’Vicious cycle:’ How California leaders are trying to redefine domestic abuse in courtrooms
Survivors of domestic violence are gaining the ability to have all they endure considered in court, their advocates say, as California’s leaders have updated state law to recognize the role of coercion in intimate partner abuse.
So, starting in January, if a man uses force, threats or other forms of coercion to deny a woman access to contraception, she can include those allegations in any legal complaint she makes and expect that it will be considered in decisions on restraining orders or other protections.
Senate Bill 374, signed into law in July, identifies this behavior as reproductive coercion and adds it into the definition of abuses covered by the state’s Domestic Violence Prevention Act.
“Right now, a judge that’s presented with evidence of reproductive coercion ..., it’s up to their discretion whether or not to find this as a form of domestic violence,” said the legislator who sponsored SB 374, Sen. Dave Min of Irvine. “From what I’m hearing, far too many judges do not recognize this as a form of domestic violence, so we believe this bill will save many, many lives and free many women from this cycle of domestic abuse.”
The new statute, the first of its kind in the nation, builds upon a law enacted last year that prohibited using any type of coercive control to harm, punish, or frighten an intimate partner, said Jane Stoever, director of the domestic violence law clinic at University of California, Irvine.
“People have conceptions of what domestic violence is, and still judges might think it means a punch, it means a hit, (that they’re) looking for a physical injury,” Stoever said. “And it’s been so important for our laws in California to expand — last year by Sen. Susan Rubio introducing the legislation to have coercive control a part of the definition of domestic abuse, then this being an additional example, of coercive control.”
Both laws acknowledge what survivors and their advocates have long known: that the scope of domestic violence goes beyond the physical abuse that is so often portrayed in films and that grabs public attention, said Krista Colón, the public policy director for the California Partnership to End Domestic Violence.
“Domestic violence is far more than just the acts of physical violence and abuse,” Colón said. “When the laws first started to come into place to provide protection, it was that physical abuse that most of the protections centered around, and that remains incredibly important.”
But, Colón continued, “what we often know from abusive relationships that have continued for a long time is that often the threat of physical violence is enough to coerce and control survivors into certain behaviors because that physical violence has been present before.”
Min, who is married to Stoever, said that he had no idea how common reproductive coercion was until he had an eye-opening conversation last December while driving up to Sacramento with his wife.
“The most common form of reproductive coercion is coercing (someone) to have a pregnancy and then to have a baby,” Min said. “What does that do to the survivor? It forces them into relationship for a longer period of time, forces them to become more dependent upon the abuser. It just exacerbates that vicious cycle of domestic violence.”
As Min worked on Senate Bill 374, Stoever offered up research on the topic and agreed to testify before legislators. In an interview with The Bee, she shared statistics from studies and a real-life anecdote from her 20-year history representing survivors of domestic abuse.
“The legislation here on reproductive coercion was really inspired by our clients, by our clients’ experiences, by seeing that this is something that occurs so commonly for so many of our clients that we’ve been representing over the years,” Stoever said. “(It has) remained unnamed in the law. And when you don’t have a name for something, it’s harder to identify. It’s harder certainly for a survivor, to say, ‘Yeah, this was a form of abuse I experienced.’”
Stoever recalled one client who testified about pleading with her boyfriend to use condoms that were an arm’s reach away: “Just use Plan B,” he told her, referring to an emergency contraceptive often called the “morning-after pill.”
Stoever said that, as her client testified about this, the judge asked her, “Are you talking about rape?”
Both the survivor and the judge struggled to put a name to the abuse she had endured, Stoever said, but the law now will name it and allow judges to do so as well.
To bring home just how common this type of abuse is, Stoever drew statistics from several studies: In 2010, roughly 20% of women ages 16 to 29 seeking care at family planning clinics in Northern California reported histories of domestic abuse and pregnancy coercion.
A year later, Stoever said, the National Hotline on Domestic Violence posted results from a survey of more than 3,000 women who called for assistance. About 25% of them disclosed that their partners had sabotaged their attempts to use birth control or coerced them into getting pregnant.
More recently, in August 2019, researchers interviewed 550 sexually active high school girls and discovered that about one in eight had experienced some type of reproductive coercion in the prior three months.
While some men use coerced pregnancies as a way to maintain control or keep their partners in a relationship, others, like the woman Stoever mentioned, learn that their partner simply wants total control over their bodies.
Colón said that reproductive coercion is an incredibly stigmatized aspect of intimate partner violence, something that many women will not talk about, Putting it into law, she said, brings it out of the shadows and diminishes its stigma.
It’s heartening, Colón said, to see legislators addressing the full scope of domestic violence and the complexity of it. While Sen. Rubio’s coercive control law is still pretty new, Colón said, survivors have told advocates that it has allowed them to take a giant step forward in telling their whole stories and to have all of what they suffered be considered when they are seeking legal protections.
Increasingly, leading think tanks, academicians and gun violence researchers have attempted to raise awareness that the impact of domestic violence is felt far beyond the confines of individual family homes.
Earlier this year, for instance, research published in the Injury Epidemiology journal showed that perpetrators of domestic abuse committed two of three mass shootings between 2014 and 2019. And, the Little Hoover Commission noted as part of an extensive report on intimate partner violence that this form of abuse is the leading cause of homelessness among women.
And, in a December 2017 report, the U.S. Department of Justice noted that, between 2010 and 2016, more police officers died as a result of service calls related to domestic disputes than in any other service call category.
This story was originally published September 20, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
