Aurora Pattern analysis for coercive control
A reference, not legal advice

What coercive control is,
and which laws recognize it.

Coercive control is the pattern of intimidation, isolation, and degradation an abusive partner weaves through everyday communication — hard to point to in any single message, unmistakable across thousands.

A growing set of state laws — California's SB 1141, Connecticut's Jennifer's Law, Washington's coercive-control statute, and newer family-court provisions in Colorado, Utah, and Arizona — name the pattern as actionable, but courts mostly still need to be walked through the evidence.

Aurora reads years of message history between two parties and returns a cited brief that shows where the pattern lives, with every claim tied back to the actual text — built for the weeks before a hearing, used by attorneys, advocates, custody evaluators, and pro se litigants preparing their own cases.

The phenomenon

The clinical and legal vocabulary for coercive control traces back to Evan Stark's work in the early 2000s. The frame is simple: an abusive partner secures dominance through a pattern of small acts — surveillance, micro-rules about money, isolation from friends and family, sustained degradation, contradictory accounts that undermine the partner's sense of reality — rather than (or alongside) episodic physical violence. Lisa Aronson Fontes describes the same phenomenon in relationship terms; Emma Katz and others have extended it to children's lives and post-separation abuse.

The phenomenon resists incident-based legal frameworks because no single act is necessarily the case. Traditional domestic violence law evolved around discrete events: an assault, a threat, a violation of a no-contact order. Coercive control is a pattern — distributed across thousands of small acts, most of which look innocuous in isolation. A judge reading any one message might reasonably say "this is conflict, not abuse." Reading two thousand of them in sequence is a different experience.

That's why message records — iMessage exports, co-parenting-app logs, email threads — are often the strongest evidence available. The volume itself is part of the proof. A single sharp message is deniable. Eight hundred sequenced ones, showing the same shape of demand-and-blame week after week, are harder to write off. What makes a record one of coercive control rather than ordinary conflict isn't any single piece — it's the constellation.

This is also why the laws below matter even where they don't create a new crime. Most of them work by adding coercive control to what counts as domestic violence for the purpose of a protective order or a custody decision. They give judges permission to consider the pattern as legally significant rather than dismissing it as "high conflict." Whether that permission translates into outcomes depends heavily on whether the evidence is presented in a form a court can actually read.

Where the law has been written

Below: jurisdictions with statutes that expressly name coercive control or its equivalent. Verified as of 29 July 2026. Where a bill is pending or a citation could not be confirmed against an authoritative source, that's noted. Entries are descriptive, not a substitute for reading the statute or consulting counsel.

United States — states

The gap. Most US states do not yet have a coercive-control statute. In those jurisdictions, conduct that looks like coercive control is reached only to the extent it fits inside existing incident-based domestic-violence, harassment, or stalking definitions — or, in family-law proceedings, through judicial discretion in custody and protective-order rulings. The absence of a statute does not mean the pattern doesn't exist. It means the courtroom argument has to do more work.

United Kingdom & Ireland

Australia

Other jurisdictions

Beyond this list. The Istanbul Convention (Council of Europe, 2011) commits ratifying states to address psychological violence within an intimate relationship, which has driven legislation across continental Europe. New Zealand recognizes coercive and controlling patterns in its Family Violence Act 2018 definition without a standalone offence; elsewhere the common-law picture is moving but uneven. Check current statutes before relying on anything not listed here.

Sources and a caveat

Entries above were assembled from primary statutory text where accessible (state legislative portals, the UK National Archives legislation database, Australian state and federal parliaments) and cross-checked against secondary materials: the Battered Women's Justice Project's Coercive Control Codification Matrix, the American Bar Association's annual family-law statute surveys, the Marshall Project's reporting on coercive-control legislation, and law-firm and women's-legal-centre summaries jurisdiction by jurisdiction. The scholarship of Evan Stark, Lisa Aronson Fontes, Emma Katz, and others informs the framing of the phenomenon itself but is not the source of any specific citation.

This page should be reviewed periodically. Statutes are amended; pending bills become law or die; new jurisdictions enter the list. Anything below an entry's date stamp may be out of date.

Last verified: 22 July 2026 · Hawaii pilot extension (Act 192), Canada (Bill C-16), New Jersey & Vermont entries added