The Office of the Commissioner for Victims of Crime has conducted extensive community consultations to understand coercive control in the Western Australian context. The resulting report recommends a suite of systemic and legislative reforms to recognise and respond to patterns of family and domestic violence behaviours.

A clear finding from the consultations is that the justice system alone cannot stop coercion and control. What is needed is a whole-of-government and whole-of-community approach to recognising and responding to these behaviours. 

The report makes 24 recommendations designed to work in sync to achieve systemic reform across multiple government agencies and processes. At the heart of these recommendations is the requirement for a system that can respond to patterns of abuse, correctly identify the victim and provide a meaningful response wherever coercive control occurs.

While WA’s law recognises coercive control to some extent, the legislation is not able to respond adequately to behaviour that represents a pattern rather than a one-off incident. 

Key recommendations made in this report include changes to legislation to enable more effective acknowledgement and response to patterns of behaviour.