Jane Monckton Smith: ‘Domestic abuse isn't a row. It's when one person has become a threat to another’

The author and professor of public protection on the red flags of coercive control and how courts should change to give abuse victims an equal voice

Jane Monckton Smith is a criminologist specialising in domestic homicide. A former police officer, she is professor of public protection at the University of Gloucestershire, and is recognised for her groundbreaking work on coercive control and stalking. In her new book, In Control: Dangerous Relationships and How They End in Murder, she lays out the eight stages of a domestic homicide timeline that flag up the potential for the coercively controlling to kill.

What is the empirical basis for your eight-stage homicide timeline?
The empirical basis is the data we collected for a research project. It looks at domestic abuse through the model of coercive control. The Home Office did a review of domestic abuse in 2012 and said that coercive control is the best lens through which to view it. The traditional lens has been the crime of passion", and from my work that doesn't fit. As a homicide researcher I have used or seen used temporal sequencing in other forms of homicide, and nobody had done it really with domestic abuse.