Short answer: Coercive control used to need proximity. Someone had to be in the house, at the door, on the other end of a landline. Almost none of that is true now. The same control runs through location sharing, shared accounts, the phone contract and the children’s devices, and it carries on after somebody moves out. This post covers the technology rather than the law.
In short:
- Nearly every controlling behaviour that once needed a front door now works through a phone.
- Most of it looks identical to an ordinary family sharing a plan, which is what makes it hard to see.
- The device usually holds a dated record, which memory alone never provided.
- Separation does not end it. It changes the route, most often to the children’s phones.
- The pattern matters more than any single message, and a pattern only shows across time.
What coercive control looks like on a device
Start with what has not changed. Someone wants to know where another person is, who they speak to, what they spend, and what they think. That is the same as it ever was.
What has changed is that all four now have a setting.
Somebody switches location sharing on, very often for a genuinely good reason at the time, and then starts checking it. A question follows: why were you there for so long? Nobody forbade anything, and nobody needs to. Being watched changes what a person does without anybody issuing an instruction.
Messages arrive constantly, and answering becomes compulsory. Not through any stated rule, but because not answering has a cost that both people understand perfectly well.
They share accounts. A family plan on an Apple or Google account, a shared photo album, a joint calendar, a banking app both people can open. Each of those has an ordinary explanation, and each of them also shows one person exactly what the other is doing.
The phone itself becomes a lever. Whoever holds the contract can stop the plan, take the handset, or query the bill line by line. Nobody has to say any of that out loud for both people to know it.
| What it used to take | What it takes now |
|---|---|
| Following somebody, or waiting at the door | Opening an app that shows where they are |
| Reading a diary or the post | Knowing the passcode, or a shared account |
| Asking who telephoned | Scrolling a call log |
| Controlling the housekeeping money | A banking app both people can open |
| Turning up at a friend’s house | Watching who appears in a shared photo album |
| Sitting in the room while a call happens | A smart speaker or a doorbell camera |
Read the right-hand column and notice how ordinary it all sounds. That is the difficulty, and it is worth stating plainly: every single item on that list is also something an entirely unremarkable family does.
Why the ordinariness is the problem
A family law team will hear these facts described and find nothing obviously wrong with any of them. Two people shared a phone plan. They knew each other’s passcodes. She could see his location and he could see hers.
None of that is evidence of anything by itself. Plenty of couples live exactly like that quite happily.
What separates the two situations is not the setting. It is who chose it, whether the other person could refuse, and what happened when they tried. A shared location that both people forget about is not the same as a shared location one person checks and mentions. The technology is identical. The relationship around it is not.
That is why “she gave him her passcode” answers nothing, and why a client who says she agreed to it is very often describing the control rather than ruling it out.
Women’s Aid explains what coercive control is and how it works in the relationship sense. On the legal side, section 76 of the Serious Crime Act 2015 sets out the offence of controlling or coercive behaviour in an intimate or family relationship. Its wording turns on behaviour that happens repeatedly or continuously, rather than on any single event. What that means in a particular case is a question for the solicitors involved.
What the device keeps that memory does not
There is one respect in which the move onto phones works in the opposite direction, and it deserves more attention than it usually gets.
Control exercised in a kitchen leaves nothing behind. Someone remembers a tone of voice, or a look, and a year later the other person remembers it differently.
Control exercised through a device leaves a dated record. The messages exist. The times exist. The order exists. So does the pattern that a single message never shows: forty of them across three months, arriving at particular hours, escalating when she went out.
This matters because of how that wording works. It describes a pattern, and a pattern only appears across time. One screenshot of one message almost always looks trivial, including to the person who lived it, which is why she so often stops trying to explain.
The practical consequence for a family law team is simple enough. Ask for the thread, in order, with dates, rather than the worst message. The worst message is rarely the useful one.
Why coercive control does not stop at separation
Everything above assumes two people under one roof. Take that away and the control does not end, it reroutes.
Shared accounts survive a move. Family plans, shared albums, a joint calendar, a location circle set up years ago, a smart doorbell still linked to somebody’s phone. Very few people think to unpick any of it while they are dealing with everything else.
Then there are the children, and this is the route that matters most in family proceedings. A parent who no longer has an address still has a child with a phone. Messages arrive throughout the child’s time with the other parent. Location sharing set up for safety shows where the child is, and therefore where the other parent is. Somebody asks the child what happened at the other house, and the child learns to carry answers between two homes.
Kids n Clicks covers that ground in more detail in our post on post separation abuse through a phone, and the effect on the child in our post on digital parental alienation.
What family law teams tend to miss on the digital side
Three things come up in almost every family Kids n Clicks hears from.
The first is treating the child’s phone as the child’s, when coercive control so often travels through it. It is very often the route, and nobody asks about it because it belongs to a nine-year-old rather than to either party.
The second is asking for the worst screenshot. It arrives without context, without dates, and without the forty ordinary messages around it that make it mean something. A client handed that request will produce the one message that reads worst out of context, which is usually the weakest thing she has.
The third is stopping at the phone. Coercive control now runs through accounts as much as devices. A location circle, a shared album, a family plan and a doorbell camera all keep working after somebody hands back a handset, and somebody has to unpick each one separately.
None of that is a criticism of how family law teams work. It is a different subject, it changes every few months, and nobody expects a solicitor to track what a phone reveals.
Our Digital Dimension in Family Law training covers this properly. It shows how location sharing, shared accounts and family plans actually behave, what a device does and does not keep, and how a controlling pattern shows up across a thread rather than in any one message.
The session teaches the technology, not the law. Solicitors already know the law. What often goes missing is a clear read of what actually happened on the phones, the apps and the accounts, and that is the gap this session fills. It is a specialist session, delivered online or in person, to a whole team or to individuals.
If you work in family law, connect with Parven on LinkedIn or get in touch here to book a session for your team.
Parven Kaur is a digital parenting and online safety expert, and the founder of Kids n Clicks. She trains family law teams on the technology side of their cases. She won the Scottish Cyber Security Award, and she sits on the National Board of Advisors for Barnardo’s Scotland.
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