“Recent amendments to the Divorce Act and provincial family legislation have highlighted the importance of taking into consideration the presence of family violence in any family matter dealing with the parenting of children: See also Barendregt v. Grebliunas, 2022 SCC 22. The Divorce Act specifically recognizes that findings of family violence are a critical consideration in the best interest analysis: see ss. 16(3)(j) and (4).
Family violence is broadly defined in s. 2(1) of the Divorce Act as “any conduct, whether or not the conduct constitutes a criminal offence, by a family member towards another family member, that is violent or threatening or that constitutes a pattern of coercive and controlling behaviour or that causes that other family member to fear for their own safety or for that of another person”. In the case of a child, family violence includes “the direct or indirect exposure to such conduct”. Section 2(1) provides a non-exhaustive list of the many forms of family violence which include physical abuse, forced confinement, sexual abuse, threats to kill or to harm, harassment including stalking, psychological abuse, and financial abuse.
Coercive control as a form of family violence is a pattern of intimate partner abuse which has been the focus of much academic research over the past several years, and has been exposed increasingly in recent court’s decisions, including by the Supreme Court of Canada in Barendregt v. Grebliunas, 2022 SCC 22. In a very recent research study commissioned by the Department of Justice Canada, the authors described coercive control as a pattern of abusive behaviours used to control or dominate a family member or intimate partner. They explain the following at p. 18:
The behaviours that are the spokes and rims of the wheel, such as economic abuse, intimidation, minimizing, denying, blaming and physical and sexual abuse, are used by the abusive person to maintain the pattern of coercive control. Understanding patterns of abuse is also an important counter to “gaslighting” (extended psychological manipulation of a victim that leads them to question the validity of their own thoughts and reality) by perpetrators of abuse, who often embrace an incident-based definition of domestic violence to disconnect their actions from one another in time and space, thereby allowing them to minimize their violence as “not that bad” and to support victim-blaming.
Coercive control may involve a range of behaviours during a relationship, and following separation, including the following:
– Intimidation, making threats to harm the victim or themselves (self-harm, suicide);
– Minimizing and denying the abuse;
– Isolating the victim from friends, family, or work/school;
– Emotional abuse such as constant criticism and degrading verbal abuse;
– Economic abuse and control; and
– Stalking and monitoring.
Coercive and controlling behaviour has been found to encompass the following types of behaviours as well:
– Making numerous unsubstantiated allegations against the other party;
– Unilaterally changing court-ordered parenting time terms without justification; and,
– Regularly engaging in behaviour that has the effect of undermining the other parent’s authority or influence and alienating the child from that parent: M.A.B. v. M.G.C., 2022 ONSC 7207, at para. 187.”