UK Legislation

Domestic abuse should be understood not as a series of isolated violent incidents, but as a patterned form of power, control and entrapment within intimate or family relationships (Stark, 2007; Kelly and Westmarland, 2016). The Domestic Abuse Act 2021 was a landmark reform because it created a statutory definition that expressly recognises physical, sexual, psychological, emotional and economic abuse alongside controlling or coercive behaviour (Home Office, 2021; Walby and Towers, 2018). This statutory language marks an important conceptual shift: it moves the law away from an incident-based model and toward recognition of cumulative, contextual harms that shape everyday life (Douglas, 2015; Myhill, 2015). Yet legal recognition on paper is not the same as protection in practice. The Act’s significance lies in what it signals about harm, but its adequacy depends on enforcement, institutional practice and the availability of services that turn rights into safety (Home Office, 2021).

The Act introduced several concrete measures: a statutory definition of domestic abuse, the Domestic Abuse Commissioner, strengthened Domestic Abuse Protection Notices and Orders, and explicit recognition that children can be victims in their own right when they see, hear or experience abuse (Home Office, 2021; Callaghan, Alexander and Kelly, 2018). These reforms are symbolically powerful because they make coercive conduct visible within criminal and regulatory frameworks (Walby and Towers, 2018). However, symbolic change must be matched by operational capacity. Coercive control is a liberty crime composed of dispersed acts—such as isolation, surveillance, humiliation, financial restriction, and micro-regulation of daily life—that rarely present as a single, dramatic incident (Stark, 2007; Douglas, 2015). For the law to capture this reality, police, prosecutors and courts need specialist training, trauma-informed evidential practice and institutional routines that value patterns of behaviour as much as visible injury (Myhill, 2015; Home Office, 2021).

Economic abuse is now included in statute, which is an important advance (Home Office, 2021; Postmus et al., 2012). Financial control—restricting access to bank accounts, sabotaging employment, incurring debt in a survivor’s name, or denying access to housing and welfare—produces dependency that can make leaving impossible (Postmus et al., 2012; Sharp-Jeffs, Kelly and Klein, 2018). Recognition is necessary but insufficient: economic abuse must be consistently identified, investigated and remedied. This is especially urgent for survivors with low incomes, disabilities, insecure housing or precarious immigration status, where financial control intersects with other vulnerabilities to prolong entrapment (Sharp-Jeffs, Kelly and Klein, 2018; Southall Black Sisters, 2022). Without targeted remedies and coordinated welfare responses, the statutory label of economic abuse will not translate into material safety.