By Jessica Kidd,Rhiannon Soliman-Marron

Copyright abc

Frontline domestic violence support services say more women are identifying themselves as victims of coercive control and seeking help since the abusive behaviour became a criminal offence in NSW.

Coercive control describes a pattern of controlling and manipulative behaviour in intimate partner relationships such as financial abuse, tracking, monitoring and humiliation.

A snapshot of the new coercive control laws, which came into effect in July 2024, suggest there has been a “slow but consistent” uptake of the new offences.

There were 297 reports of coercive control reported to NSW Police between July 2024 and June 2025, according to the Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research (BOCSAR).

Despite that, just nine charges have been laid to date.

BOCSAR’s executive director Jackie Fitzgerald said those figures were anticipated to an extent because of how “novel” the offence is.

“Coercive control requires a pattern of behaviour, and that’s quite an unusual element of offences,” she said.

“There also needs to be an element of intention by the offender, and that also makes it difficult to prove these offences in the courts.”

The median time between a coercive control incident occurring and a person being charged was 131 days.

For most other offences, that process takes less than a week.

Of the nine charges laid, just one has resulted in a conviction, after the defendant pleaded guilty.

Two were withdrawn by prosecutors and the other six remain pending before the court.

Ms Fitzgerald said she expects the number of charges laid to steadily increase once a coercive control case proceeds to trial.

“We’re really still waiting for that test case to come through, which will establish how the courts are going to respond to coercive control and what’s required in order to prove [it],” she said.

“The longer time goes on … there’ll be more cases to draw on to establish that pattern of behaviour.”

Lag time before more cases to be investigated

Chief executive of Full Stop Australia Karen Bevan said it was simply a matter of time for investigations into allegations of coercive control to be completed and for more cases to come before the courts.

“We always knew that the first year of operation of the law would be establishing the offence, educating the community and starting to really make sure that the people coming to police were being heard,” she said.

Ms Bevan said the fact the laws were not retrospective meant there would be a lag time before more cases could be investigated and prosecuted.

“That means we aren’t picking up the years and sometimes decades of coercive control that has been in place for many victim survivors prior to that,” she said.

“It’s a complex picture — I don’t think that we could in any way say this isn’t working, I think there’s been a lot of positive outcomes from the introduction of the legislation.

Annabelle Daniel is the chief executive officer of Women’s Community Shelters, an organisation which oversees a number of community-run women’s shelters across Greater Sydney.

She said frontline workers are seeing an uptick in the number of women recognising patterns of coercive control in their partners.

“We find it very heartening that more women are recognising themselves as being victims of coercive control and not just domestic violence,” she said.

“And when they’re coming forward to specialist services like ours they are identifying that up-front.

“At frontline services we’ve seen an incredible increase in knowledge from victims in NSW, they are identifying themselves very clearly as being victims of Coercive control and not just physical or sexual abuse.”

NSW was the first jurisdiction in Australia to explicitly make coercive control an offence.

The only other state where it is currently a crime is Queensland, where legislation came into effect in May this year.

Between May and August, Queensland recorded 100 reports of coercive control.

Earlier this month, laws criminalising coercive control passed South Australia’s parliament — but they are expected to come into effect in 2027.

Ms Fitzgerald says coercive control legislation still has merit, because it covers elements that are not otherwise considered crimes, such as financial abuse or shaming.

“If we can establish a pattern of [that] behaviour over time, they can stand alone under that coercive control headline,” she said.

“It’s really about looking for what some people have recognised as a gap in the legislation.”