Dr Charlotte Barlow presenting paper at the Australian and New Zealand Society of Criminology Conference
Dr Charlotte Barlow will be presenting her paper, ‘The Coercive Control Offence and Implications for the Policing of Domestic Abuse’ at the Australian and New Zealand Society of Criminology Conference. This paper forms part of a ‘Coercive Control’ panel with speakers Dr Kate Fitz-Gibbon, Dr Marilyn McMahon and Dr Les Humphreys. Please see below for Charlotte’s abstract:
Coercive and controlling behaviours were criminalised in England and Wales as part of Section 76 of the Serious Crime Act 2015. There has been consequent growing academic interest and critique of coercive control as a legislative concept (Walklate, Fitzgibbon & McCulloch, 2018; Walby & Towers, 2018). This paper aims to extend this discussion by exploring police responses to coercive control, informed by empirical data from the author’s N8 Catalyst funded project. The paper will consider how the idea of coercive control is utilised and understood in practice by police officers. Police responses to coercive control will be compared to violence against the person with injury cases, in particular ABH, to consider the similarities and differences. The problems and possibilities of the implementation of the coercive control offence will also be discussed.
The presentation will be based on her N8 short report: