The Office of the Commissioner for Victims of Crime has conducted extensive community consultations to understand coercive control in the Western Australian context. The resulting report recommends a suite of systemic and legislative reforms to recognise and respond to patterns of family and domestic violence behaviours.

The development of this strategy has been informed by consultation with the legal assistance sector. It is intended to be a practical, flexible and proactive roadmap to support legal assistance service providers in collectively delivering legal assistance in a way which responds to the needs of Western Australia’s diverse and geographically vast community.

The Western Australian government is encouraging the community to get involved in a community debate about the pattern of destructive family violence known as coercive control. This discussion paper outlines matters the community, including victim-survivors of coercive control and experts in the legal and family violence sectors, may wish to consider.