Australia: The coercive control con job

Article here. Excerpt:

'In a book called Coercive Control: The Entrapment of Women in Personal Life, it was argued that the domestic violence industry was running into problems because of mounting evidence that men and women are equally violent. The book took ideas that had been floating around in the domestic violence industry about patterns of ‘patriarchal terrorism’ and invented a brand-new form of domestic ‘violence’ called ‘coercive control’. This idea claimed men started to use ‘coercive control’ to control their relationships after society moved on from the systematic, widespread ‘wife torture’ of the past, due to women’s liberation eroding men’s sex-based patriarchal privilege.

Even though everyone knows that both men and women use controlling behaviours, it was argued that people should ‘take on faith’ that ‘the pattern of intimidation, isolation, and control … is unique to men’s abuse of women’.

Worse, this was being promoted as a new criminal offence, which made these laws a far more effective weapon to use against men than the old violence protections orders used for domestic violence. On the basis of the flimsiest evidence describing behaviours that can’t even be properly defined, and that victims may not even see as a problem, men would be sent to prison.'