Szabo & Associates News & Updates

What is coercive control?

The term coercive control refers to a range of repeated patterns of family and domestic violence. These behaviours can include emotional, financial and psychological abuse used to gain control over an individual. Examples include restricting activities and access to bank accounts, insults, humiliation, and threats to take away the children or harm themselves. By having their independence and autonomy removed in this way, the individual can feel trapped in a cycle of abuse.

Even though hiding assets and sources of income in divorce proceedings can have serious consequences, there are those that prepared to take that risk. Property settlement negotiations can only really begin seriously once both parties have fully disclosed their financial position to each other.

Eligibility to lodge a family provision claim, where a person feels they have not been adequately provided for from an estate, is limited to some key groups, including children of a deceased person. This means that an estranged adult child who has lost contact with their parent is eligible to contest a Will. However, it does not necessarily mean an application will be successful.

A custody dispute over pet ownership can potentially be a serious source of contention between separating couples. Disputes can even lead to extreme behaviour. In the UK, two recent examples demonstrate just how acrimonious such situations can become. In one case, a property developer was taken to Court by his ex-girlfriend, accused of posing as a dog walker to abduct her cockapoo. Even more disturbingly, a 70-year-old Austrian, Count Konrad Goess-Saurau, was found guilty of shooting dead his wife's German pointer, Herman, while she was away.

Blended families are often described as those where two individuals, each with their own children, re-marry or form a new partnership. They may go on to have more children together. Blended families have become a more common feature of society and accordingly an increasingly important issue for many more people than in the past.