In December, a court acquitted Nengsy Lim, 45, for the crime of “nagging” her husband. The Indonesian woman had been charged with causing her husband psychological harm with her repeated scoldings. A guilty verdict could have resulted in a one-year prison sentence.
The case is the harbinger of a growing trend in the United States.
The Violence Against Women Act reauthorization, recently introduced in the U.S. Senate, proposes a dramatic expansion of the definition of “domestic violence” for purposes of providing victim services. If the reauthorization is approved, domestic violence would include “coercive control,” which is defined as “behavior committed, enabled, or solicited to gain or maintain power and control over a victim, including verbal, psychological, economic, or technological abuse.”
But the VAWA bill never defines what verbal and psychological abuse is. It is possible that anything that hurts another person’s feelings would count. The bill makes a point of saying that engaging in coercive control “may or may not constitute criminal behavior.” Indeed, University of Maryland law professor Leigh Goodmark has predicted that as a result of such laws, “prosecutions of women would skyrocket.”
According to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 58% of victims of “coercive control” are males. This means that each year, 17.3 million men are victimized by coercive control, compared to 12.7 million females.
In response, three states already have passed laws to ban coercive control: California, Hawaii, and Connecticut. In these states, nagging is now a crime. The Hawaii law bans “name-calling, degradation, and demeaning the individual frequently.” In Connecticut, nagging is broadly described as “controlling, regulating or monitoring the family or household member’s movements, communications, daily behavior, finances, economic resources or access to services.”
In all three states, the definitions focus on “a pattern of behavior that in purpose or effect unreasonably interferes with a person’s free will and personal liberty.” But exactly what is meant by a “pattern” of behavior? Does calling your partner “lazy” three times over the last 10 years count as a “pattern”? How about insisting repeatedly that he or she get off the couch and find a job? Or angrily demanding an explanation for an hours-long, unexplained absence last night?
Not only don’t these laws specify, but they are filled with vague, undefined terms such as “basic necessities,” “communications,” “daily behavior,” “movements,” and more. Lawmakers in Connecticut and California further expanded the reach of these laws by inserting the sweeping phrase “not limited to.” For example, the Connecticut law includes the wording, “Coercive control includes, but is not limited to, unreasonably engaging in any of the following…”
If a civil court finds that you engaged in coercive control, that finding could be used against you in a future criminal case. In California, for example, the jury instructions for a domestic violence case state, “You may, but are not required to, conclude from that evidence [of coercive control] that the defendant was disposed or inclined to commit domestic violence.”
Legal authorities have cautioned against sweeping definitions of abuse. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia once argued, “When [activist groups] impose their all-embracing definition on the rest of us, they not only distort the law, they impoverish the language. When everything is domestic violence, nothing is.”
Commentator Wendy McElroy has warned that broad definitions of abuse will begin to encompass “lover’s quarrels (verbal abuse), threats of leaving the relationship (psychological), and imposing a budget (economic).” But even household “honey-do” lists could be seen as “controlling.”
My advice to women? If you live in California, Hawaii, or Connecticut, consider moving elsewhere. And if the proposed coercive control provisions in the federal Violence Against Women Act go into effect, maybe we should all consider taking an extended vacation to Tahiti.
Edward E. Bartlett is the president of the Coalition to End Domestic Violence.
