Redefining Violence: Coercive Control and the Loss of Human Intent

• The UK Home Office has updated statutory guidance for Domestic Abuse Related Death Reviews to include cases where death occurs after long-term coercive control without physical assault.
• Defining violence solely by physical injury fails to capture the systemic erasure of individual agency found in emotional, economic, and psychological abuse.

The Role of Intent

• Drawing on the work of Silo, violence is framed as the act of treating another person as a 'prosthesis'—an extension of one’s own body used to carry out one’s own project.
• Physical violence is the immediate imposition of another’s intent upon the body, whereas coercive control is the gradual hollowing out of a person’s practical possibilities, organizing their life around someone else’s wishes.

Structural Violence vs. Injustice

• Domination based on race, religion, or political status can mirror interpersonal abuse, embedding restrictive structures that persist long after the original instigators are gone.
• While not every unjust structure is inherently violent, human intentions can harden into institutions that continue to strip others of their status as autonomous subjects.

Implications for Humanizing Relationships

• Humanizing involves acknowledging the other as a center of intent with their own voice and future, rather than an object to be controlled.
• Recognizing violence without a bruise requires looking beyond isolated physical events to see if a person’s ability to act, refuse, or escape has been systematically overridden by the intent of another.