Where are we at with criminalising coercive control?
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It was the year 2000. Jonty Bush was 21 and sharing a Maroochydore flat with her younger sister Jacinta, and Jacinta’s new boyfriend Kris Slade had just moved in. “It was this overwhelming gut instinct that there was something wrong with him, that there was a rage,” the Queensland MP says as she describes what it was like to witness coercive control up close.
“You’re trying to link things, minor things … you’re trying desperately to find something that you can link to back up this gut instinct that you’re feeling that you have to flee,” Jonty recalls. “It’s a weird thing because something in my body knew it was wrong.”
Jacinta was becoming more withdrawn. At the same time, Kris was buying her flowers and taking her out. He’d look after Jacinta’s daughter. “So, you’re constantly quietening that internal voice that says he is dangerous,” Jonty continues. “He had never hit her. He’d never threatened to hit her. There had been nothing physical at all apart from some weird, darkish broody behaviours.”
The only time she saw his mask slip was on the morning of July 29, 2000. Kris had booked dinner at a hotel for Jacinta, but she had learned that a girlfriend was going to be in town overnight and asked if they could cancel so she could see her friend.
“He really went right off that day,” Jonty says. “He was saying, in front of me, ‘I never asked you to do anything. I’ve asked you for this one thing.’” Jacinta capitulated and agreed to go to the hotel instead of seeing her friend. Alone in their flat, Jonty’s concerns hardened into a conviction that she had to get her sister away from this man.
“I thought, ‘Right, next time I get her alone, which was hard because he was always around, I’m going to say: ‘He needs to go. Something’s not right here.’
“That was the night he killed her.”
In the months and years of grief that followed Jacinta’s murder, people asked Jonty, ‘Didn’t you see anything?’ She saw everything, she told the Queensland Parliament last year. “I saw that he wouldn’t let her leave the house. I saw the love bombing followed by periods of silence. And, I saw that he was controlling the finances, and I saw that she stopped seeing her friends.”
Back then, there was nothing she could do.
“We had no language for coercive control and the language for DV (domestic violence) was really narrow,” Jonty tells The Weekly. “It was black eyes; it was broken arms.; it was extreme physical violence. It wasn’t the subtle patterns we see that harass, harm and diminish women.”
This May, legislation criminalising coercive control in Queensland will come into effect. Conduct likely to cause physical, emotional, financial, psychological or mental harm will carry a jail term of up to 14 years. Jonty hopes the change will cut the rates of this type of abuse.
Content retrieved from: https://www.womensweekly.com.au/news/where-are-we-at-with-criminalising-coercive-control/.
