What the first coercive control cases reveal about a 'life-saving' law

NSW's coercive control law put Samantha Bouffler's abuser in jail. But two years in, it's unclear whether the contentious new legislation is the success story many have been hoping for.

Two years imprisonment. It took a while for the Local Court judge's words to sink in, for Samantha Bouffler to grasp that her ex-partner would lose his liberty for having so brutally deprived her of hers. 

In January this year Callum Fairleigh became the first person to be sentenced to a jail term under NSW's new law against coercive control, the pattern of controlling behaviour perpetrators of domestic violence use to entrap and dominate victims.

"I remember I was really emotional but it's difficult to describe," Bouffler, 35, says. "I was relieved, and I felt validated, but then it was like my body crashed because I'd been on such high alert for so long … I'm still dealing with the consequences every single day."

The agreed facts ran to eight pages, chronicling almost six months of Fairleigh's abuse from July 1, 2024, when the legislation took effect. He shamed, harassed and humiliated Bouffler, calling her a bitch, a moron and other slurs. He baselessly accused her of cheating on him. He damaged her property. He tried to isolate her from her family and friends, "blowing up" her phone whenever she spent time with them, demanding she cut them off and be on his "team".

All of Fairleigh's abuse was awful, Bouffler says (his previous charges for assaulting her were dismissed). But it was the psychological control that was "most damaging" — the sense of worthlessness she felt, the hyper-vigilance, the feeling of walking on eggshells so many victims describe. 

"It doesn't just hurt, it completely dismantles you," she told the court. "It stripped me of my identity, shattered my confidence and poisoned every part of my life. He didn't just damage me; he destroyed the woman I was."

In November 2022, NSW became the first Australian jurisdiction to criminalise coercive control, with a new law, in force from July 2024, making it an offence to engage in a pattern of abusive behaviour against a current or former partner in order to coerce or control them. Politicians and advocates who campaigned for it insisted it was important for the criminal law to recognise the insidious system of tactics that underpins so much domestic violence. Plus, they argued, coercive control is a precursor in up to 99 per cent of domestic homicides — outlawing it could "literally" save lives.

Two years in, though, the jury is still out on whether the new laws are the success story many have been hoping for. In the handful of cases finalised in court so far judges have grappled with the serious nature of coercive control and its devastating impacts on victims, highlighting the law's potential to shift the way the criminal justice system — and the broader community — understands and responds to domestic violence.

But recorded "incidents", charges and convictions remain low, and victim support workers across the state say they're underwhelmed by progress so far, with many disappointed with slow and "patchy" responses from police, who seem to be struggling with how to investigate what is widely regarded as an overly complex and narrowly drafted offence.

With South Australia's coercive control law set to take effect next year, and the ACT and Victoria recently introducing bills of their own, their questions and concerns offer a glimpse at how hard it can be to implement such a sweeping reform — and how much is at stake if it fails.

"I think there's been an expectation from the community that there would be a higher rate of charges in NSW and ultimately I don't think we've met those expectations," says Angie Gehle, policy and advocacy manager at DVNSW, the state's peak body for domestic violence services. "And the law, the actual offence, doesn't necessarily meet the experiences … of victim-survivors."

New data released by BOCSAR this week shows NSW police recorded 682 reports of coercive control in the first 24 months of the offence, the vast majority (95 per cent) involving a female victim. As of June 2026, 42 charges had been laid, all of them against men, and four defendants were sentenced after pleading guilty: two received prison sentences (two years, and two years and three months), one an 18-month intensive correction order, and the other a two-year community correction order.

Some observers might attribute the low number of charges and convictions to police and courts just getting their wheels on during the early implementation period. But courts data in Queensland, where coercive control legislation took effect in May 2025, is raising eyebrows: as of July this year 216 defendants had a coercive control case lodged in the Magistrates or District Court, and all of the 19 men convicted were sentenced to terms of imprisonment.

It is unclear what is driving these differences. It could be because Queensland's offence applies to partner and family relationships while NSW's is limited to intimate partnerships. There may also be differences in how police are applying the laws; by many accounts gathering evidence is also a challenge in Queensland, but some experts wonder whether the maximum penalty — 14 years, compared with NSW's seven — is more motivating to officers who see it as a better return on investment. Maybe it's as one Queensland legal professional put it: "Police were basically told to get this right, there's lots of pressure on them."

For Professor Jane Wangmann, who researches legal responses to domestic violence at the University of Technology Sydney, a major concern in NSW is the huge disparity between reports of coercive control (682 in the two years to June 2026) and domestic violence assaults (more than 77,000 in the same period). It raises serious questions, she says, about what is happening when victims report DV to police. When research suggests it underpins almost all domestic violence, how much coercive control is being overlooked?

Wangmann wants NSW to replicate a UK study which explored the problems and possibilities of implementing laws against coercive control in the UK. The research, published last year, found police in England and Wales failed to record coercive control in at least 87 per cent of cases of physical violence. "I would like the police to think it's actually a positive story for them," she says. "That if they're better trained to actually see what is potentially already available to them, they don't necessarily have to go and do something more."

Another potential hurdle, Wangmann says, is the mental element of the offence; that is, the requirement for prosecutors to prove that the accused intended to coerce or control a victim — a high bar. In NSW it was drafted in to mitigate the risk of victims, especially First Nations women, being misidentified as perpetrators — one of the main arguments against criminalisation. But in practice it may be preventing both cases of misidentification (which so far seem to be very rare) and actual cases of coercive control from being identified.

"I think the government thinking that narrow drafting was the answer means they've made an offence that really just can't be used," says Wangmann, who sees misidentification as a police practice issue. In the long run she believes the offence should be expanded to include "recklessness" — say, the accused intended to coerce or control or was reckless as to whether they did — which is one of the issues being considered by a government review currently underway. "But I think there needs to be some cultural and system reform for people to feel confident about it … we actually need to grapple with what is happening with policing that means we're over incarcerating Indigenous people [for] domestic violence offences."

Then there is the complexity of the offence — coercive control itself is a complex theoretical concept — which could be confusing and overwhelming for police, who are accustomed to responding to domestic violence as an incident-based crime. As of June this year it was taking 187 days for police to lay charges following a report, though some court support workers say they know of cases where investigations are taking even longer.

"The legislation has achieved something important, which is legal recognition that domestic violence can be a sustained pattern of control, not just one-off serious physical assaults," says Jenna Hattersley, acting director of services at Housing Plus, which runs DV support services in far-west NSW. "But for many victims it's [about] gathering the evidence of monitoring, financial control, isolation, threats and intimidation over the months or years it's been happening", which is not always simple.

And in many cases, Hattersley adds, police will charge discrete offences like assault or take out an ADVO rather than investigate the "course of conduct" of coercive control, probably because it's quicker and easier, especially in regional and remote areas where there are fewer police.

Some frontline workers see any police action against domestic violence as a positive. For others, though, it misses the point of the new law. Many workers say police are still reluctant to investigate reports of coercive control, or they don't until victims report serious physical violence. Others are frustrated that some officers still seem to hold archaic attitudes that reflect a lack of understanding of what coercive control is (they tell victims, "He doesn't seem like the kind of bloke who'd do that", or ask, "When was the last time he hit you?").

"Police are still not confident in how to gather evidence for coercive control, and nor are we," says one court support worker in regional NSW who was not authorised to speak publicly. "It has been fantastic to have coercive control recognised with these laws — a large number of our clients disclose coercive control to us, it is a huge issue — and victims have been reading about it thinking it will be charged. But we're having to manage their expectations because in reality, it isn't happening."

All this points to deficiencies in the education and training police are receiving, says DVNSW's Angie Gehle. "We don't think their training is adequate. We would also like to see some transparency with their training modules, the way it's being delivered, and an independent review of how it's being received by NSW Police Force personnel," Gehle says.

The NSW Police Force says its members are well covered by several phases of mandatory coercive control training, including sessions on "lived experience" — how victims think and feel. But Gehle doesn't think it is proportionate given police spend 60 per cent of their time on domestic violence, or informed by a diverse enough range of victim experiences (not every victim is white, weak, meek and afraid, for instance).

For the NSW Police Force's Dr Bridget Mottram, one of the main reasons for the slow uptake is that the offence only applies to behaviour from July 1, 2024. "The matters are also very complex and the investigations very protracted — it takes significant time to follow all of those lines of inquiry," says Mottram, strategic policy and project manager, coercive control. "We do also really need to stress that coercive control legislation isn't a catch-all" — there are many situations where charging other offences is more appropriate. "It comes down to the victim as well, what they want, what they can tolerate … so it is genuinely case by case and we rely on the expertise of detectives."

Domestic and Family Violence Command Superintendent Danielle Emerton is quick to squash suggestions that police don't have enough resources to respond to coercive control. She is also keen to stress that there has been a shift in the way police are dealing with domestic violence generally, even if victim support workers feel otherwise.

"Police are looking for that deeper pattern of abuse," Emerton says. "[They're] now looking … beyond the bruises and bloody noses and broken windows, they'll go into a home and start looking for other indicators of abusive behaviour. And often it's the police that will identify coercive and controlling behaviours before the victim actually understands that they're experiencing them themselves."

Samantha Bouffler didn't call police to report coercive control. 

She called them in late 2024 because her ex, in one of his rages, had locked her out of their Sydney home, and she didn't know what else to do. "I ended up giving them a statement about what had been happening over the past three days and … the female officer I was dealing with said, 'This sounds like coercive control, I'll refer you to a detective to investigate'," Bouffler explains.

At that point she felt "scrambled" and utterly exhausted by her ex's cycles of gaslighting, apologies and promises, but she had no idea what coercive control was. She read through a list of examples the detective had emailed her and quickly recognised almost every one: "I had been living with many of those behaviours for years without understanding that collectively they had a name. That was a huge light-bulb moment for me."

Crucial to Bouffler's case was the fact that her ex had carried out so much of his abuse via text message. "I know it's something that can be really hard to prove, especially if you're not documenting it over a long period of time," Bouffler says. "I was grateful that I had it, black and white, in text to show." (NSW police and many court support workers encourage victims to document abuse with the Empower You app.)

Still, the process of helping the detective assemble his brief — she gave several statements, one of which took more than six hours — felt overwhelming. She also felt guilty because it was Christmas time, and her ex had just lost his job after struggling with addictions he refused to seek help for, despite the impact it was having on their finances. She had been "conditioned" to protect him from the consequences of his behaviour, she says — to feel responsible for what happened to him. "But something inside of me was like, I need to hold him accountable … I need to get away from him, and protect my daughter from that environment."

There is no question Bouffler's life would look very different had a sharp-eyed cop not spotted what was going on. "If he was not charged with coercive control or jailed, I can almost guarantee I'd be back with him or still suffering from his abuse. He's relentless, and he wouldn't leave me alone," she says. "And I think it's important that [the law] recognises something that our justice system has historically struggled with … it's also given me a language and a legal meaning for a pattern I have struggled to explain for years."

Before NSW introduced its coercive control law, before debate about it had even begun, there was Scotland, which is frequently credited with designing "gold standard" legislation. Partly it's because of the Scottish offence's simplicity — there's no convoluted definition of coercive control, just an elegant explanation of "what constitutes abusive behaviour". It also puts the focus on perpetrators: prosecutors must demonstrate a person engaged in an abusive course of behaviour to intentionally cause the victim harm, or they were reckless as to whether it would.

Still, there have been fewer prosecutions than many were expecting. Since the domestic abuse offence was introduced in 2019, court cases have quietly ticked up, with the most recent available data for the 2024 financial year showing 1,039 people were prosecuted and 897 convicted.

Dr Emma Forbes, National Lead for Domestic Abuse at Scotland's Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, says the country's most prominent recent prosecution is the case of Lee Milne, who was in April convicted of engaging in a course of abusive conduct towards his wife. "By prosecuting a course of abusive conduct, we were able to show that Lee Milne was responsible for Kimberley jumping from a bridge to her death," Forbes says — a "legal first" in Scotland.

But prosecuting coercive control is challenging, she says — it can be an "amorphous and shifting crime", with offenders tailoring behaviours to their victims, who often experience a "slow burn of increased control". "The risk of escalation and further harm to those living with coercive control is real," Forbes says. "Victims are navigating their own safety and that affects their ability to engage in the justice process."

Dr Marsha Scott, chief executive of Scottish Women's Aid, says the COVID-19 pandemic is partly to blame for the sluggish uptake of the offence, as are police, who weren't taught about domestic abuse as well as she'd have liked.

"They just trained them about the letter of the law rather than coercive control, and so … they continued as if there wasn't really a change," Scott says. "A lot of police [were] still looking for physical violence, that kind of thing. It's slowly improving because we have some really good leadership in Police Scotland — there's been a bit of a regime change — but the reality is, when you're working with 16,000 mostly men, this isn't a ship you can turn quickly."

Ultimately, though, Scott says she was "naive" about how fast everything could shift. "When I look back I see that it was a much more radical thing that we were doing than we knew at the time … I had a lot more faith in training than I do now. I'm more of a change geek now … and you never get behaviour change from formal trainings, you only get it when you combine them with investment in infrastructure and accountability mechanisms" — mechanisms, that is, to ensure police and courts are applying the law the way they ought to.

As for how victims are experiencing Scotland's coercive control law? "It's mixed," Scott says. "It really depends on where they live and how the law is applied." A major challenge, she says, has been a broader systemic failure to explore how to improve victim safety. Some abusers need to be in prison, she says, which provides temporary safety, but they're going to get out eventually — then what? 

It's why Scott wants to see investment in technologies like GPS monitoring and intensive bail supervision. "We have lots of evidence that these things work. They don't all work the same way with the same perpetrators, but they work to keep her safer."

Have NSW's coercive control laws improved women's safety? When he introduced the bill to outlaw coercive control to the state parliament in October 2022, then attorney general Mark Speakman framed its potential in urgent terms. "Coercive control is a proven red flag for domestic violence homicide," he said. "It is no exaggeration to say this bill could literally mean the difference between life and death." Other MPs and advocates deployed similar rhetoric, pointing to data from the DV Death Review Team which found coercive control was a factor in almost all domestic homicides.

For Jane Wangmann, a member of the DV Death Review Team, the emphasis on "saving lives" and high-profile homicide cases could be problematic if it leads the community to think of coercive control as "exceptional" rather than "everyday", a part of the fundamental architecture of domestic violence. "I also have concerns that it … over-promises what a law on its own can do in terms of preventing homicide," she says. "Law is an important element in the puzzle but we know that most women don't report to the police and those that do might not have it result in a charge."

She also believes the "saving lives" framing overlooks the fact that before many of those women were killed, there were missed opportunities for police to step in and charge perpetrators. "So I think we need to remember that for many of them, it wasn't that there was a gap in the law," Wangmann says. "In fact, the police hadn't acted on what had been reported."

For coercive control laws to be successful in NSW, the entire system needs overhauling, says Angie Gehle. At the moment services don't work together, she says, they provide "fragmented, siloed" support, which is difficult for victims to navigate and creates dangerous gaps. Whether it's the courts, child protection or hospitals, she says, every service that responds to domestic violence needs to understand what coercive control is and "address it in a holistic way".

On the policing front, Gehle also believes expanding a pilot program in which workers from the Women's Domestic Violence Court Advocacy Service (WDVCAS) are co-located at police stations would be a "game-changer". The court workers bring a depth of knowledge to DV cases that police don't have, and police inevitably pick up new skills by "osmosis", which is a win for everyone. "It has had some incredible outcomes," Gehle says, and could deepen officers' understanding of coercive control — and improve uptake of the offence — if it was rolled out beyond the 10 sites it currently runs in.

In the meantime, she is not convinced the new laws are improving women's safety — at least not yet. "Our members are saying that not much is changing for victim-survivors," Gehle says. "But the law in and of itself is just never going to be able to do that. It will take all of that other reform work along the way."

And crucially, she adds, women who are getting "negative responses" after reporting coercive control to police are likely to be "more unsafe than ever". "If victim-survivors think, 'I'm going to go and report this because I can now' … and the perpetrator knows that they've reported but no action is taken? That can be so dangerous," Gehle says. "So those expectations are set, but then they're potentially placed at risk of further harm."

Credits

Photographs: John Gunn, Callum Flinn, Adam Griffiths and Andy Roberts