Redefining domestic violence in France as a violation of human rights: coercive control

The historical evolution of social and legal conceptions of gender based domestic violence in France are the dynamic traces of how social practice, as well as social representations, formed and transformed. However, numerous studies show that the current incident-based conceptions of domestic violence are far from the victims’ experiences, and only partially effective in detecting, criminalising and preventing domestic violence. Understanding the global process by which perpetrators subordinate the victims, mostly women and children, by progressively depriving them of their human rights and liberties, led to a contemporary conceptualisation of domestic violence as coercive control (Stark, 2007). Recognising the roots of domestic violence in gender inequality, far from reducing it to some individual, psychological issues, this human-rights based conception of domestic violence is much closer to the victims’ experiences, has led to legal innovation in the ways in which several countries understand, criminalise and prevent domestic violence, and could be at the core of emerging social representations of domestic violence.