything […] even if they were spoken to about it.” Olivia’s expectation that legal action should function as a resource for protecting future victims resonates with Burman and Brooks-Hay’s (2020) identification of an “aspiration–reality gap” in rape reporting, where reporting is rarely framed as a pursuit of punishment alone but as a moral or social responsibility aimed at safeguarding others and preventing further victimisation. Furthermore, among victim-survivors, justice is frequently understood as a process of recognition, safety, and collective accountability, rather than as a narrowly defined criminal outcome (Gangoli et al. 2020).

These expectations of safety, collective protection, and accountability reflect what Herman (2005) identifies as the fundamental needs of survivors from any justice process: validation of their experience, community acknowledgement, and the restoration of honour. These same needs were reflected clearly across the interviews. The interviews highlighted clear expectations when engaging with the criminal justice system, most notably the expectation to be believed, listened to, and treated with empathy. Bella was unambiguous: “First of all, I expected to be listened to. Certainly, be believed. To have compassion.” Sophie’s expectation was equally clear: simply “to be believed.” Therefore, in victim-survivors’ reflections, justice was inseparable from how they were treated within the process, which reflects what Wydall and Zerk (2021) describe as a shift toward “doing justice differently,” where justice is understood not only through conviction rates but through procedural fairness. In parallel to these expectations, they stressed the need for police and legal professionals to understand the dynamics of coercive control and manipulation. Olivia’s call was direct: “Police need training on reading the underlining message not just what’s in front of them.” Similarly, the importance of proactive communication throughout the process was also consistently raised. The complete absence of follow-up after reporting was captured by Lucy: “It might have been nice if somebody had followed up on the situation to make sure […] Nobody came back to just even call around the house and say, is he still here? Are you OK?” This poor communication was consistently linked to feelings of abandonment, and Bella’s conclusion was stark: “Women are still being let down. Not heard, not seen”.

4.4. Recovery, Agency, and the Role of Women’s Organisations

“I was told I was not allowed to have any therapy while waiting to go to trial […] I have gone 18 months suffering PTSD […] and then they said it was an error.”

Jennifer–participant.

“It is not doom and gloom here. You come in and it is like a family atmosphere […] you always feel better when you are going out.”

Anna–participant.

Jennifer’s experience of mistakenly being denied therapy for eighteen months while awaiting trial and Mary’s description of her help-seeking experience as “begging,” a word she returned repeatedly across the interview, capture a pattern that runs through all four themes of this article: that the systems they turned to for help often reproduced the powerlessness they had sought to escape. This continuation of disempowerment within institutional processes provides a direct link to Wemmers’ (2013, p. 229) empirical findings, which illustrate, “victims [survivors] who were unfairly treated appear to improve slightly over time but they continue to experience more PTSD symptoms than victims who had been treated fairly.” In contrast, across all thirteen interviews, women’s organisations emerged as central to recovery and empowerment after abuse, particularly where formal justice processes had become exhausting, disempowering, or unsafe. For Anna, “It is a woman’s charity […] somewhere for us to come together […] enjoy each other’s company…do different courses […] it helps women who are lonely, who are living on their own and they’ve come through domestic abuse.” She further emphasised the sense of belonging: “It is uplifting […] Does not matter how rubbish you feel when you first come in, you always feel better when you are going out”.

Women’s organisations were also valued for creating safe spaces where victim-survivors could share experiences without judgement. Angela’s reflection captured this: “Finding places like this are great for support because women can talk about it and you realise, you are not alone […] It builds up your confidence as well.” This aligns with Helmersson and Jönson’s (2015, p. 57) finding that “group processes, group-feeling, and mutual support” are essential factors in facilitating recovery. In that sense, rather than framing coercive control as solely a legal issue, victim-survivor support organisations created collective narratives of survival that helped the women reinterpret their experiences within broader structural and gendered contexts. Valentine and Breckenridge (2016, p. 52) describe this as a feminist intervention that involves “a shift in focus from the deficits of the victims to the nature of the violence,” enabling survivors to locate their experiences within a structural analysis of gendered harm rather than as personal failure. Such support also contributes to “a sense of self-value which helps women to consider their own well-being as worthy of protection” (Sen 1996, p. 366).

Beyond emotional support, women’s organisations also played an educative and empowering role. Rachel’s experience illustrated this: “I did not realise how many different forms of domestic violence there is…I have done a ten-week course on domestic abuse and another on sexual violence […] I have learned so much through that.” Such education points to a further potential implication that women’s organisations may also serve as a bridge to statutory and legal options that women might not otherwise know how to access. This resonates with Sen’s (1996, p. 366) observation that “women do not always seek access to statutory agencies […] often it is the personal contacts and networks into which women tap that provide the crucial linkage to legal and housing options”.

5. Conclusions

The findings show how victim-survivors themselves understand and narrate coercive control not as a series of discrete incidents but as control over everyday life: the narrowing of social circles, the instability of shifting house rules, the erosion of selfhood, the coding of threat into ordinary conversation. As Olivia’s counting method demonstrates, these experiences are invisible to incident-based responses. Indeed, that same invisibility followed the victim-survivors into the administrative and legal systems their former partners learned to exploit through vexatious litigation, surveillance through institutional data-sharing, and harassment enabled by bail conditions and early release. Within criminal justice processes, procedural disempowerment mirrored the loss of agency they had experienced in the relationship; and institutional disbelief, shaped by gendered assumptions about credibility and fatherhood, positioned perpetrators as the more legible and sympathetic. Anna’s formulation captures this precisely: “I did not have control in the relationship. I was completely controlled then. And then through this investigation and everything I have had no control over that either”.

These findings are consistent with a substantial body of existing research on criminal justice responses to domestic abuse, suggesting that the dynamics identified reflect structural features of adversarial legal systems more broadly. The findings show a clear and consistent gap between national policy reforms and victim-survivors’ lived realities. Despite significant shifts in policy discourse and legal reform, the women in this study described a system that, in practice, mirrors coercive control itself. Their experiences pointed to several shortcomings of the criminal justice system. First, police responses were characterised by inconsistency: some officers affirmed survivor accounts, while others minimised, trivialised, or redirected encounters in ways that advantaged perpetrators. Second, the evidential burden fell disproportionately on survivors themselves, through demands that placed them at risk. Third, early release decisions were not routinely communicated to survivors, leaving them unaware of changes in their risk environment. Fourth, the adversarial structure of proceedings systematically reproduced the loss of agency that coercive control itself depends upon. Therefore, rather than merely falling short, the system risks reproducing the conditions of the harm it aims to address. The findings carry policy implications. In particular, the evidential burden documented in this study points to the need for more proactive, state-led evidence-gathering that does not place investigative responsibility on victim-survivors. The failure to communicate bail conditions and early release decisions to victim-survivors, experienced by several women in this study as a source of ongoing danger, further indicates a need for clearer statutory obligations and guidance around survivor notification. Furthermore, these findings should not be read as a case for disengaging from criminal justice altogether, as this would risk disregarding survivors’ own perspectives. As McGlynn (2022, p. 3) argues, “for some survivors, criminal justice remains central to their understanding of ‘justice’,” and “an anti-carceral approach that entirely disengages with criminal justice systems does not reflect the perspectives of some survivors, nor does it support their journeys seeking redress and accountability.” The response these findings call for is, then, not disengagement from CJS but a more integrated approach, one that adopts a coercive control-informed approach across CJS. This also requires, as Alvarez (2025, p. 13) argues, “integrating community knowledge, investing in prevention, and recognising that justice cannot be reduced to prosecution alone.” Therefore, the role of women’s organisations documented here also suggests that commissioning and funding frameworks should position specialist community provision as central rather than supplementary to the domestic abuse response system. The women in this study gave concrete meaning to Alvarez’s claim and described women’s organisations as spaces that offered safety, validation, and a sense of connection rarely found within statutory processes: for many, they were where recovery actually happened, which suggests that women’s organisations constitute a critical site of effective response.