Designing future interventions to educate the young people about healthy relationships including how to recognise coercive control behaviours

During 2020, the Northern Ireland Executive introduced the Domestic Abuse and Civil Proceedings Bill which has now passed its final stages in becoming law. The Bill is intended to better reflect the experiences of victims and means that domestic abuse offences will no longer be limited to acts of physical violence, and makes ‘coercive control’ an offence. This offence is expected to be operational by the end of 2021. Coercive control is a form of domestic abuse also known as emotional or psychological abuse; indirect abuse; or emotional torture. It has been cited as one of the worst types of abuse to experience within an intimate relationship, and is the most difficult type of violence to evidence and report (Lagdon, Armour and Stringer, 2015). This type of abuse is characterised by a pattern of behavior which aims to intimidate, threaten and humiliate a person or restrict a person’s liberty (e.g. isolating a person from friends and family; taking control over aspects of everyday life such as where a person can go and who they can see; repeatedly putting a person down; or making threats and intimidating a person to frighten them). Coercive control is well recognised as having a significant impact on victim mental health, (Lagdon, Armour and Stringer, 2014; Stark and Hester, 2019). Ahead of the implementation of the new legislation and to address the need for an evidence base, we developed a module of questions to be included in the 2020 Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey (Lagdon, Jordan, Shannon, Tully and Armour, 2021), a project funded by the Public health Agency (£40,000). The development of this work follows from Dr Susan Lagdon’s research programme (research team member), which included the publication of a number of public reports with the PSNI and Women’s Aid and a later short report funded by the Department of Justice. The NILT Survey respondents were asked to respond to questions based on scenarios of obvious and less obvious forms of coercive control. Half of the respondents were given the scenarios describing heterosexual relationships where the female was the victim, the other half received the scenarios where the male was the victim. Over 1200 completed the survey across NI. We found that over one third (37%) of the respondents showed a lack of understanding of what coercive control means. Concerningly, the majority of 18-24-year olds (60%) reported they did not know what coercive control is. Compared to obvious coercive control scenarios, fewer respondents considered the behavior described in the less obvious coercive control scenarios to be domestic abuse or a crime, and were also less likely to recognise the associated potential dangers. This was particularly the case when the victim is male. These findings highlight that awareness of coercive control needs to be raised amongst the public as: a) many do not have full understanding of what behaviours constitute coercive control, b) recognition that victims come from a broad range of demographic backgrounds (e.g. gender, sexual orientation) needs to be improved, c) there needs to be greater understanding that coercive control often escalates over time starting with less obvious behaviours and progressing to more severe behaviours; d) particular attention needs to be devoted to improving awareness amongst young people. The current project is proposing qualitative research in the form of focus groups with young people across NI (including young men and those who identify as LGBTQ) and linked professionals who work with such groups to hear more about what they would like to see in future interventions/awareness raising addressing healthy relationships including seeing the signs of unhealthy behaviours such as those associated with coercive control. These will be delivered in a workshop manner and underpinned by principals of Participatory Action Research. Our third sector partners are in support of this project. This work will further contextualise our NILT survey findings, particularly our upcoming data from Young Life and Times Survey. This work will also be used in support for a future ESRC Future Leaders Award following the wider project recommendations. Our research was endorsed by DoJ, with Justice Minister Long opening our launch event. The research has been widely supported on social media with strong level of agreement about our proposed future research.