This article reviews the background, introduction, and critical response to new criminal offenses of coercive control in England/Wales and Scotland. How the new Scottish offense is implemented will determine whether it can overcome the shortcomings of the English law. We then review new evidence on four dimensions of coercive control: the relationship between “control” and “violence,” coercive control in same-sex couples, measuring coercive control, and children’s experience of coercive control. Coercive control is not a type of violence. Indeed, level of control predicts a range of negative outcomes heretofore associated with physical abuse, including post-separation violence and sexual assault; important differences in coercive control dynamics distinguish male homosexual from lesbian couples; measuring coercive control requires innovative ways of aggregating and categorizing data; and how children experience coercive control is a problem area that offers enormous promise for the years ahead.

Despite the development of much positive work by to tackle domestic violence, frustrations are often voiced by social care and other professionals - and echoed in women's and children's experiences - that it can be difficult to ensure and sustain safe outcomes for women and children in circumstances of domestic violence. The article takes as its starting point these frustrations and difficulties, and provides an attempt at understanding some of the systemic problems practitioners may be facing that undermine the effectiveness of their practice. The article explores in particular some of the tensions and contradictions that are evident in professional discourses and practices across work with victims and perpetrators of domestic violence; child protection and safeguarding; and child contact. These three areas of work are especially difficult to bring together into a cohesive and co-ordinated approach because they are effectively on separate ‘planets’ - with their own separate histories, culture, laws, and populations (sets of professionals). The notion of separate ‘planets’ can also be understood in light of what Bourdieu (1989) would call the ‘habitus’ of groups, where the particular structures, orientations and approaches in the work of a professional group may create divides between their own everyday and common place professional assumptions and practices and those of other professional groups. Tackling the ‘three planet problem’, and dealing more effectively with domestic violence as it impacts on adults and children, requires both a unified approach across the separate ‘planet’ areas and acknowledgement of the processes of gendering that are situating women as culpable victims. It requires much closer and coherent practices across the three areas of work, with acknowledgement and understanding of professional assumptions and practices of different professional groups.

The article discusses findings from first study in Europe to track domestic violence cases over six years through the criminal justice system and compare cases involving male and female perpetrators. Ninety-six cases involving men and women recorded by the police in England as intimate domestic violence perpetrators were tracked to provide detailed narratives and progression of cases, establishing samples with a single male or female perpetrator or where both partners were recorded as perpetrators. Domestic violence involves a pattern of abusive behaviour over time and the in-depth longitudinal approach allowed similarities and differences in violent and abusive behaviours used by men and women, as recorded by the police, to be explored. Gender differences were found relating to the nature of cases, forms of violence recorded, frequency of incidents and levels of arrest.

This article explores the process of attrition, where domestic violence cases fail to make it through the criminal justice system and do not result in criminal conviction. The article draws on the hitherto most detailed study of such attrition in the UK. The research, carried out across the Northumbria Police Force area, explored the quantitative attrition of domestic violence cases, from reporting to the police to final court outcome, contextualising this via the experiences of individuals (mainly women) victimised by domestic violence as well as the perspectives and practices of the police, prosecutors, the courts and non-criminal justice agencies.

In this article, drawing on interviews with women and men in same sex relationships who have experienced domestic violence, we explore the ways in which recognition of domestic violence can be hampered by public stories about the phenomenon and practices of love. Public stories construct domestic violence as a gendered, heterosexual phenomenon that is predominantly physical in nature. Victims of domestic violence are also constructed as ‘other’, weak and passive. In addition, we argue that practices of love obfuscate practices of violence; and can also result in victim/survivors constructing themselves as stronger than the perpetrator who needs their care.