Coercive Control: From Literature into Law

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'Coercive Control: From Literature into Law' will be the first interdisciplinary project to investigate the complex relationship between British literary fiction and the law of coercive control. In 2015, domestic violence legislation in England and Wales was extended to include 'threats, humiliation and intimidation' and 'a range of acts designed to make a person subordinate and/or dependent'. While the crime of coercive control may involve sustained exploitation, deprivation, regulation, isolation, and degradation, a troubling misconception persists: that domestic abuse is limited to physical, rather than psychological, violence. The Women's Aid Federation of England, which campaigned to make coercive control a criminal offence, 'now wants to make sure that everyone understands what it is'.Creative storytelling has played a crucial role in raising awareness and shaping understandings of this new offence. The Rob and Helen Titchener storyline on BBC Radio Four's The Archers, which won the Outstanding Contribution Award at the 2017 BBC Audio Drama Awards, drew public attention to the chilling psychological effects and momentous legal implications of sustained coercive control. Polly Neate, CEO of Women's Aid, reported that the 'Archers effect' saw a 20% increase in calls to the National Domestic Abuse Helpline. For many survivors of coercive control, whose voices were heard in the mainstream media in the weeks surrounding Helen's trial, The Archers provided the first account of an experience that aligned with their own. More recently, the ten-part miniseries Maid (2021) has shown viewers the devastating and terrifying power of psychological and verbal abuse, leading to the claim that Netflix has produced 'the most important series in history'. But long before coercive control was identified and criminalised, writers of fiction had explored, analysed, challenged, and imagined ways of escaping from coercive and controlling relationships.This will be the first project on coercive control to combine literary and legal research methodologies. While coercive control now carries a maximum of five years in prison in the UK, fictional women have been imprisoned in narratives of psychological abuse for centuries, helping to shape understandings of its far-reaching effects. Drawing on our combined expertise in legal history and literature from the Victorian period to the present day, our network will ask important questions about British writing and its psychological, social, and educational impact. How have textual strategies of surveillance and regulation driven different fictions, from Victorian marriage plots and neo-Gothic mid-century melodramas to contemporary queer narratives of unequal unions? How might realist authorial omniscience and postmodern textual trickery be read as metafictional meditations on coercive control? How do narratives of coercive control empower readers and amplify the voices of survivors?While our project will benefit from significant contributions by international scholars, including keynote speakers Professor Celia Marshik (English Department, Stony Brook University) and Professor Simon Stern (Faculty of Law, University of Toronto), it will also investigate narratives of coercive control at a local level. The project has significant roots in Yorkshire writing, by the Brontë family of Haworth and George Gissing of Wakefield. These local connections will inform our work with 'Staying Put' and 'Together Women', Yorkshire-based charities working to support survivors of sexual violence and coercive control.