Robert Buckland – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Attorney General

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Robert Buckland on 2014-04-07.

To ask the Attorney General, whether any domestic violence cases have led to prosecutions for coercive control since the inclusion of coercive control in the Government’s definition of domestic violence in March 2013.

Oliver Heald

The CPS flags all cases identified as domestic violence according to the revised Government definition implemented in March 2013. This includes the elements of coercive control, and behaviours which do not display visible injuries such as psychological abuse which were introduced in the revised definition. However the records held by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) cannot separately identify the number of people prosecuted for each of these elements. Such information could only be obtained through a manual search of records which would incur a disproportionate cost.