A long custodial sentence handed down at the High Court at the start of this week, under the Domestic Abuse (Scotland) Act 2018, was reported as a landmark. In one sense it was. The court found a course of conduct over a period of years that fitted the definition of coercive control as Parliament wrote it: a pattern of behaviour, not a single event, designed to isolate, humiliate, frighten and dominate a partner. The sentence reflected the seriousness of the pattern. Within the limits of what criminal sentencing can ever do for survivors, the outcome was the one survivors' advocates had spent eight years arguing for.
The question that the reporting on Monday and Tuesday largely sidestepped is whether this case actually demonstrates that the Act is working as the 2017 white paper said it would, or whether it demonstrates only that the Act can be made to work when the evidence is strong, the witnesses cooperative, the perpetrator's behaviour written down in messages and recordings, and the prosecution team experienced. The case this week was, on every one of those measures, the easy version of itself.
The Act was always going to be hard to operationalise in the hard cases. That was the consistent warning from the academics and from Scottish Women's Aid during the parliamentary stages in 2017–18. Coercive control is by its design difficult to evidence. It works through small interactions over long periods, not through visible bruises or single dramatic incidents. The Crown Office's training, the police's reporting forms, the courts' familiarity with the offence: all of these have improved over the eight years since commencement. None has improved at the speed that the campaigning organisations argued was needed.
The conviction rate under the Act, set against the volume of incidents reported to Police Scotland over the same eight-year window, is the figure on which serious commentary on the legislation now turns. The published statistics do not break down cleanly: charges under the Act are sometimes folded into broader domestic-abuse offences in the management information. But the broad picture, on what is available, is that the Act has produced steady but not transformative results, that the cases reaching trial tend to be those with the strongest documentary evidence, and that the offence is still under-charged in proportion to disclosed incident patterns.
The Act was always going to be hard to operationalise in the hard cases. That was the consistent warning.
None of this is news to the agencies. Sit through any of the third-sector review meetings on the Act's operation — the most recent published report, by Scottish Women's Aid in collaboration with academics at the University of Glasgow, ran to over a hundred pages — and the same set of issues comes up: charging thresholds, the experience of survivors giving evidence over multiple court appearances, the still-uneven distribution of specialist domestic abuse officers across Police Scotland divisions, the long backlog at the High Court of cases involving children as witnesses, and the slow construction of the supporting court culture around the offence.
Two things, in the wake of this week's sentencing, deserve to be said clearly. First, the law as drafted is not the problem. The 2018 Act is a piece of legislation that the rest of the United Kingdom and several other jurisdictions have, in different forms, since copied. Its definition of the offence is closer to how survivors describe their own experience than any earlier statutory wording. Where it has run into trouble is in the system around it: how the offence is investigated, evidenced, prosecuted, supported in court, and resourced.
Second, every sentence handed down under the Act is, by definition, a survivor who came forward and stayed in the process for the years it now takes a coercive-control case to reach trial. The case this week involved a survivor whose disclosures began in 2022. That is not unusual. The median time from first disclosure to verdict in coercive-control cases that reach trial in Scotland is, on the working numbers used by the third sector, well over two years. For survivors with children still in school, with housing in the same area, with limited support networks, the patience that the system demands of them is itself a barrier to charging.
The new Holyrood, sworn in this week, will be asked at some point during its term to revisit the resourcing of the Act and the surrounding court infrastructure. The case for additional ring-fenced funding for specialist police officers and for the Crown Office's domestic-abuse unit was made in detail in the last term, and was partially addressed; the case for further investment in survivor advocacy through the court process was made and not addressed. Whoever ends up in the justice portfolio in the new cabinet will inherit those two pieces of unfinished business. The 2018 Act was Holyrood's proudest piece of social legislation in the second half of the last decade. Eight years on, the system around the Act still does not match the Act's own ambitions. This week's sentence is not, in that light, vindication. It is a reminder.
By Niamh Buchanan — Society Editor at The Scottish Review. She writes on social policy, public services and the third sector.