Is it coercive control?
59 behaviors in 15 families, drawn from The Codebook for Identifying Coercive Control in Longitudinal Artifacts. A behavioral match does not constitute a pattern as defined by law.
01 · ISO
Isolation
The active process of disconnecting the target from friends, family, colleagues, and other sources of support so that the abuser becomes the primary or sole source for reality, belonging, and support. Isolation is not a passive side-effect of abuse. Isolation is a deliberate set of lonely-making tactics that disrupt both existence and reality.
02 · SUR
Surveillance and monitoring
Converts the target's life into an object of continuous visibility: location, communications, activities, and routines, through accounting demands, device access, physical presence, investigators, and everyday technologies. Official New South Wales data recorded harassment, monitoring or tracking in 56 percent of coercive-control incidents between 2024 and 2025.
03 · DEG
Degradation
Attacks the target's dignity, self-worth, and personhood through insults, public and private shaming, attacks on competence, and body or sexual denigration. Survivors describe death by a thousand insults, and being broken down until they no longer recognize themselves.
04 · REG
Micro-regulation of everyday life
Extends control into the minute details of daily existence: appearance, food, sleep, bodily care, housework, medication, and invented private standards. A 2025 review found survivors commonly live under an unpredictable and shifting rule book.
05 · ECO
Economic control and exploitation
Restrict, exploit, or sabotage the target's access to money, credit, employment, education, and other material resources so that exit becomes financially dangerous or impossible. A central mechanism is the creation and concealment of debt.
06 · THR
Threats and intimidation
Explicit or implied threats of harm to the target, children, family, pets, or the abuser's own life. Threats to kill are among the strongest predictors of lethality-type charges. Controlling behavior is present in the large majority of intimate partner homicides examined in Australian death reviews, including many cases with little prior physical violence.
07 · GAS
Gaslighting and reality manipulation
The sustained effort to make the target distrust their own perceptions, memory, and judgment so that the abuser's version of events becomes the dominant reality. The abuser achieves this by denying or rewriting shared history, mobilizing stereotypes and structural vulnerabilities, and reversing blame when confronted.
08 · SEXC
Sexual coercion and reproductive control
Sexual coercion within controlling relationships operates through entitlement, pressure, punishment, deception, triangulation, and recruitment of third parties rather than only through physical force. Reproductive coercion is a distinct tactic that interferes with autonomous decision-making about contraception, pregnancy, and pregnancy outcomes.
09 · CHI
Children as instruments of control
Children are drawn into the control regime as monitors, messengers, hostages, and grounds for litigation. They are direct targets and co-survivors, not mere witnesses. An abuser uses children to maintain domination after separation, to attack the target's most valued relationship, and to keep the target under continuous emotional, logistical, and legal pressure.
10 · INST
Institutional and legal systems abuse
The deliberate weaponization of legal and institutional processes to continue control after separation. The abuser files frivolous or repetitive actions, makes false or exaggerated reports, and manipulates professionals so that courts, police, and evaluators become instruments of ongoing coercion.
11 · REC
Intermittent reward, reconciliation, and conditional affection
Apology, promise, romance, and generosity following abuse are part of the regime, not a departure from it. These tactics condition attachment through intermittent reinforcement, rewire the target's sense of safety, and make later isolation, surveillance, degradation, and threats more effective.
12 · CRIM
Coerced criminality and forced complicity in harm to children
Two related mechanisms that manufacture official vulnerability: forcing the target into crime, then holding the exposure as leverage; and compelling participation in or concealment of harm to children, then presenting that inability as the target's own culpability.
13 · HAR
Harassment
Relentless pursuit and interruption: flooding, public smear, image-based abuse, unwanted presence, proxy harassment, and other disturbance of peace. Function and density relative to need, not the tone of any one message.
14 · PATH
Pathologizing
The abuser converts the target's normal responses to abuse, past trauma, or mental-health struggles into proof that the target is the problem. Directed at the target, and to third parties. Distinct from gaslighting, which rewrites reality.
15 · VPO
Violation of protective or restraining orders
Protective orders exist to restore liberty. Violation, outright or through technical compliance that defies the order's protective purpose, continues the regime after separation. The message the target receives is that no one, including the court, can provide protection.
Identifying a behavior described here does not establish a pattern of behavior and does not establish coercive control. A tactic is not a regime. The instrument consolidates peer-reviewed literature so a reader can check when in doubt. The instrument is not a coding manual. Carlton Research does not provide the instrument as a weapon.
Looking something up is literacy. Applying an instrument to a real file is a forensic engagement, and that is not this page.
Carlton, C. (2026). Is it coercive control? Carlton Research Instruments. /codebook. Last reviewed August 31, 2026.